Israel Hershberg: Prince Street Gallery’s 40th Anniversary

40 years ago, Israel Hershberg and some fellow artists founded the Prince Street Gallery in SoHo, New York. Recently, the Prince Street Gallery asked Hershberg to write the following forward for the catalogue printed in honor of the occasion:

Forward for the Prince Street Galleryʼs 40th Anniversary Catalog
By Israel Hershberg

Prince Street Gallery’s original location on Prince and Greene Streets, SoHo, NY Photo: Israel Hershberg

The Prince Street Gallery like its sister galleries the First Street, Bowery and Green Mountain galleries all came into being as a direct consequence of the Alliance of Figurative Artists, known among the cognoscenti by its sobriquet, The Alliance. Anyone who ever attended The Alliance meetings in the late 1960s through the early 70s, must have at some point been struck by the complete incongruity of the Alliance nomenclature. These spirited gatherings were many things to artists and art students but ‘alliance’ was simply not one of them. The fractious, raucous meetings that at times took on even violent overtones were very much a part of what I understood to be a young New York artist’s traditional rite-of-passage — a kind of ritualistic initiation into a particular community within New York’s art world. The mystifying epithet of alliance was really no more than an imprimatur of sponsorship, an obeisance to the Educational Alliance. This venerable Jewish community center, founded in 1889 and located at 197 East Broadway on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was home to those weekly Friday night meetings. The Alliance was a kind of figurative offshoot of the legendary Artists’ Club of the New York School which in its heyday was presided over by such eminences as de Kooning, Pollock, Kline and Motherwell. At meetings of the Alliance of Figurative Artists one would regularly (and in some cases occasionally) encounter the likes of Al Leslie, Fairfield Porter, Robert De Niro Sr., Aristodemus Kaldis, Alice Neel and others once associated with the The Club.

Educational Alliance, Lower East Side, NY

The Prince Street, First Street, Bowery and Green Mountain galleries were also the result of the natural gravitation of a younger generation of artists wishing to continue in the footsteps of the legendary artist-run and co-op galleries of the Tenth Street scene in the fifties and early sixties. The Tanager, Hansa and Brata galleries once showed de Kooning, Kline, Guston and later, Lennart Anderson, Phillip Pearlstein, Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, Louisa Matthiasdottir and Gabriel Laderman – presences that loomed large at the Alliance.

On Friday evening, like ritual, I’d make my way by subway from Brooklyn to East Broadway to the Alliance, first stopping to have dinner at the storied Garden Cafeteria, a long time hang-out for Jewish poets, writers and intellectuals, where one could find Issac Bashevis Singer dining and in earlier times, it is said, Trotsky would sup.

Garden Cafeteria, Lower East Side, NY Photo: Bruce Davidson

The meetings as a rule were boisterous, emotionally charged and adversarial. The din of passionate argumentation mingled with the smell of cigarettes and percolated coffee wafted down the hall and assaulted the senses well before one entered the room, and the meeting was called to ‘order’, for lack of a better word. Inevitably, broad battle lines would be drawn along propositions and ideologies that seemed predestined by the planning committee to be as absolutely combustible as possible. A recurring and seemingly ineluctable sub-theme that would underlie ad absurdum just about every single topic for years at the Alliance always revolved around the virtues of a stormy, baroque or expressionistic posture toward representation vs. one favoring formal restraints and a more tempered pictorial approach, as manifested by the artists making up both sides of the divide. Among the officiating doyens, Phillip Pearlstein, Paul Georges, Louis Finkelstein, Rosemarie Beck, Gabriel Laderman, Paul Resika, Kaldis and Leland Bell, would be arrayed followers, students and allies to do the kind of passionate battle that was clearly meant to have no winners. Everyone was to be a casualty and all was meant to test and put to the grinding stone one’s own, as well as the other’s, most cherished ideas and theories, the beliefs which informed them in the more hidden battlefield of the studio. And as in the days of The Club, the meetings would conclude by spilling over to the Cedar Tavern or as mutual studio visits in what felt like a shift, after a serious bruising, to camaraderie. To the eighteen year old art student that I was then, the Alliance of Figurative Artists was pure Ritalin to what I saw as the bloodless and absolutely vapid atmosphere that defined the Brooklyn art college I was attending.

