Jerome Witkin (b. 1939)

Jerome Witkin was born in 1939 in Brooklyn, NY to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother and has an identical twin brother, the renowned photographer, Joel Peter Witkin. His art talent’s blossomed early, winning art prizes and scholarships that allowed him to live and travel in Europe and who would meet and get know such leading painters such as Ben Shahn, Isabel Bishop, Giorgio Morandi, Jack Levine, Philip Guston, Willem deKooning, Alice Neel and many other important painters such as R.B. Kitaj – who is reported to have cited Witkin as “the greatest figurative painter in America.” Art historian Donald Kuspit, called Witkin’s works “dreams in the grand visionary manner of the Old Masters” . . . painted with the rhapsodic abandon of pure sensation . . . unequivocal masterpieces.” The art critic Kenneth Baker once stated that “Witkin’s only peer is Lucien Freud.” (excerpt from https://paintingperceptions.com/jerome-witkin/)