SHFAP presents Representations, a show of major works by artists Rosemarie Beck, Seymour Remenick, Bob Thompson, Anne Harvey, June Leaf, Susanna Coffey, Susan Lichtman, Kyle Staver, Gideon Bok, and Sangram Majumdar. There is currently a distinct vogue in the art world for figuration; yet these artists represent the undercurrent of interest in representational subject matter that has existed since World War II. Beck, Thompson and Remenick eschewed the abstraction of their teachers for a language of images that was at once personal and narrative, turning to art history, mythology and music for their subjects. Among the living artists in this exhibition there is a spectrum of ages and styles, yet all have been engaged in figurative painting for a protracted period of time. Many have also devoted a significant part of their creative energy to teaching, and consequently have influenced a generation of new painters. 

Rosemarie Beck (1923-2003) was born in Westchester, New York. She attended Oberlin College, the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, and was mentored by Philip Guston and Bradley Walker Tomlin. Her paintings have an almost textile-like weave and touch, evocative of the embroideries she also made. Beck often mined Shakespeare and Ovid for inspiration, as well as astrology. She wrote, “it is my fate as a painter that I am perennially caught between opposing forces.” 

Beck was on the faculty of Queens College and then joined the New York Studio School. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum, New York Studio School, National Academy, and in a one person show at steven harvey fine art projects in 2013. 

Seymour Remenick (1923-1999) studied at the Tyler School of Fine Art with Albert York and Roy Davis. Though he studied with Hans Hoffman and made classic modernist paintings, Remenick left his modernistic pictorial structure for an almost Dutch small-format vision of landscape, painted directly from observation with a juicy facture. Fairfield Porter wrote that Remenick “expresses as well as it is expressed today, the idea that the ends of painting are to be found in its means.” 

Remenick’s work can be found in collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Bob Thompson (1937 – 1966) was born and educated in Louisville, Kentucky, but moved up North in 1958, initially to Provincetown where he encountered Lester Johnson, Gandy Brodie, and Red Grooms. Over the course of his short but productive career, Thompson developed a figurative style dependent on the compositional structures of Old Master painting swathed in a new vibrant color. This gouache exhibited here is derived from Goya’s Caprichos. His pieces explore the interplay of good and evil, order and chaos, nature and humanity, with a distinct energy and sensuality. 

Thompson’s work has been exhibited at steven harvey fine art projects several times before, with a show of drawings in 2012 and a two-person show with Gandy Brodie in 2011. Bob Thompson’s pieces are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  

Anne Harvey (1916-1967) was born in Chicago, where her early skills were nurtured by her culturally progressive family of writers and artists. Along with her mother and aunts, she became a part of the artistic milieu of French culture and formed relationships with the likes of Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, and Henri Matisse. Harvey worked from life, painting scenes of her apartment and the streets of Paris, but imbued each image with complex and imaginative patterns and flourishes, adding an element of what Matisse termed “fantasie.” Lawrence Campbell wrote that “she saw patterns inside other patterns… meandering, eddying, dissolving, disappearing, then coming into focus elsewhere, as though the wood grain pushed her even deeper into a world she could see as well as invent.”

During her lifetime, Harvey exhibited at both shows of women artists at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of the Century Gallery, 31 Women in 1943 and The Women in 1945, as well as at Jeanine Hao Gallery in Paris. There was a memorial show for Harvey at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in 1971. Steven Harvey showed her work in 2017, 2019 and 2022. 

Now in her 90s, June Leaf is naturally prolific, working continually between sculpture, painting and drawing. Leaf’s visual world is populated by imagined and autobiographical figures who stride and dance, sometimes animated by mysterious mechanical parts. These curious scenes are oddly human stagings of the play of passions that divide and attract us, with the artist as a kind of inventor and director, or as she terms herself, “a dancer… or an aviator.” 

June Leaf grew up in Chicago, where she attended the New Bauhaus Institute of Design, and Roosevelt University, but moved to New York City in the early ‘60s. Leaf’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Steven Harvey has shown Leaf’s work in a solo show and several group exhibitions.

Susanna Coffey is a graduate of the Yale School of Art, was a titled professor at the Chicago Art Institute and in recent years has taught at Columbia University. She is known especially for her portraiture, which blurs the boundaries between artist, space, and work, as well as her integration of art historical imagery with her own self-portraiture. 

Coffey’s work is in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Museum of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery. She was the subject of solo exhibitions at SHFAP in 2014, 2018 and 2019. 

Susan Lichtman works with the domestic and the intimate, oftentimes painting her own household and family. This space blends her past and present, as the house she and her husband built sits on land adjacent to the property where she grew up in the woods of southeast Massachusetts. Despite the personal subject, Lichtman is in fact creating what she thinks of as fictions, her paintings serve a novelistic function rather than a purely documentarian one, trying to “get mystery and specificity at the same time.” 

Lichtman received her BA in Studio Art at Brown University, and an MFA in Painting from Yale. She taught at Brandeis University for thirty years, and her work has recently been exhibited at SHFAP, in Madrid, Cambridge, MA, and Smith College, Northampton, MA.

Kyle Staver’s scenes from world mythology, realized in oil on a large scale canvas, have a rawness and physicality that evokes, as John Yau wrote, “the vision of someone who believes these figures exist as flesh, fur, feathers, and blood, rather than as symbols or allegorical representations.” Despite the comic element in her depictions, Staver gives her subjects and their stories empathy and gravitas. In her own words, she is “taking the universal and telling you about my stake in it…”

Staver was born and raised in Minnesota before attending Yale University. She has shown at SHFAP several times, most recently in a 2023 show with June Leaf, and a two venue solo exhibition in 2015. She has shown at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles and Nino Mier Gallery in Brussels, Belgium. Her work is included in the collections of the National Academy of Design, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Arts Club.

Gideon Bok lives and works in Maine. He received his BA from Hampshire College and his MFA from Yale University, and has taught at both Hampshire College and Boston University. Bok experiments with movement and saturated color, so that layers of time and space are blended in the static image of the piece. He takes the process of painting from observation in the studio to an extreme, writing that “if the sitter or person moved, or moved something in the studio, or even if the light changed, the painting had to change in relation to it,” explaining that this act of watching “changes the … painting from a still object to a time-based medium.” 

Bok has shown several times at SHFAP, most recently in 2023, and also in 2010, 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2020. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, in 2005 he was included in The American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition where he received the Hassam, Speicher, Betts and Symons Fund Purchase Award.

Sangram Majumdar was born in Kolkata, and moved to New York at the age of 9. Now living in Seattle, Washington, he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Indiana University. Majumdar’s interest is in exploring the hidden, the peripheral and the in-between. In this show we exhibit an early painting from 2011, a portrait of an artist friend in which a space of significance to the subject was projected as an image behind him while Majumdar painted him from life. John Yau wrote, “It seems to me that Majumdar is after that moment of seeing which occurs just before we name the object, event or experience and begin looking for the next thing, whatever it is…”

Steven Harvey showed Majumdar’s work in 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2018, 2019, and 2020. Majumdar is the recipient of a Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant, a Mellon Faculty Fellow in Arts, NYFA Grant in Painting, a MacDowell Fellowship, and in 2019 was inducted into the National Academy of Design. His first solo exhibition in India at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai will take place in 2024.