IN PERSPECTIVE

Group Chat

In 1955, Philadelphia’s avant-garde was alive with possibilities. That year a group of 30 Philadelphia painters, architects, musicians, and dancers organized a series of exhibitions and public forums within the city’s relatively staid art world. The idea was to open a robust dialogue about the role of art and science in the postwar era and to engender understanding of modernism across the arts. Group ’55, as it came to be known, was a cadre of Philly’s most significant creators, many of whom were working in abstract styles (the Philadelphia Abstract Artists, another group, evolved from this original organization). Among them were artists Quita Brodhead, Sam Fried, Michael Ciliberti, Sanford Greenberg, and Raymond Hendler, architect Louis Kahn, and composers George Rochberg and Vincent Persichetti. Together, these voices shaped the culture of Philadelphia throughout the 1950s and remained influential in the decades that followed.

It was Sam Feinstein, a painter, educator, and filmmaker, who launched the group’s initiative. He sent out a postcard inviting abstract artists to meet at the Dubin Gallery in May 1955 and bring ideas. The group’s first exhibition poster laid out its directive: “Group ’55 was organized in the Spring of 1955 as an invited membership of artists interested in discussing contemporary creative problems among themselves and with the public.” An exhibition of some 25 artists at the Dubin-Lush Galleries followed in January 1956 alongside a host of public programs, and the group would go on to produce a dozen group and solo shows of members’ work and that many forums and programs through 1958.

The press dubbed Group ’55 a “brave new art organization,” and Ciliberti, a painter, recalled it as providing “the opportunity to listen to creative people in other fields—musicians, architects, and philosophers whose thinking in many ways paralleled that of the abstract painters.” Ciliberti, who recently died at 94, found in the group a handful of others working within the Abstract-Expressionist mode of painting outside of New York—the regional hotbed for the movement less than 100 miles away. He called it “the most exciting thing in my life.”

Now, 75 years after the organization’s formation, the Woodmere Art Museum and Springside Chestnut Hill Academy celebrate Group ’55 and Feinstein with an initiative titled “Sam Feinstein, Group ’55, and Midcentury Abstraction in Philadelphia.” Under these auspices, Woodmere mounts two shows— “Group ’55 and Midcentury Abstraction in Philadelphia” and “Sam Feinstein: Immersive Abstraction” (both through January 24)—while Springside Chestnut Hill Academy presents “Sam Feinstein: The Early Years.”

While the two other shows offer opportunities to view Feinstein’s powerful brand of abstraction and bold use of (1960, oil on canvas), which comes to the show from the artist’s trust, exemplifies Feinstein’s virtuosic command of paint. The material gives the appearance of being aggressively rubbed onto the canvas like crayon or pastel, imbuing the painting’s surface with a sense of immediacy and roughness. Its colors, nearly Fauvist in palette, blend together in some passages and in others interlock like contrasting puzzle pieces. “How do pictorial forms become energized equivalents for solid forms? They are built out of units of pictorial energy: colors,” Feinstein is quoted as saying. “Each color is like an atom in the fabric of pictorial form.”