A PERSONAL NOTE 

Beware, you faint-hearted; Be changed, you in the know, you who fear not, you who absorb how strikingly important are these images of the late Miriam Beerman's solo exhibition in the DiMattio Gallery.

   

 In 1991, I wrote in my Palette column in The Asbury Park Press phrases such as Miriam who gets "dangerously close to the nervous system" and reaches bare-handed into the guts of "humans frustrated by their bestial characteristics." They didn't, and now won't ever be, less than Miriam's "animals suddenly finding their freakish link to humans." 

    Miriam Beerman was one of the most intense, fearless 20th-century artists. In her presence in the early 1990s, in her house swathed in the breath of art, I felt out of my body, star-stricken, terrified. Upstairs, Miriam and I entered one of her studio rooms. She placed a large piece of paper before me and handed me a hefty,  magenta pastel stick. Oh my God, she's going to test my artistic ability. The pastel filled my palm and I froze. Miriam's electromagnetic energy nearly audibly slapped around my head, in which swirled words about her work---Weltschmertz, metamorphosis, raw, struggle, fabulous wretched pictures of creation and survival. I remembered that her work "Ritual of My Legs, After Neruda," of a human head on the body of a big hairy spider, scared the hell  out of me. But I couldn't take my eyes off its power.

   

 Miriam refused to watch me freeze. She took my hand and smacked the pastel down hard on the paper. "Draw!" she wailed. I don't even remember what I drew, if I drew at all, but I will never forget her intensity forcing its way into my system.

   

This petite Miriam Beerman with a Gargantuan spirit made paintings so mortal in character, yet immortal in art. I knew then how intimidated/grateful I was to learn from her. Thereafter it became easy to feel her personal pain, convictions, activism, and her depiction of the eternal conundrum all of us experience at times in our lives. Her art transcends doom. Her art will live forever. 

   

 I contemplated the great big paintings in one of her rooms. There was a small pastel titled "Two Demons" leaning against the wall on the floor. I bent down to see it. Miriam stood in the threshold.

    "Take it," she said.
    "Oh, no. I can't."
    "Take it."
    "No. No. It's too valuable."
    "TAKE IT!"
   

 She meant business, so I sheepishly lifted it from the floor. It never left my wall where I see it every day. Up close to her old and new huge canvases on the gallery walls gave me the wild intense feeling that Miriam was again smacking my hand onto the paper. After I wrote about her work, I was nervous. Was it good? What will she think? My phone rang the day after the article was printed. She'll probably hate it. Oh, no.

   

 "You really get me," she said to my relief. Then she asked me to write a book about her. I regret that earning a living usurped all my time, but I know I'd always have a lot more to write about her. She helped me fear not about my own art.

 

In the gallery she in her new dimension followed me as I dared go from painting to painting until I saw her self-portrait. It was so small, dwarfed, in the corner. She saw herself as forever anxious but determined to tell all, and to tell the truth. Her work not only deserves high praise, but the status of an intractable American-artist icon. 

   

 I love you, Miriam. Thanks for everything. 

 

Tova Navarra
Middletown, NJ 2022