History

April 25, 2008

Brushes With Greatness

Three Baltimore Jewish artists who captured the life and times of Jewish Baltimore

Gilbert Sandler
Special to the Jewish Times

The history of Jewish Baltimore, as with the history of any community, is shaped by a mystic mix of remembered conversations, stories we tell each other, what is written about us, and perhaps least recognized, how our artists portray us.

Three Jewish artists come to mind when speaking of Jewish Baltimore: Jacob Glushakow, Bennard Perlman and Aaron Sopher.

Each of them brought to his rendition a personal insight into the life of Jewish Baltimore, capturing a scene out of it, reminding us of who we are and where we came from.

Jacob Glushakow

‘Melancholy Peripheries’

Of Jacob Glushakow, Bennard Perlman once wrote, “Jacob was mild-mannered and soft-spoken. He was a good conversationalist who got his points across in soft vocal tones. His art emphasized this soft tone.”

Glushakow was born in steerage on the steamship S.S. Brandenburg in 1914 as it crossed the Atlantic from Bremen to Baltimore. His parents left Ukraine only days before the outbreak of World War I, and when they disembarked at Locust Point, they followed the Jewish community to East Baltimore.

Here, he was raised on the streets that he never really left. He was educated at City College and what was then the Maryland Institute of Art (now the Maryland Institute College of Art), and from 1933 to 1936 at the Arts Students League of New York.

The world that Glushakow captured in his art was, in the words of one critic, “the melancholy peripheries in urban life.” The aura of tenement life and pushcart commerce and chickens-in-their-cages on the sidewalks, the angst of an emerging immigrant society, permeated his art.

In 1937, Glushakow returned to Baltimore from New York. With barely enough money to pay the rent, he opened a studio on the second floor of a tiny row house on East Baltimore Street.

“Fellow Jewish artists Herman Merrill and Eddie Rosenfeld were already somewhat known in Baltimore,” he recalled. “It was the heart of the Great Depression. Few fields of endeavor offered much hope for escaping poverty, least of all the business of art. Attempting to make a living as an artist seemed a hopeless undertaking, but some of us were determined to try it. I was one of them.”

Glushakow’s determination paid off — to the delight of a grateful Jewish Baltimore. The artist died in 2000 after six decades of capturing the everyday life of the neighborhoods of his hometown.

Bennard Perlman

‘Special Expression’

“When I came back to Baltimore from Pittsburgh in 1950, where I had been studying at Carnegie Tech [now Carnegie-Mellon University], and being raised as a fourth-generation member of Temple Oheb Shalom, I became aware of the differing synagogue architecture in Baltimore,” said Bennard Perlman.

“It occurred to me that Baltimore synagogues, in their different styles of architecture, were a microcosm of Jewish architecture the world over. And so I was eager to draw them, and over the course of the next 50 or so years, I did. I got to understand that Shaarei Zion [at 3459 Park Heights Ave.] was a Greek temple, the old Beth Tfiloh in Forest Park was Byzantine, Beth El [at Hilton Street and Dorithan Road] was American contemporary.”

Mr. Perlman was born in 1928 on Mount Royal Terrace, attended elementary school at Linden Avenue and Koenig Street, and then School No. 49 on Cathedral Street. He graduated from City College and went on to Carnegie Tech.

Today, his curriculum vitae is crowded with his accomplishments as an artist, teacher, writer and lecturer.

He said, “Growing up at Oheb Shalom explains my love for synagogue architecture.

“A congregation’s choice of architecture for its synagogue building is one way of expressing their Jewishness,” he said. “It is that special expression that I look to draw.”

Aaron Sopher

‘I Wouldn’t Kowtow’

Aaron Sopher was born in 1905 in East Baltimore, one of 13 children of a cigar manufacturer. He matriculated at Poly, did poorly there, then at the Maryland Institute, and did poorly there, too. He did not want to sit and study; he wanted to draw.

In 1937, draw he did, prolifically, over the next 50 years on Eutaw Place.

Sopher opened his studio at Charles and Madison streets next to the old Stafford Hotel. “He was the fastest draftsman I ever knew,” recalled Jacob Glushakow. “He could sit and draw anything right away, getting it right the first time. He was prolific and he could turn out saleable work fast.

“I think he will be remembered for being a satirist, so loose in his renditions that he was sometimes a cartoonist. He used to take the streetcar from his home on Fernwood Avenue in Forest Park to his studio, and draw things from his seat. I saw him sit in Bickford’s restaurant on Calvert Street and draw the people he saw near his table. He would stick his thumb in his coffee and then apply it to his drawing — the effect was to wash the drawing a kind of sepia tone.”

By 1937, the world-famous collector Etta Cone asked Sopher to bring some of his drawings to her to look at, and she bought 42 of his works. She promised him that she would display them in her famous apartment in Eutaw Place.

Death kept her from fulfilling her promise, but Sopher seemed to feel that she would not have kept it anyway. “It wasn’t that she didn’t like my work,” said Sopher, who died in 1972. “It’s that she didn’t like me. I wouldn’t kowtow to her.”

Nonetheless, there are today hundreds of Sophers hanging in dens and living rooms all over Baltimore, admittedly in venues of lesser renown than Cone’s. Some call the phenomenon “Sopher’s Revenge.”

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