Ann Chernow, Hand Colored Etching Vintage Hollywood Legends Etching with Watercolor Painting, 1994

Titled: Birds of a Feather
Ann Chernow (Connecticut b. 1936) etching. hand signed ‘Ann Chernow’ in pencil lower right. Numbered ‘5/15’ in pencil lower left. Titled in pencil lower center. Sheet measures 18-in. x 24-in.
Image is smaller. please see photos.

Ann Chernow, née Levy, born 1936 in New York City, is known for her portrait-style illustrations that evoke the images of female cinematic figures of the 1930s and 1940s. Born and raised in New York City, Chernow studied music and art from a young age and acquired an affinity for the arts. Chernow was exposed to several movies that left a lasting impression and prompted her to make the likenesses of leading ladies. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer and Katharine Hepburn were the subjects of some of her works in the late 1990s. Chernow has worked extensively in the mediums of lithograph, silkscreen, etching, and colored pencil. Her first formal art education was at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester in the early 1940s, where she attended art classes in the museum galleries. After her family moved to Flushing in 1946, she studied under a local Italian painter, Giuseppe Trotta. Years after taking lessons with Trotta, Chernow eventually entered the School of Fine Arts at Syracuse University in 1953, but transferred soon after to New York University, where she earned her Master of Arts degree in 1969.
As an undergraduate and graduate at NYU (1955–69), Chernow studied under the direction of several artists. Her instructors and mentors included Howard Conant, Jules Olitski, Irving Sandler, Lawrence Alloway and Hale Woodruff, all of whom influenced her through their teachings and artistic viewpoints. Toward the end of her academic education and for a few years afterwards, she worked for the art educator Victor D’Amico, and taught at the studio school of the Museum of Modern Art (1966–71).
In the 1950s, Chernow’s style was centered on colorful abstractions, which were influenced by Jean Dubuffet, who was famous during that period. She subsequently dabbled in a variety of styles in the 1970s, including pop art, huge billboard paintings, sepia drawings of individual women and colored pencil drawings. Feminist art. Already in 1968, she had begun to explore lithography, although she only began to work seriously in printmaking (both lithography and etching) in 1978. She reached the height of her career with a number of evocative paintings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which depicted starlets of the 1930s and 1940s, as in Artist and Models (1998). In these later works, Chernow used close-ups of women who were quickly passed by the camera, as opposed to celebrated vintage Hollywood film stars. Screen legends like Bette Davis, Katherine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford are among her female muses. Men like james Cagney, Humpherey Bogart and George Raft strongly represent her kinds of guys. Leggy showgirls abound, and vamps like Jean Harlow slink through Chernow’s canvases as though they are floating on air. Imagined grand entrances and exits prevail. Stolen kisses are acted out in shadowy hallways, and if a bad girl wasn’t careful, she could cause cardiac arrest in any man standing in her way. Chernow aims to reveal the “unsentimental truth” in her art by showing an image that jogs a memory and brings about a nostalgia which her viewers can understand because they see something familiar.

Select Public Collections

National Academy, NYC
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT
Butler Institute of American Art, OH
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Museum of Modern Art, Skopje, Yugoslavia
Museum of the City of New York
National Museum of Women in the Arts, D.C
New York Public Library Print Collection, NYC
Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University Study Collection, MA
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Educational Archives
The Brooklyn Museum
The DeCordova Museum, MA
The Achenbach Foundation, San Francisco
The National Museum of Women in the Arts
The Tel Aviv Museum, Israel
The United Nations Westport Collection
Wesleyan University, CT
Yale University Art Collection