"Caroline #2"

Gershon Benjamin (1899 - 1985)

Gershon Benjamin is a painter of portraits, landscapes, still lives, and the urban scene. He had a prolific career for over seven decades. Influenced by many European modernist, Benjamin used form and color to capture his emotional responses to the subjects by extracting the vast array of visual stimuli that he experienced into interesting reductive images. He viewed his art as a way of expressing delicate emotions as he sought to capture the universal truth of his subjects. Benjamin evolved a distinctive style by achieving a subtle balance between realism and abstraction. His works combined a lyrical chromaticism with simplified designs and two-dimensional shapes.

Benjamin was content to simply be able to paint, supported by a day job in the Art Department of the New York Sun. Because of this perspective, he remained little known to the contemporary art audiences until the early 1980s, when a series of exhibitions at Drew University and the New Jersey Institute of Technology brought his works into the public’s attention.

Nowadays, Benjamin is represented in many private and public collections including Berkeley Heights Public Library; Drew University; Griffiths Art Center, St. Lawrence University; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Ulrich Museum of Art.