Posted on Sat, Nov. 14, 2009
Si Lewen begins his paintings as he sleeps. Images crowd his dreams until one rises above the rest to wake him and beg to be put on canvas.
Lewen always obliges.
"My art is my life, my world," he said from the Foulkeways at Gwynedd apartment he shares with his wife, Rennie.
They moved there from New Paltz, N.Y., two years ago to be near their daughter, Nina Kardon, and her family, who live in Ambler.
Lewen - whose work once was exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and galleries in New York and around the country - has been painting for most of his 91 years. Much of his art packs his studio and apartment.
Lewen uses charcoals, somber black and gray paint, and collage to make haunting images of Holocaust victims, their faces sparse and elongated; other paintings burst with color and abstract shapes symbolizing dance, love, and joy. He creates in series of paintings, some of which number into the hundreds.
His work moved Albert Einstein to write: "Strong emotional tendencies of the artist himself have often given birth to truly great works of art. . . . Our time needs you and your work."
Tomorrow in Bethlehem, Pa., Lewen will be guest of honor at the opening of the Si Lewen Art Museum at the International Institute for Restorative Practices, an organization that promotes a method of working with criminal offenders and victims.
"I just thought this work was important," said institute president Ted Wachtel, who learned of the paintings through Lewen's daughter, who works there. "His themes are themes that shouldn't get buried."
Lewen did some of the burying himself. In 1985, he abandoned his career and stopped selling his work, declaring that "art is not a commodity."
His withdrawal from the art world stunted his growing reputation among gallery owners and the sale price of his work. Paintings, one of which sold for $15,000, will start at about $1,000 at the institute, with proceeds going to the nonprofit's graduate school.
"I think he had the potential to become one of the country's leading artists," said Teresa Quinn, director of the Palmer Gallery at Vassar College, which had an exhibition of his work in 2005.
Lewen, now with a full gray beard rising to form fluffs that frame his head, is pleased his paintings will be displayed in a museum named after him.
"It's something I never imagined would happen in my lifetime," he said.
Lewen was born Isiah Levine in 1918 in Poland, the first son of Samuel and Susan. By 1920, the Levines fled violence against Jews and resettled in Berlin, where they lived for the next 13 years. Germany is where Lewen, slender and short, first was beaten up when he began attending grade school in a nearby village.
"I was not only a Jew but a foreign Jew, and not only a foreign Jew, but the worst kind of foreign Jew," he said. "There couldn't be anything lower than a Polish Jew."
He withdrew into art, painting landscapes, buildings, anything he saw.
Lewen said his favorite refuge was a Berlin art museum: "I was enchanted. This, to me, was heaven."
Heaven could not shield Lewen and his family, now joined by a brother, from the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. In 1933, Lewen and his brother Jerry moved to France and two years later to the United States, where they had relatives who had regaled them with stories of America.
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