Artist Birthday: Sarai Sherman

Painter, interior designer, and ceramic artist Sarai Sherman was a Jewish American whose paintings were a combination of reality and reminiscences, producing a unique form of abstraction.

Artist Birthday for 2 September: Sarai Sherman (1922–2013, United States)

Sarai Sherman was a unique abstractionist who wanted nothing to do with Abstract Expressionism.

Sarai Sherman, Bear Cat, 1959. Casein and oil on canvas, 100.3 x 69.89 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2025 Artist or Estate of Artist. (MOMA-P2739)

Painted at the height of Abstract Expressionism's dominance of the American modern scene, a style to which Sherman "did not subscribe", Bear Cat shows how her style at the time remained defiantly figurative and narrative. The only slight concession to that movement might be in Sherman's copious attention to the heavily worked surface. Bear Cat, which possibly represents a member of a motorcycle gang, is Sherman's own brand of figuration, like that of Francis Bacon (1909–1992), transformed by her inward vision. Like many of her figurative works that were not stridently social statements, the figure is blurred, as if viewed through a veil. This negates any specificity of the figure, and the work is a pleasing study in Sherman's technique of building forms in layers of gestural colors.

Sherman was born of Jewish parents in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia. She was painting as early as elementary school, and took extra art classes at an art graphics school downtown. An ardent draughtsperson, Sherman said that she was interested in ambience—nature, the city and the people. During the Depression (1929–1940), she took art classes from accomplished artists in the Federal Arts Program of the WPA.

She received a BFA and BA in teaching from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia, and later an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she determined she wanted to be an artists rather than teach. She moved to New York where she designed wallpaper and fabrics, while continuing to paint.

In 1952, on a Fulbright Scholarship, Sherman studied art in Italy, where she found the art world more adaptive or women than in the US. While she worked in Italy, her painting began to reflect the social mood of the period. When she returned to New York in 1954, she was represented by the American Contemporary Art Gallery, the only one that "took women seriously", having exhibited women artists since its founding (1932), including those who were Chinese, Jewish, African American, and Latinx.

In the 1960s, Sherman painted popular culture, some in the Pop Art milieu, and others of subculture figures in rock music, including series of prints on singers and their lyrics. In the 1970s her art became more subject-centric, and less blurred in its predominant figuration. From the 1980s into the 2000s, her work was based more and more on contemporary social issues, including the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.