Theresa Bernstein
1890-2002
Theresa Ferber Bernstein-Meyerowitz was born on March 1, 1890, in Kraków, Poland, and raised in Philadelphia. Following training at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and the New York Art Student’s League, where she studied under William Merritt Chase, Bernstein quickly found success as a painter in New York City. By 1914, she was showing regularly alongside renown painters of the Ashcan School John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Robert Henri. At a time when modernist abstraction was coming to the fore, Bernstein remained devoted to figurative subjects. Inexorably drawn to the excitement of urban life, Bernstein painted the rapidly modernizing world around her: suffragette meetings, opera houses, throngs on the omnibus, parades, and parties. Bernstein’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Museum of Art, and the de Young Fine Art Museum of San Francisco, among others.
