Jerome Myers

Born in Virginia in 1867 to immigrant Jewish parents who faced economic hardship, Jerome Myers arrived in New York City in 1886 following an unsettled childhood. He began evening classes at Cooper Union and within a year enrolled in evening classes at the Art Students League which offered academic art training at that time.

To support himself during eight student years of night study, he worked daytime as a theatrical scene painter and as a decorative painter, helping to explain his vivid color sense. He also worked as a photo-engraver for the Moss Engraving Company, and starting in 1895 he worked in the New-York Daily Tribune art department.

Fiercely dedicated to the rich theater of New York City as his subject matter, Myers embraced the everyday, and for fifty years Myers rendered scenes of quotidian life on the Lower East Side in his paintings, etchings, and drawings. Speaking of poorer neighborhoods in a 1923 article in The Survey, Myers said: "Others saw ugliness and degradation there, I saw poetry and beauty, so I came back to them." He continued: "I took a sporting chance of saying something out of my own experience and risking whether it was worthwhile or not. That is all any artist can do."

Myers traveled to Paris twice, once in 1896, and again in 1914. In his 1940 autobiography, Artist in Manhattan, Myers wrote:

"So many artists had returned from Paris, who despite their advantages, had since gone under, while I more wisely than I knew, had gathered together my motives in the streets of New York, where the vast drama of life was each day freshly enacted. This country, this city, became my element: here I made a definitive commitment for my art life. What I had to say was my own. The language of my art I spoke was my own: simple and direct, from life to mood, from mood to life."

In January 1908, Myers mounted his first one-man exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery on Fifth Avenue. Although Robert Henri did not invite Myers to join the pivotal group of artists known as “The Eight,” who sought an alternative to academic art, Myers, pursued a similar vision and means of expression, albeit with a more sentimental dimension. Myers' 1888 work, Backyard, depicting clotheslines against a backdrop of tenement buildings is thought to be among the first works embodying the precepts of the Ashcan School.

He exhibited in a number of important group exhibitions, including the 1904 Universal Exposition in St. Louis, where his painting Night Concert was awarded the Bronze Medal, and the 1910 progressive Exhibition of the Independent Artists that included John Sloan and Robert Henri. In 1911, along with Walt Kuhn and Elmer MacRae, he organized an exhibition of The Pastellists, to show the works of the Pastellists Society at the Madison Gallery with the hope that the pastel medium would gain greater popularity.

Myers was also instrumental in the formation in 1911 of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), the group that grew out of the Pastellists. The AAPS was responsible for the cataclysmic 1913 Armory Show held at the Sixty-ninth Street Regiment Armory. Early planning for the 1913 Armory Show took place in Myer's studio. Myers originally intended that the Armory Show only include American artists who were ignored by the National Academy of Design. When Arthur B. Davies, who succeeded J. Alden Weir as president, he changed the scope of the exhibition and included European artists.

Myers had hoped that the exhibition would lead to widespread recognition of American realist artists. Instead, as the first large-scale international exhibition of European modern art in the country, the European artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso, revolutionized the New York art world. Myers along with Henri, Sloan, George Luks, George Bellows, and Guy Pene du Bois, resigned from the AAPS over this change in course, claiming the exhibition was “The great American betrayal.” Nevertheless, the exhibition catalog lists three entries of Myers' work, the last entry consisting of fifteen drawings.

In 1921 Myers was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design (NAD) and in 1929 he became an Academician. Shortly before he died in 1940 he published an autobiography, Artist in Manhattan.