Our next show will feature the photography and paintings of Sam Feinstein. Born in Russia in 1915, Feinstein arrived at Ellis Island with his family when he was five. Raised in Philadelphia, he graduated from the Philadelphia Museum College of Art and at the age of nineteen was awarded his first one-man show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

During WWII, Feinstein served in the army, initially in a camouflage battalion until he suggested to his commanding officer:

“...my services would be
of greater value to the
War effort in the work
of a pictorial nature,
such as visual training aids, motion picture animation, or posters for public information.”

In the summers of 1946, 47, and 48, Feinstein, and his wife, Barbara Crawford, sojourned to Gloucester. The path, well known to giants of American visual art, led to a place where Feinstein could explore the ever-shifting geometry and light of a working harbor. Using casein and watercolors, with pastel highlights, Feinstein captured not only the vividness of place, but the timelessness of its rhythms.

Sam spent the 1950s summering in Provincetown where he painted with Hans Hofmann, exhibited extensively, served on juries with Hofmann and created an historically important documentary film about Hofmann’s teaching and principles of art.  In 1960 Sam left the art world of Provincetown to continue his own painting and teaching privately in the town of Dennis for the next 43 years.  A retrospective exhibition of his paintings was held at the Cape Cod Museum of Art in 2008.

After exhibiting in New York, Provincetown, and Philadelphia through the 1950s, Feinstein withdrew from the commercial art world. In turning away from the market’s validation, he could focus, without distraction, on painting and teaching. He taught until his death in 2003 at the age of 88. 

Feinstein’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Cape Cod Museum of Art and the Cape Ann Museum.