American artist Bernard Perlin was a painter, illustrator, war artist-correspondent, whose works expressed the horrors of WWII, issues of social justice, and homosexuality with conviction and bravery.
Early in his career, Perlin lent his artistic talent to the creation of American wartime propaganda and illustration, going on to create throughout his lifetime a body of work that gravitated from social realism to magic realism with subjects as varied as graphic wartime recollections, sensuous male nudes, evocative New York scenes, and works implicit with social comment concerning the plight of minority groups and the poor. He led a life that, in his own words, was “a direct path to making art and seeking human connection.”
In the 1930s, Bernard Perlin was an artist for the Works Project Administration, painting murals for the Treasury Department and the U.S. Maritime Commission. During World War II, he was embedded with American forces in Europe, Asia and the South Pacific as an artist-correspondent for Life and Fortune magazines creating works he described as reportage.
Perlin began painting “independent pictures” following his return from Cairo, his base for various wartime assignments. His works of this period reflect the influence of artist Ben Shahn, who was his colleague in the graphics division at the United States Office of War Information. Perlin’s paintings soon attracted the attention of Knoedler and Company, where a first, highly successful exhibition was presented in 1948.
One of Perlin’s most notable works from this period is the tempera Orthodox Boys, 1948. Depicting two Jewish boys furtively discussing a Jewish text by a graffiti-covered wall by Canal Street in Lower Manhattan, the painting was first acquired by the arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein and now resides in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery in London.
From 1948 to 1953, Perlin lived in Italy, supported in part by a Fulbright Scholarship, where for the first time he began painting in oil. Upon his return to the U.S., he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, was featured in the Whitney's 1955 exhibition New Decade-35 American Painters and Sculptors, and was given an exhibition by Catherine Vivano Gallery in New York that same year where Stuart Preston of The New York Times lauded Perlin’s handling of light, and praised his painting, Capri, saying, “I venture to call this picture a masterpiece.”
Bernard Perlin was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1918 to humble beginnings as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Prompted by one of his high school art teachers, his parents enrolled him at the New York School of Design in 1934 and two years later he continued at the National Academy of Design Art School and the Art Students League, also in New York. By the fall of 1938, Perlin had moved from his family’s home to settle permanently in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
Perlin was active in the gay Greenwich Village scene. From the midst of the Paul Cadmus and Jared and Margaret French circle, Perlin befriended artists, musicians, and personalities including Leonard Bernstein, Grace Hartigan, David Hockney, Lincoln Kirstein, and Pavel Tchelitchew, George Tooker, along with literary figures Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Arthur Laurents, Glenway Wescott, E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham, Christopher Isherwood, and Tennessee Williams. As with many of his contemporaries, Perlin was photographed by George Platt Lynes, a close friend, in 1949 and 1954. Hunter O’Hanian, Museum Director, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, in New York, remarks “He was someone who had the standing to say Roy Cohn (Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel assisting investigations of suspected communists) was ‘really hideous in person’” or to spend time with Robert Mapplethorpe in his ‘male impersonator outfit.’”
Openly gay at a time when there were real risks involved both socially and physically, Perlin pursued his art as he pursued his lovers - unapologetically and with great passion and aplomb. Curator of the Artist’s Estate, Michael Schreiber, writes in his 2016 monograph, “By blending homoerotic works into an oeuvre occupied with looking at a variety of ‘normal’ human experiences and expressions, (Perlin) sought to promote a recognition and acceptance of homosexuality as being just another part of the natural order of things.” Perlin embraced and lived his own life in his own way, without apology, to the very end.
From Perlin’s series of swinging “cocktail culture” is his 1957 oil, The Bar, a scene from a gay bar in New York City at a time when being gay was a felony in every state. In the misty nightclub scene, anonymous male faces emerge from the red and yellow lights, looking out defiantly. The Bar is now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, gifted by the S.C. Johnson & Son collection in 1968.
By the late 1950s, as figurative painting was giving way to Abstract Expressionism, Perlin changed locations rather than his style, and moved out of New York to settle in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In Peter Steinhart’s book, The Undressed Art: Why We Draw (2004), Perlin was quoted as saying of Abstract Expressionism, “Their painting is millionaire art. Who else can afford it? Or live with it?”
Bernard Perlin largely stopped painting in the 1970s, having outlived many of the artists and creatives in his social circle of the 1940s and 50s. In his 50s and 60s, Perlin was unafraid to befriend and have sexual relations with men in their 20s. Later in life, at age 91, he legally married his longtime partner as a “political statement.” In 2014, he passed away at the age of 95 in his home in Ridgefield, survived by his husband, Edward Newell.
Solo museum exhibitions for Bernard Perlin were presented by the University of Richmond Museums (2016) and the Jewish Museum Milwaukee (2024). Notable group exhibitions including Perlin’s work have been held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (2022 and 2011), the Jewish Museum in New York (2020), the Saint Louis Art Museum (1965), the Detroit Institute of Arts (1965) and the Tate Gallery in London (1960).
Works by Bernard Perlin are represented in many prominent museum collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Columbus Museum in Ohio; the de Young Museum in San Francisco; the Hirshhorn Museum; the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of America Art in New York; the National Portrait Gallery in London; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pritzker Military Museum & Library; and the Tate Modern in London.
In his lifetime, Perlin’s work hung in many notable private collections, including those of Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mr. and Mrs. John Jay Whitney, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, Harry Hirshhorn, and Lincoln Kirstein.