Chronology

CHRONOLOGY

by Michael Brenson

Jonathan Silver, around 5 years old.

1937

Jonathan Silver is born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 19, 1937. He is the youngest of three children of Regina Bublick and Edward S. Silver. Bublick, from Argentina, was a direct descendent of the rabbi Elijah of Vilna. Edward Silver was a lawyer who would become District Attorney of Brooklyn from 1954-1964.

Jonathan’s childhood home, Brooklyn NY.

1948

Edward Silver brings his wife and children with him when he serves as a delegate to the 1948 Zionist congress in Switzerland. On that trip to Europe, Silver’s mother takes Jonathan to the Louvre, where he sees Classical and Hellenistic Greek sculpture.

1951

“Terrified”1 of school, Silver drops out and enters Freudian analysis, which he will continue for the rest of his life. He makes copies of Michelangelo drawings. As a child he began making sculptural portraits of Beethoven; Julius Ceasar and the tenor Enrico Caruso are other childhood heroes. For four years, his tutors follow the curricula at Midwood High School. Among the courses for which he receives credit are drawing and music. Silver friend and scholar Virginia Budny wrote that “after receiving credit for three courses offered by the Juilliard School of Music Extension Division in New York City in 1955–1956 and passing the high school Regents exam in January 1956, he was awarded an academic diploma from Midwood. He continued to study at Juilliard through the winter 1958 semester.” 2

1959

Silver enters the School of General Studies at Columbia. He takes courses with several of Columbia University’s renowned art historians, including Julius Held, a Baroque scholar, and Theodore Reff, who specializes in iconographic studies of 19th century French art. Silver is captivated by Meyer Schapiro, the influential medieval scholar and modernist thinker, whose rhetorical eloquence, range of reference and acuity of attention are as compelling to artists as they are to other academics. Silver receives a BS and then an MFA, writing his master’s thesis, under Schapiro’s supervision, on “Constantin Guys: Some Aspects of the Origins and Development of His Style.” 

1960-1966

While studying art history, Silver takes courses at Columbia in studio art. Beginning in 1961 he enrolls in Sculpture, Sculpture and Drawing, or Clay Modeling and Drawing, classes during every semester through spring 1966, as well as for summer terms in 1962 and 1963. From 1964 on, Peter Agostini is the instructor for these classes.3 Agostini is a figurative sculptor whose success demonstrates to his students that figurative sculptors, working from the model, can make a place for themselves in an art world in which “the contemporary” is being largely defined by Pop Art and Minimalism. “What Peter imparted to many of his students,” Budny wrote, “especially through his personal charisma and forceful example, was a fervent dedication to intense, sustained study of the model as an avenue for self-exploration, and Jonathan was one of those who got hooked. That was at a time when working from the human body was widely disdained as the useless remnant of an enervated academic tradition.”4 “What was important” to Agostini “was not whether it looked like the model,” Silver said, “but the quality of attention you were paying to what you were doing.”5 In Agostini’s classes, Silver meets Bruce Gagnier, Lance Solaroli, Virginia Budny and Christopher Cairns.

1966-1969

In 1966 Agostini begins teaching at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; established as a women’s college, it had begun admitting men in 1963. Gagnier recalled that Agostini had been let go by Columbia “and would not teach at UNCG if he was not given tenure and if three of his Columbia students did not accompany him.” 6 Silver teaches one semester a year, Gagnier and Solaroli both semesters. Silver, Gagnier and Solaroli draw from the model every night, seven days a week. As an art history teacher, Silver has access to the slide collection. “Each week during the school year we would show slides to one another,” Gagnier wrote, “taking turns (‘slide packs’) in the lecture hall.” 7

Jonathan Silver, Untitled, 1968, oil on canvas, 18 x 15 inches.

In Greensboro, Silver meets Kelly Cherry, three years younger, an MFA writing student who will become a distinguished poet. Within six weeks, they are married. Within three years, they are divorced. 

In 1967 or 1968, in Baltimore, through the poet Gary Moore, a student in Johns Hopkins University’s graduate Writing Seminars, Silver meets Michael Brenson, a Hopkins graduate student in art history. Both Silver and Brenson would soon be engaged in doctoral research on Alberto Giacometti.  