It was after two years of Alliance meetings and on one of those Friday evenings in 1970 at the Cedar Tavern that the idea of a new co-op gallery, later to be named the Prince Street Gallery, came into being. Groups at the tavern would form roughly along the battle lines described above for a night of drinking, conversation and continued debate. Conversations drifted and as memory serves, I felt myself being pulled into a discussion by two painter friends seated opposite me, the late Ed Cato and A.D. Tinkham, both of the First Street Gallery. The First Street, Bowery and Green Mountain galleries were already up and running at that time and there was very certainly the required number of artists sufficiently enthusiastic to get a new gallery off the ground. As the conversation progressed I was suddenly struck with the sense that A.D. and Ed were reframing this discussion into a proposition which I had no idea would be dropped squarely in my lap. They thought I should assume charge and besides, they chided, the time had come for me to start showing my work as well. Now as then, I had no idea why they thought that I, younger than any of those that later comprised the original members of this gallery, should take on such an initiative. Though skeptical about my abilities and desire to carry through with such a project, I bowed to persuasion, and at the end of the evening it was decided that an announcement would be made next week at Alliance that a new co-op gallery would be forming and those interested could take it up with me at the Cedar Tavern after that meeting. A group of painters and sculptors quickly formed around my table that evening at the tavern. After what felt like a thorough sniffing session we were satisfied there was the makings of a serious group and things moved fast. I had come with news in hand that a friend, Jim Ballard, a fellow student at Pratt Institute, with a top-floor studio at Prince & Greene streets had a space to rent on the ground floor of that location. An ad hoc committee was immediately formed with me included to ascertain the suitability of that space the very next week and in the blink of an eye a deal was struck and with our own hands the renovation began.

SoHo in those days was not the shopping mall it is now. Though one could easily sense that the future of this neighborhood was moving in a new direction there were then only a handful of galleries. Factories still occupied most of the lofts and spaces of the area. The streets were gritty, uneven and pot-holed and huge trucks would have their way unremittingly through them, cosseting up to loading docks and taking up most of the available parking during the day. At night the neighborhood was dark and foreboding. Fanelli’s Bar was then a workman’s bar with a truck-stop like atmosphere and the artists who began to patronize it were looked upon with curious and suspicious eyes – yet “tolerated”.

As renovation progressed, usually on Sundays, on site meetings would be called to order along with lunch to hammer out various understandings and policy among the members. During one such meeting it was decided the time had come for officers to be elected and I suddenly found myself again, without a hint as to why, being put up to be voted in as president of this new gallery which would be formally named the Prince Street Gallery. Though I protested that I was the youngest member of the group, administratively incompetent, and that surely there were more experienced members of the group to assume such a position, it was to no avail. The vote was pushed through in a fashion that would shake anyone’s confidence in the exalted principles of true democracy, making me the first president of the gallery. In expressing my gratitude for what I recognized as the group’s indulging affections for a younger colleague, I made sure to proclaim that if the gallery is at all to survive the other officers voted in that day would have to assume the requisite administrative duties. Indeed, I have no memory of doing anything that could even remotely be interpreted as presidential with the exception of this recounting which I now do forty years later, and do with pride and not a little nostalgia.

Prince Street Gallery’s inaugural exhibition poster

The gallery opened its doors with an exhibition of works by its founding members: Patricia Bailey, Robert Casey, Winston Coleman, Michael Eisenman, Norman Feinberg, Stephen Grillo, Ora Lerman, Tomar Levine, Frederick Ortner, Barry Rosenthal, Norma Shatan, Willard White, Jim Wilson, Charlie Katinas and myself. A vertical flyer with these names and a photograph I shot of the the gallery still in the midst of renovation from across the street with my treasured Leica 3C announced the Prince Street Gallery’s inaugural exhibition.

In 1971 the First Street Gallery moved to Prince Street just down the block, and the Bowery and Green Mountain (renamed the Blue Mountain) galleries moved to Greene Street, all within a minute’s walk of each other.

Israel Hershberg exhibition poster, 1971

Aside from the various group shows at the gallery, I participated in a two-person show at the PSG with my friend Barry Rosenthal in 1970 and had a solo exhibition in 1971. In 1973 I informed the gallery that I was leaving New York to teach at the Maryland Institute College of Art, besides having developed great doubts about the sagacity of exhibiting regularly at such a young age, and sadly bade the Prince Street Gallery farewell.

The Prince Street Gallery was born from a spirit of youthful, contrarian and humanist pushback vis-a-vis the early and already palpable manifestations of a burgeoning exploitive art world establishment mired by mercantilism, cynicism, novelty, and which would ultimately sever itself from anything that may be construed to be related to painting, drawing or sculpture, figurative or otherwise. I am moved and humbled by those that came after us, over this period of forty years, to tend, preserve and advance that same spirit.

Dedicated to the memory of:
Eddie Earl Cato, Michael Eisenman, Ora Lerman and Norma Shatan

Israel Hershberg
Jerusalem, 2010

May 11, 2010 | Categories: Contributions, Events, Figurative Arts | Tags: A.D. Tinkham, Alliance of Figurative Artists, Barry Rosenthal, Eddie Earl Cato, Garden Cafeteria, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Israel Hershberg, Michael Eisenman, Norma Shatain, Ora Lerman, Prince Street Gallery, SoHo, The Alliance | 5 Comments »