About the Foundation
The mission of The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation is to protect, preserve and expand the legacy of Jonathan Silver.
Silver was a sculptor, art historian and teacher, with special interests in the intersections of form, materiality, iconography and psychoanalysis. His intellect, wit, articulateness and independence inspired and provoked everyone with whom he came in contact. He was a modeler and constructor for whom every stage of the casting process was a source of discovery and knowledge. His modernist ancestry includes Rodin, Rosso, Duchamp-Villon and Giacometti but his trajectory was his own. Beethoven and Michelangelo were childhood heroes. He was drawn to the dense economy of ancient Egyptian sculptural heads and then to the operatic sculptural figures of Hellenistic Greece. He spent the first half of his artistic life resisting narrative and the second half embracing it. His literary inspirations included Freud, Mann, Goethe and Milton. Always he drew — for years from the model, with a hunger and analytical intensity marked by Cubism and Giacometti, then, increasingly, with improvisational flights that provided intimate access to his fantasies and dreams. In his haunted studio world, thick with plaster, the windows covered to block light from the sky and street, he made heads and figures that have an irrepressible and yet endangered inwardness, many of them messengers from a region overflowing with stories and yet unavailable to words. Identity remained a challenge and mystery. He lived with great intensity the modernist conflict between belief and doubt, continuity and rupture.
The Foundation is committed to the development of exhibitions, publications and programs that study Silver’s art, thought and life and to supporting and showcasing research by a broad range of voices reflecting upon the substances, directions and contexts of his work.
Board Members
Joshua Silver
Marion Smit, president
Ronald D. Spencer
Artistic Director
Michael Brenson
Research and Technology
Margaret Farmer