Sidney Goodman

de Mark Rosenthal, Stephen Berg, Julien Robson

Since the 1960s, Sidney Goodman has helped to maintain the vitality of American figurative art. Making the figure in the modern urban landscape his ongoing subject, Goodman collages images into compositions that are both clear and disquieting. Man in the Mirror documents the first major exhibition of Goodman's works on paper. Sidney Goodman is among the most important American figurative painters of the post-World War II era. The exhibition is the first major presentation of Goodman's works on paper, and will consist of 63 large and small scale works. Goodman's imagery is culled from memory and imagination, close observations of everyday life, and from the news media and art history. A Philadelphia native, Goodman attended the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) from 1954 - 1958. In 1961, he received critical attention at his New York debut exhibition and was awarded the Whitney Museum of American Arts' Neysa McMein Purchase Award. He has won numerous prizes and honorary degrees including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1962, the Hazlette Memorial Award for Excellence in the Arts (Painting), and an honorary doctorate from Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and appears in major collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Goodman sees his work as embracing two major concepts: "One is about shades of ambiguity and clarity. The other is about richness of light and color. The physical and spiritual realms of human experience merge through the forms of light and darkness. The sense of continuity from youth to old age is reflected by a preoccupation with global events. A concurrent theme is the everyday, the routine, the beauty of the commonplace."