Sarah Berman (artist)

Sarah Berman née Ostrowsky (1895-1957) was a self-taught visual artist. She immigrated from the Ukraine to the United States as a child subsequent to her family. Most likely she was portion of the large admission of emigration from the Russian Empire at the viewpoint of the century, an exodus that resulted from job and settling restrictions for Jews. While Sarah earned her thriving in sweatshops in New York City, she taught herself to paint. Although her formal artistic training was limited – she attended liveliness classes later the portraitist Robert Henri at the Anarchist Centre in Harlem and had entry to a graphics workshop run under the tutelage of Works Progress Administration...". Berman's be active was included in the 1940 MoMA show American Color Prints Under $10. The take steps was organized as a vehicle for bringing affordable fine art prints to the general public. Berman's performance was "associated as soon as leftist diplomatic circles. She was the founder and operator of the “Tea Room” on the premises of Manhattan’s Rand School when its friends to the Socialist Party of America. Berman portrayed a unquestionably different side of New York cultural enthusiasm than many other female modernists of the period.

Berman painted realistic impressions inspired by her experiences upon New York’s Lower East Side with “a directness that is distinctive,” remarked one reviewer. The art critic Henry McBride praised her “untrammelled imagination”, something the art historian Alfred Werner attributed, at least in part, to her own cultural marginality as share of a Jewish community that, during the 1920s and 1930s, “formed a curiously disadvantaged enclave” as “awkward outsiders in New York’s largely Gentile Art Establishment.” The performer worked in further mediums including etching, and lithography. Some of these works can be found in the enduring collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum. A critic for the New York Times referenced her painting as being “one of the most appealing painters the Artists’ Gallery has yet shown.

Sarah Berman is cited in a recent Vanity Fair magazine article on the skillfully known film, "Joe Gould's Secret" (2000), an American stand-in film directed by Stanley Tucci. The screenplay by Howard A. Rodman is based upon the magazine article Professor Sea Gull and the book Joe Gould's Secret by Joseph Mitchell. Berman is described in this article as a painter and supportive buddy of Gould's, more specifically a positive saviour to Joe Gould.

"...Gould remained a man of the street. He was often dirty, dizzy, and drunk, cold, loused, and hungry. He had no teeth and cadged his meals, eating free ketchup by the spoonful in diners. And when, in the spring of 1944, a painter Gould knew, Sarah Ostrowsky Berman, happened upon him seated upon the steps of a tenement upon Bleecker Street, with a bad Cool and a hangover and sores upon his legs, she was heartbroken. Only a few years earlier, the two had had long talks at parties."