The present lot is from the collection of the artist Philip Reisman (1904-1992). Born the sixth of seven children in Warsaw, Poland, Reisman and his family moved into Tenement housing on the Lower East Side of New York City when he was four years old. His father discouraged his early aspirations to become a painter, but undeterred, Reisman dropped out of high school to take on paid night work while studying at the Art Students League. His paintings and etchings were an early success, focusing on candid, crowded scenes of everyday downtown Manhattan. His works are unapologetically harsh in reality, often focusing on the struggle of the working class and a harsh economic system brought on by the Great Depression. However, in 1936, as part of the Federal Art Project arm of the New Deal, Reisman was commissioned to paint a mural for the Psychiatric Building at Bellevue Hospital, where he painted a more optimistic, productive view of American industry for the men’s therapy room. Reisman was an avid painter and printmaker well into his 80s, capturing the raw visual history of New York City from the 1920s everyman, the Depression-era Lower East Side to the hippy culture of the 1960s and the punk scene of the 1980s. As Reisman put it himself, "artists have a responsibility to express the texture of their time and that's what I have been trying to do.”
Works by Philip Reisman are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Academy of Design, among other institutions. Throughout his productive lifetime, Reisman had the opportunity to travel across the country and the world, inspiring an eclectic personal art collection. His travels to India inspired a great appreciation in South Indian bronze sculpture in particular, as evidenced by his many correspondences with Indian curators and friends.