The American Art Fair

From May 14-17, 2022, Forum Gallery exhibits at The American Art Fair. Celebrating its 15th year, the fair returns to the Bohemian National Hall in person after an eighteen month long hiatus. 

For The American Art Fair, Forum Gallery will be bringing masterworks by American social realists Raphael Soyer (1899 – 1987) and Jack Levine (1915 – 2010).

In The City Park, c. 1934, is a work in oil by Raphael Soyer that is emblematic of the Artist’s quintessential “Bowery paintings” that observed Depression-era life anitaround Union Square in Manhattan during the 1930s. Acquired directly into the Soyer family collection and thence by descent, the painting was exhibited during the 1967 traveling retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and has since been included in important traveling exhibitions organized by the Pushkin Museum in Moscow (1977), the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio (1996), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (2007).

1932 (In Memory of George Grosz), 1959, is one of the small number of works by Jack Levine that relate directly to Nazism, as it portrays an imagined meeting where Hitler is handed the baton and appointed to be the Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. Jack Levine dedicated the painting to the artist George Grosz, who had come to New York in 1932 to escape the dangers developing in Germany. This remarkable work was the centerpiece of Levine’s 1959 exhibition at the Alan Gallery in New York, where it was acquired by the award-winning author and screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo. It has since been featured in many museum exhibitions, including a 1961 group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art and during the Artist’s 1978 retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Depression-era works by Fourteen Street Artists Isabel Bishop and Reginald Marsh will be shown alongside cityscapes of the period by Oscar Bluemner, Niles Spencer and Joseph Stella and rare sculptures by Alexander Archipenko, Chaim Gross and Max Weber. In addition, striking Structurist works by Charles Biederman, Ilya Bolotowsky and Sidney Gordin will be on view. 

Coinciding with American Art Week in New York City and The American Art Fair, Forum Gallery presents, Important Works of American Art, on view at the gallery through June 17, 2022. The exhibition features exceptional American paintings, drawings, and sculpture dating from the first half of the Twentieth Century to today.