Jerome Witkin | the artist

Jerome Witkin does two kinds of paintings. He does big paintings about big subjects like the Holocaust and 9/11. These are occasions for the artist to deploy the full powers of his imagination, pull out all the painterly stops, and dazzle his audience with his considerable powers as a scenarist…

Young girl with long dark hair, green dress, seated at a table with cards in front of her.

Unseen and Unheard (In Memory of All Victims of Torture)

The Nazis had so-called "brownhouses," and they would pull in Jews or Communists or people who were homosexuals and beat them to death. There was a whole litany of people being forced to watch somebody being killed or raped…

Jerome Witkin is an American painter known for the realism in many of his works. He was born on September 13, 1939 in Brooklyn, NY to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother and has a twin brother, Joel Peter Witkin, who is a photographer. His parents were unable to transcend their religious differences and divorced while Witkin was still young. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Cooper Union, the Berlin Academy, and the University of Pennsylvania…