At the same time as he is teaching at UNCG and researching a dissertation, under Schapiro, Silver makes small sculptures and what may be his only paintings in Agostini’s studio on 12th Street and Avenue B. He is invited to work there by Cairns, Agostini’s studio assistant. On the way to Agostini’s second-floor studio, Silver catches a glimpse of Barbara Roberts, who is working on the ground floor, in a space occupied by a sculptor, Bill Sildar. Roberts, six years older than Silver, is the daughter of a minister in whose Ohio church she played the organ. Silver asks Cairns to find out from Sildar who she is. Silver and Roberts meet.8 Silver and Cairns become important friends. Born and raised in Delaware, Cairns is the son of a renowned chemist. He attended Tufts University and Oberlin College. In 1970 he receives his MFA from Tulane University. 

1970

Silver takes a job teaching art history at Montclair State University, where he will continue teaching until shortly before his death. His colleagues include the artists Carmen Cicero, Nancy Goldring and John Czernowksi, and Avram Kampf, who is becoming a prominent historian of Jewish art and thought. Kampf becomes one of Silver’s formative interlocutors on Jewish issues.

Silver and Barbara Roberts are married. Both play the piano. She becomes a skilled piano rebuilder and tuner. In his classes and public lectures, Silver will occasionally play the piano in order to make connections between art and music. 

Barbara Silver, Margo Cairns, Alexis Cairns and Jonathan Silver, New York City, 1974.

1970-1976

In 1972 Jonathan and Barbara Silver move into a loft at 30 East 4th Street. 

In 1974 Silver’s essay “Giacometti, Frontality and Cubism,” based on research for his unfinished Ph.D dissertation, is published in ArtNews. It is an incisive analyses of Giacometti’s painting. Although Silver will speak passionately about Giacometti for the rest of his life, with this article he believes he has said what he has to say about him and to continue with the dissertation would immerse himself in an academic pursuit in which he is not interested. He is no longer divided between art historian and sculptor. He is now a sculptor. 

In 1975 Silver’s essay, “Elie Nadelman: A Single Notion of Style,” is published in ArtNews.

From 1970 to 1976, Silver’s working relationship with Cairns is as close as that of any two artists anywhere. Each is preoccupied by the sculptural head. They explore the sculptural histories and implications of frontality. To figurative conventions that go back to Ancient Egypt and Greece, they apply principles of Analytic Cubism and the experimental freedom of Rodin. Cairns regularly visits Silver’s studio and Silver draws at Haverford College, where Cairns is teaching; sometimes he teaches Cairns’ drawing classes. Silver makes sculpture in the college foundry which Cairns built in 1972; with the help of Cairns and his assistants, several of Silver’s sculptures are cast in the foundry, including the bronze of Wounded Amazon that will be acquired by the Walker Art Center. Silver and Cairns will remain in continual contact until 1988.

In 1976 Cairns, Silver and Bruce Gagnier exhibit together at Haverford’s Comfort Gallery.

1978-1982

Silver starts to move away from a preoccupation with frontality, which imposes on viewers the authority of a fixed point of view, and begins modeling and constructing thin syncretic female figures that demand to be seen from all sides. Working on frontal heads had helped him to resist narrative. Increasingly he wants his sculpture to hold within it the drama of personal and historical experience. His figures, like his heads, but differently, are intensely psychological. He embraces mythical, classical and Biblical references. His titles refer to Venus, Medea, Diana, Lilith, Orpheus and Eurydice, St. Cecilia, Elijah and Jesus.

In 1979 Silver and Cairns exhibit together at The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, where Cairns had taught. In her review in ArtNews, Cynthia Nadelman writes: “While Cairns’ work consciously makes use of artifice, Silver’s is realer than real: both artists’ explorations of human forms are intelligent and informed. Today it’s easy to see why sculptors with figurative tendencies could use some reinforcement. These two are original and powerful enough to let their ideas really take flight – all the more so if they turn the obviously personal process of sculpting into an experience more easily shared by others.” 10

Around 1982, along with teaching at Montclair, Silver begins teaching sculpture at the New York Studio School, where Gagnier has been dean since 1979. The artists who study with Silver at the Studio School include Marion Smit and Eyal Danieli, who become Silver’s friends.

