Newington-Cropsey Foundation Director Barbara Newington with Burton Silverman, recipient of the Seventh Annual Award for Excellence dinner presentation at the Lotos Club on February 25, 2005

The Newington-Cropsey Cultural Studies Center honored realist painter Burton Silverman as recipient of its seventh annual Award for Excellence in the Arts. The award, consisting of $5,000 and a bronze statuette depicting the Archangel Michael by NCF Director Barbara Newington, was presented at a dinner on February 25, 2005, at the Lotos Club in New York City.
 
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, Silverman has long been a champion and an exponent of realism, in the American tradition of Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper. His portraits—unflinchingly observed yet tempered by compassion—have appeared on the cover of Time magazine and in The New Yorker. He has furthered the contemporary realism revival not only through the excellence of his own work but also through slide lectures at museums and art schools across the country. Generations of young artists have been influenced by his teaching, first at the School of Visual Arts in the mid-1960s and since 1971 in studio classes. His portraits and scenes of urban life combine the convincing spontaneity of a snapshot with careful composition, psychological insight and painterly facture. Describing his commitment to the painter’s craft and a humanistic vision of society, Silverman has written: “I am stuck with my passion for the objective world, for the constantly shifting shades of meaning in the events of my life, to the states of being of the people I paint, and to the persistent need to get it right.”