Jerome Myers - Jerome Myers' Quotations From His Autobiography Artist in Manhattan (1940)

Jerome Myers' Quotations From His Autobiography Artist in Manhattan (1940)

• The song of my work is a simple song of the poor, far from the annals of the rich.

• At Cooper Union, where I first began to study art, and later at the Art Students League, where I continued to attend classes over a period of some ten years, the art taught during my time was either the academic French of the day or the academic painting of the Munich school... I questioned the wisdom of this procedure.

• Directly, I ventured out to interpret life for myself, to render the impression of the city and the people that I really cared for. ... In this instinctive way, I set myself in opposition to the authority that had governed my art instruction. It was a choice between becoming merely a cultured artist or learning to make a personal statement of my own feeling.

• a solitary crayon pencil, ... at the crowded East Side of New York City, making notes of the historical poor, of the poverty that struggles on...At nightfall, the surcease of a great city, the repose in the parks, or on the recreation piers, the aged gossip, the children at their endless play — a panorama which was for me unceasing in its interest, thrilling in its significance...

• My love was my witness in recording these earnest, simple lives, these visions of slums clothed in dignity, never to me mere slums but the habitations of a people who were rich in spirit and effort.

• To this teeming metropolis of the poor whom I studied, to them I came in quiet friendship. To them I owe much.

• ust as went to live in the Dutch ghetto, so I too went to study in the ghetto — that of our own East Side.