Postwar Gallery in Point Breeze debuts artists of past and present
What separates Grossman’s collecting and curatorial taste from the dominant strain is that interest in technique and experience over novelty.
Morris Grossman of Postwar Gallery once owned Dalmo Optical in Squirrel Hill, but he now helps people see in a different way. His gallery focuses on the under-appreciated American Expressionism movement, with the hopes that art aficionados will see the value in their work as well as in the work of talented contemporary Pittsburgh artists.
American Expressionism is sometimes also called “American Figurative Expressionism,” as it was in contrast with the better-known Abstract Expressionism of the postwar period. Most, even outside the art world, know Jackson Pollock. But names like Vincent Smarkusz, Aaron Bohrod or Raphael Soyer faded into relative obscurity. Grossman and his staff want to change that with his motto “Midcentury Masters Matter.”
“I’m dedicated to artists that were overlooked, and there’s a strong Jewish connection, too,” Grossman said. Many of the American Expressionists were immigrant Jewish artists who brought the sensibilities of German and Russian figurative painters to depictions of day-to-day life in American cities. While the Abstract Expressionists turned away from traditional technique, the American Expressionists sought to use figuration to express the angst and absurdity of life after World War II.
“I’ve collected art forever and my father was a gallerist,” Grossman said. “So, I had a good example of how to open a gallery.” Grossman’s collection spans everything from brass jewelry and salt and pepper shakers to enormous paintings. Some show plein air, recognizable scenes, others look almost ghostly. Many were Jewish, some were African American, and all received little popular recognition, left to sit in collectors’ vaults for decades.
Gallery assistant Veronika Eber, a sculptor in her own right, came to Pittsburgh from New York to study art at Carnegie Mellon University. When she moved to Pittsburgh, she didn’t know of any galleries and was excited to find a place with a unique mission that also drew from Jewish history. “I liked that the goal of this gallery isn’t just to sell work, but to highlight underappreciated artists’ careers,” she said.
Abstraction has dominated the art market in the 2020s, but tides can always turn. As Anny Shaw of The Art Newspaper reported in 2023, “every decade or so, the art world likes to declare either figuration or abstraction dead.” Perhaps in a world emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, there may be a need to feel more of a human touch in artwork. But part of what makes the American Expressionists so fascinating is that while they did paint figurative reality, it’s not quite photorealistic. There’s a sense of imagination and borderline surrealism in every painting.
Though popular culture didn’t always embrace them, Postwar Gallery’s catalogue features artists who’ve been in institutions as storied as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum and the Walker Art Center. Some were in the Whitney Biennial as many as 18 times. “While these artists got some institutional recognition, they never received the popular acclaim of their peers,” Director of Operations William Murphy, who previously studied photography and found the gallery through a job posting, said. Murphy handles the events, press relations and many backend tasks for the gallery. He hopes to help work on a catalogue of all of Grossman’s collection with biographies of each artist.
One such artist is Henry Koerner, an Austrian Jewish artist who came to Pittsburgh in 1953 as an artist-in-residence at Chatham University. Grossman owns one of his paintings—an eerily gorgeous scene of a figure holding a flame beside a wrought-iron Pittsburgh bridge—and pointed to it as an example of the mastery of technique and imagination the American Expressionists brought to their subject matter.
But Grossman doesn’t just want to feature deceased artists of the past. He sees the gallery as a space for living artists in Pittsburgh, too, hence why he opened the gallery with an exhibition of David Aschkenas’s Flora & Fauna. “This show really is for David, whom I’ve known a long time,” he said. Aschkenas has been photographing for 50 years, with work in the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Polaroid Corporation and Howard Heinz Endowment.
A statement for Flora & Fauna reads that, “While our primary focus is on American Expressionist artists from the midcentury period, we are not afraid to exhibit artists who align with our mission and who are worthy of being highlighted. David is one of these artists in spades, and we are excited to be able to commemorate his 50th year in photography with this wonderful exhibition.”
Aschkenas’s photography lines up with some of the American Expressionist aesthetic sensibilities towards a mixture of the real and the absurd. He photographed the interior of a big game hunter’s mansion just outside of Pittsburgh, full of taxidermied animals and landscape murals. He combined these images with flowers and plants from around the world. The result is both beautiful and eerie, with an eye for technical mastery.
What separates Grossman’s collecting and curatorial taste from the dominant strain is that interest in technique and experience over novelty. The work within Postwar Gallery, including Aschkenas’s, shows that tradition and whimsy aren’t mutually exclusive.
The opening to Aschkenas’s show featured live jazz by Billy Price playing to a packed house, all in an unassuming warehouse storefront in Point Breeze. It’s eclectic, for sure, and very Pittsburgh to see world-class midcentury artwork in a graffiti-ed warehouse also home to an underground arcade and a coworking space.
But part of Postwar Gallery’s charm is its multihyphenate character. Grossman doesn’t see Postwar Gallery as just one thing. He hopes it can be something for both the history and the future. The gallery is my collection, plus, plus, plus, plus…” he trailed off, but decided to end the sentence there, leaving space for what could be.
Postwar Gallery is located at 6901 Lynn Way, with open hours Monday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. All other days of the week by appointment. David Aschkenas: Flora & Fauna runs through Feb. 5. PJC
Emma Riva is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.
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