William Meyerowitz

ANA 1943; NA 1959

Skip to main content
William Meyerowitz
William Meyerowitz
William Meyerowitz
American, c. 1895 - 1981
Both Meyerowitz's father and grandfather were cantors, and Meyerowitz was a soloist with the Imperial Conservatory in his youth. His family brought him to New York in 1908 to escape the pogroms of Czarist Russia. He studied at the National Academy of Design with Francis Jones and Douglas Volk (1912-1916). While a student he sang with the Metropolitan Opera chorus in its Italian and German productions.
Meyerowitz was a charter member of the Society of Independent Artists and of the People's Art Guild led by Professor John Weischel. The purpose of the latter organization was to bring art to the students of he settlement houses of the lower east side. One of the artists he interviewed to collect art work for the exhibitions was Theresa Bernstein, whom he married in 1919. At that time he was living and working at the artist's colony at Ridgefield, New Jersey.
Bernstein had been summering at Gloucester, Massachusetts, for a few years, and after their marriage, the couple spent most summers there. They stayed at inns and at the homes of friends until the mid-1930s when they purchased a home in East Gloucester. Their first summer they were the guests of Ellen Day Hale in Folly Cove where they worked on her etching press. It was there that Meyerowitz developed his innovative techniques for color printing. Meyerowitz was active in the controversy over whether public art exhibitions should be juried or not, and his painting of 1923 The Artists of Gloucester depicts this division allegorically.
The Meyerowitzs wintered in New York. They were members of the Whitney Studio Club, and Meyerowitz played chess with Marcel Duchamp and associated with Stuart Davis and Reginald Marsh.
Meyerowitz exhibited widely including one man shows at the Corcoran (1921) and the Smithsonian (1923, 1941). He painted a mural The Post Road in Connecticut for the Post Office at Clinton, Conn. (1937) and was a member of the American Artists Congress. He taught painting and etching at the Modern School of Self Expression in the Bronx (1940-45).
Meyerowitz painted harbors, gardens and landscape in Gloucester, and in New York, city scenes and religious subjects. His style was influenced by Cezanne and the post impressionists