In 1982, traveling with Cairns on his only trip to Europe as an adult, Silver visits the Medici Chapel in Florence. In Brenson’s words, “he was overwhelmed not just by the physicality and drama of Michelangelo’s sculptural figures but also by their ability to make the architectural space theirs.” Silver said that the sculptures “permeated the air the way music permeates the air. It became a whole thing, in which the physical space inhabited by the work was alive with the thoughts projected by it.”11  Silver begins to read epic poetry. Alan Mandelbaum’s translation of the Aeneid “just blew me away. Then I read Paradise Lost, and that blew me away, in the same way. I was just overwhelmed with the richness and power of the imagery . . . All of a sudden I saw the potential greatness of art, or sculpture; its capacity to deal with drama, on the highest level.” 12

1983

“The Classical Cubism of David Smith,” Silver’s review of two David Smith exhibitions in Washington, D.C., is published in ArtNews.

Brenson introduces Silver to Julian Weissman, a dealer at Soho’s Gruenebaum Gallery, and his wife Karen Gunderson, a painter. 

1984

Silver has a solo exhibition at the New York Studio School. In the New York Times, Brenson writes: “The sculptural and psychological confusion of inside and outside, right and left, up and down, self and other, makes it impossible to decide who or what the figures are. As in Greek tragedy, Silver presents figures in the grip of forces they can neither control nor understand.”

Jonathan Silver and Julian Weissman, Gruenebaum Gallery, New York City, 1986.

1986

Silver exhibits at the Gruenebaum Gallery. “Jonathan Silver Sculpture: 1975-1986” includes the “Chapel of Alexander Severus,” an installation created for the show in which divergent sculptural presences in a darkened smoky space hover over a broken figure and what seems to be a terrible event. From this point on, Silver’s exhibitions will feature theatrical installations, almost all of which evoke ancient and yet still current stories.  

Before the show, Tom Gruenebaum, the director of the gallery, asks the prominent collector Sid Singer to put up money to cast in bronze one of Silver’s sculptures. Singer arranges for the casting at the Tallix foundry. Singer will become Silver’s most important collector and arrange for the casting of nearly two dozen Silver sculptures.

“Giacometti on the Couch,” Silver’s scathing review of James Lord’s biography of Giacometti is published in ArtNews.

1987

Silver accompanies Brenson to Mexico City to see ”The Giacometti Family,” an exhibition at the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo, which Brenson reviews for the New York Times. They visit the Museo Nacional de Antropología. 

Brooklyn Museum curator Lynne D. Ambrosini interviews Silver, along with the sculptors Bryan Hunt and Alain Kirili, for the catalogue for her and Michelle Facos’ exhibition, Rodin: the Cantor Gift to the Brooklyn Museum.

Jonathan Silver with his sculpture Diana, 1986, Tallix Foundry in Beacon, NY, 1988.
Photograph by Shirley Singer.

1988

Through Martin Friedman, its director and a long-time supporter of modern sculpture, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis acquires a bronze of Silver’s Wounded Amazon and installs it in its sculpture garden, which also includes sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra and Martin Puryear.

The Montclair Art Museum presents Silver’s exhibition, “Recent Sculpture and an InstallationChance Overthrown.”

1989

Silver is invited to create an installation for the Sculpture Center on New York’s Upper East Side. Two years earlier Marian Griffith, its director, had begun inviting individual sculptors to use the summer months, when the Sculpture Center was closed, to develop projects that would reopen its space in September. The Lower Room, which Silver called a “sculptural opera,” includes standing and reclining figures based on Barbara Silver, who had recently recovered from an aneurism; Charon, a large looming figure with an oar; an angel of death with disproportionately long arms, and a scrambled black rubber cat. The walls are painted black and grey and the floors caked with broken clay. In Art in America, Eileen Myles writes: “One sensed a desperate kinetic communication between the parts of this installation that was denied by examination of any one facet or figure. But there was a single impact. The chaos of this environment, with its swirling fluids and unfinished, spiraling, clumping forms, resolved itself into a temporary shape. Silver defined his pained, deformed figures as mythological, even ‘noble.’ They are not suffering humans but dreamers fleeing their nightmares, being transformed by that flight.”13

The sculptor Tom Otterness is led to the show by Brenson’s review in the New York Times. Otterness meets Silver and introduces him to his wife, the filmmaker Coleen Fitzgibbon. 

1990

Silver is included in The Expressionist Surface: Contemporary Art in Plaster, a group exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art. 

