“Apart from the fact that these works are so beautifully composed and constructed as to make one feel at one with Silverman’s vision, the understanding that he has deliberately chosen ordinary settings to create such extraordinary circumstances excites the mind as much as the eye… He’s captured artisans, laborers, vacationers, and sportsmen—the old and the young. They comprise a repertoire of real people whose existence often transcends the commonplace, representing for the artist larger issues and deeper emotions. The work can be viewed on two planes: as documents of an epoch and recordings of ideas… Silverman’s art is created with intelligence and his commitment to truth and beauty is vividly clear.”—Steven Heller, , Arts Magazine, Jan. 1984

More about the artist:

Burton Silverman has been painting and exhibiting as a fine artist and illustrator for over 75 years.  His early training was at age 11 in the kids’ classes at the Art Students’ League in NY.  Years later, he would become a teacher at the League and at the  National Academy of Design. and a guest instructor at art colleges all across the nation. He attended Columbia University, where he majored in Art History and graduated in 1949. Two years later, he was drafted into the US Army during the Korean War.

After discharge from the US Army, his career as a painter evolved slowly but steadily as his gallery representation expanded both in NY and in Philadelphia and Washington, DC.  Like early American painters  Winslow Homer,  the Ashcan artists, and Edward Hopper, his manifest graphic and painting skills drew him to an extraordinary parallel career in illustration. His early illustrations were for kids' novels and a dramatic reissue of Rudyard  Kipling's scary stories. In 1957, he became a part-time employee of the Newspaper Guild at the then liberal NY Post, where he created cartoon-style promotional ads for the paper. He quit the Post to become a features illustrator for Sports Illustrated, at the urging art art-friendly   Jerome Snyder, who saw his drawings at the Davis Galleries 

 From then on until late 1994, he pursued an increasingly extraordinary parallel career as a distinguished painter and illustrator. His art appeared in national magazines and print media with covers on Time. Newsweek and New York, and story illustrations for Time, Esquire, New York, the Carnegie quarterly the American Heritage, as well as 125 portraits for the New Yorker’s celebrated feature, Profiles. He did record album covers, including the iconic Aqualung cover for a  British rock group. His drawings for New York Magazine of the historic Columbia student strike in 1968 were acquired by the Library of  Congress. With illustrator and noted painter-friend, Harvey Dinnerstein, they self-initiated a graphic record of the equally historic Montgomery Bus boycott of 1956; these 75 works are now in multiple museum collections.

Silverman’s paintings began appearing in galleries in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Denver.. He taught at art Schools all over the country, starting in 1964 at the School of Visual Arts  He would go on to teach at the Art Student’s League, the National Academy Art School, the Smith Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, the Scottsdale Artists School, and the Lyme Academy in Conecticuct. 

Silverman would receive over 40 Awards and honors, culminating in the 2004 Gold Medal from the  Portrait Society of America and in 2020, from the Artists Fellowship.

 His work is in the permanent collections of over 30 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum, and the Library of Congress.

Multiple retrospective shows started in 2000 at the newly created Brigham Young Museum, ending in a celebrated retrospective in 2023 at the historic Salmagundi Gallery in New York. At 97 he continues to paint in his studio, with both large-format pictures and intimate, smaller glimpses of the little-noticed moments of our lives.

Click here for a full biography  including  honors, awards and collections