06/04/2026
Forum Gallery is delighted to share news of recent museum acquisitions to the collections of The Jewish Museum, New York, the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY, the Fort Wayne Art Museum, IN, and the Tang Museum, Skidmore College, NY.
Bernard Perlin’s "Hospital Corridor", 1961, draws attention to social issues that shaped New York City in the early 1960’s at the dawn of the Civil Rights era. Ben Shahn’s "Death On The Beach", 1945, is an emotionally charged and important work that conjures that horrors of war. William Beckman’s landscape of impressive scale, "Blue Straw Bales and Plowed Field", 2024, transports the viewer to the boundless vistas of America’s heartland where nature mingles with industry. Susan Hauptman’s "Self Portrait (With Silver Border)", 2003, is an exemplary and highly refined self-portrait, for which Hauptman is most revered.
The sensitive tempera work, "Hospital Corridor" by Bernard Perlin has been acquired by The Jewish Museum, New York. The work was commissioned by Fortune magazine for an article, “What the Doctor Can’t Order – But You Can” published in the August 1961 issue. Here, Perlin portrays a scene at Lincoln Hospital, now known as NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln, where the demand for medical treatment had increased tremendously because of five new low-income housing projects erected nearby in the Bronx. The Artist rhythmically divided his composition with alternating green and white rectangles to describe the orderly cubicles installed by the hospital to maintain privacy for their patients. Upon closer examination, the painting is much more than a mere illustration revealing ubiquitous inequities in the hierarchy of the medical world in 1960s America. In this way, Perlin enters his own statement for Civil Rights. Edward Insull was a close friend in Perlin’s inner circle and first owner of "Hospital Corridor".
Works by Bernard Perlin are represented in many prominent museum collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Columbus Museum in Ohio; the de Young Museum in San Francisco; the Hirshhorn Museum, the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of America Art in New York; the National Portrait Gallery in London; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Tate Modern in London.
In his lifetime, Perlin’s work hung in many notable private collections including those of Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mr. and Mrs. John Jay Whitney, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein, Harry Hirshhorn, and Lincoln Kirstein.
Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York has acquired Ben Shahn’s "Death On The Beach", an important work in a series of war themed paintings the Artist completed throughout the 1940s. Shahn’s anti-war sentiment is reflected in "Death on the Beach", and is closely related to a large-scale tempera work created by the Artist the same year titled Pacific Landscape in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Both paintings depict haunting scenes of a lifeless soldier lying face down on a dune of small white stones, each painted painstakingly one by one.
For the Abrams monograph published in 1972, Ben Shahn’s wife, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, writes about the sheer visual impact of his wartime works: “…it is emotional content, an outcry against war…all these impacted feelings are innate in the image. Recognition, the sense of desolation, precedes any words that might arise to describe it. The words follow or are not necessary at all.”
Widely exhibited, "Death on the Beach" was selected for inclusion in "Ben Shahn", a retrospective exhibition organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948, curated by James Thrall Soby. Death on the Beach was presented in a second retrospective exhibition for Shahn presented by The Fogg Art Museum of Harvard in 1957. Ben Shahn’s fame grew when in 1962, Soby organized an exhibition of Shahn’s work, including "Death on the Beach", to be presented at four European museums: Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Palais Des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome; and Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.
"Blue Straw Bales and Plowed Field", 2024 by William Beckman has been acquired by the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. The painting’s scale immerses the viewer within the vast expanse of the worked land of the Artist’s childhood home. Imparting the strength and emotional power for which Beckman is known, "Blue Straw Bales and Plowed Field" joins the museum’s impressive, nationally recognized collection of contemporary and historical realism.
Growing up on a working farm left an indelible impression on the Artist, and the plowed fields, granaries, and machines that make the farm so active and compelling have long been an artistic preoccupation for William Beckman. Additionally, Beckman once remarked:
“I wanted that hassle between the environmentalist and the farmer. It doesn’t surface very often in the eastern press, but you get it endlessly in the mid-west–the chemical fertilizers they put on the ground, the way they push down every tree or use a bulldozer to straighten out a stream that meanders through a field, the way they run a power line directly through otherwise productive land if they want electricity.”
In 2002, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle organized a retrospective for William Beckman’s paintings and drawings. Four years later, Beckman’s portraits were included in the group exhibition, Portraiture Now, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of their new facility. In 2014-15, Beckman was honored with a retrospective exhibition dedicated to his drawings; organized by the Columbus Museum in Georgia, it then traveled to the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock.
Works by William Beckman are included in the collections of that museum, as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum Moderne Kunst, Vienna, Austria; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; and many more.
Susan Hauptman’s "Self Portrait (With Silver Border)" has joined the collection of the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. The Artist had a personal relationship with the college, serving as an assistant professor there from 1974 until 1978 — one of numerous teaching positions. Her work was shown for the first time at a faculty exhibition at Hathorn Gallery, Skidmore College in the winter of 1976.
Hauptman remained in New York and began drawing self-portraits to send to her husband who lived across the country at the time. Working primarily on paper in charcoal, her highly refined portraits are executed masterfully and with intention. Simultaneously realistic and idealized, austere and playful, exposed and secretive: these incongruities keep her audience on their toes.
Works by Susan Hauptman are in the collections of important institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR; the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN and the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA.
To see available works by Bernard Perlin, Ben Shahn, William Beckman and Susan Hauptman, we invite you to visit our website, www.forumgallery.com.
Images:
Bernard Perlin, “Hospital Corridor”, 1961, tempera on board, 13 1/4 x 24 1/4 inches
Ben Shahn, “Death on the Beach”, 1945, tempera on board, 9 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches
William Beckman, “Blue Straw Bales and Plowed Field”, 2024, oil on canvas, 72 x 99 inches
Susan Hauptman, “Self-Portrait (with Silver Border)”, 2003, charcoal on paper, 40 x 40 inches