1991

Silver’s exhibition at the Victoria Munroe Gallery includes drawings and figures and a large table covered by sculptural heads. The exhibition also includes an installation, The New Gretchen, which features a naked female plaster figure sitting on the edge of what may be an operating table shaking her fist. Inspired by a character in Goethe’s Faust, the expressionist realism of the figure points Silver’s work in a new direction, one that is topical as well as allegorical and empathetic. 

Soon after the exhibition closes in October, Silver, a chain smoker for forty years, is diagnosed with lung cancer. He continues to work on sculpture as best he can and begins composing an opera. Over the next eight months, Brenson records nine interviews with him and Coleen Fitzgibbon films Silver in his remarkable studio, packed with sculptures on stands and racks, with plaster spread over and embedded in the floor, and thoughts and poems scribbled on the walls. Fitzgibbon records studio conversations between Silver and long-time friends, such as Brenson and the painter Bert Carpenter, the head of the art department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

1992

Silver’s show at the Victoria Munroe Gallery in April includes recent drawings of haunting figures and animals, among them dogs that he refers to as “the hounds of hell.”14 He also has a drawing show at Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Inc., in Houston, Texas.

On July 10, 1992, Silver dies at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Lower Manhattan from complications from lung cancer. He is 54. 

A memorial is held at The Sculpture Center. 

With Marion Smit and Josh Silver, Jonathan’s nephew, Barbara Silver discusses her dream of a Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation. 

1995

A memorial exhibition, Jonathan Silver: Heads, curated by Brenson, takes place at the Sculpture Center. 

2001

Incorporation of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation.

2006

Christopher Cairns curates “Five Sculptors: Peter Agostini, Christopher Cairns, Bruce Gagnier, Jonathan Silver, George Spaventa” for the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, Haverford, PA.

2008

Lori Bookstein Fine Art, a Manhattan gallery, presents the exhibition “Jonathan Silver: Sculptures.”    

Trailer for Infidel in the Studio, directed by Coleen Fitzgibbon. Available online at the Filmmakers Cooperative

2016

Coleen Fitzgibbon’s film, Jonathan Silver: Infidel in the Studio, debuts at Manhattan’s Anthology Film Archives.

Barbara Silver dies at 85.

2018

Smit establishes the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation as an office, study center and exhibition space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It includes the Silver archives and an installation of most of the sculptures in Silver’s studio at the time of his death. 

Smit curates “Jonathan Silver: Drawings and Heads,” an exhibition, accompanied by a panel discussion, at the New York Studio School.

2019

“The Continuity of Substances: Jonathan Silver Interviewed by Michael Brenson,” is published in Bomb magazine.

2022

Exhibition at Victoria Munroe Gallery, NY, NY.


1 Michael Brenson, “On the Edge of the Visible: The Drawings of Jonathan Silver,” in Jonathan Silver: Drawings and Heads, exh. cat., edited by Marion Smit (New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture, 2018), n.p. 

2 Virginia Budny, “Jonathan Silver (1937–1992): Drawn from Life,” unpublished booklet, 2018, 2. 

3 Budny, “Jonathan Silver (1937–1992): Drawn from Life,” 2.

4 Budny, “Jonathan Silver (1937–1992): Drawn from Life,” 2. 

5 John Dorsey, “Religious Impulse Shapes Silver’s Sculptural Vision.” Baltimore Sun, December 23, 1987: 1B, 4B. Cited in Budny, Jonathan Silver (1937–1992): Drawn from Life, 7.

6 Bruce Gagnier, email to the author, May 19, 2021.

7 Bruce Gagnier, email to the author, May 19, 2021. 

8 Christopher Cairns, email to the author, May 29, 2021.

9 Christopher Cairns, email to the author, May 29, 2021.

10 Cynthia Nadelman, “Christopher Cairns and Jonathan Silver.” ArtNews 79, no. 1 (January 1980): 164. 

11 Brenson, “On the Edge of the Visible: The Drawings of Jonathan Silver,” n.p.

12 Brenson, “On the Edge of the Visible: The Drawings of Jonathan Silver,” n.p.

13 Eileen Myles, “Jonathan Silver at Sculpture Center,” Art in America 78, no. 1 (January 1990): 157. 

14 Brenson, “On the Edge of the Visible: The Drawings of Jonathan Silver,”n.p.