Exhibition to feature rarely seen Breverman works

The 90th solo exhibition of the work of internationally recognized master printer and painter — and UB emeritus faculty member Harvey Breverman — will be on view Nov. 9 through Feb. 24 at the Burchfield Penney Art Center at SUNY Buffalo State.

“The Contradictions of Being: Composite Works by Harvey Breverman,” an exhibition of more than 50 paintings and drawings by Breverman, SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the UB Department of Art, features many works that have never been shown before publicly in Western New York.

The exhibition focuses on Breverman’s “Discontinuous Sequence” series, which uses the technique of montage, bringing together disparate elements in a composition to create tension.

Created from 1970-74, the series was in many ways an immediate reaction to the political unrest on college campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s in response to the Vietnam War, notes Tullis Johnson, exhibition curator and manager of archives.

Around the same time, Breverman sat on the committee that approved the inclusion of the Department of Media Study, founded by Gerald O’Grady, as a part of UB’s School of Arts & Letters in 1973. The late Tony Conrad, a faculty member in that UB program, introduced Breverman to the writings of Soviet film directors Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, Johnson says, calling Eisenstein’s essay on the importance of montage, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” “an important influence on work from this period.”   

Later Breverman works included in the exhibition employ the process of montage in other ways. The series “Terezin,” “Polyln” and “Fenstere Medina” reflect on the Nazi occupation of Poland and Czechoslovakia during World War II. Various objects and architectural fragments from German concentration camps and synagogues destroyed during the war are used to memorialize the stories of friends and family who were lost or narrowly escaped the terror of that conflict. The series reflect on the genocide of European Jews from 1941-45, and its lasting impact on the world.

Breverman, who joined the UB faculty in 1961 to teach drawing and headed the printmaking program until his retirement in 2005, has been fascinated throughout his career by depictions of things that would not appear to go together in some connected way. “Repeated viewing and what can sustain me is intriguing,” he says. “In ‘Discontinuous Sequence,’ my ambition was to create riveting work that stops the viewer in his or her tracks, or in passing it, they decide to return to discover a revelation that one could have never anticipated the first time around. Each piece has multiple interpretations; it’s not a one-line, one-word event, though the titles may be condensed or compressed. Imagine various units integrated with one another, but separate at the same time.”

Johnson says what distinguishes this exhibition “is the focus on other brilliant works in his portfolio versus the figurative representations central to what he’s so well known for. The depictions reflect the things around us and the human spirit.”

Adds Breverman: “I reinvent a set of human circumstances, rather than depicting something accurately and making a nice picture; I don’t make nice pictures. What I do is stimulate the mind and heart; in the act of looking, a work will be appreciated on many levels. The depiction and complexity of the human circumstance is central to what I do.”