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Jerome Witkin is an American figurative artist whose paintings deal with political, social and cultural themes, along with serious portraiture that melds the sitter's social position with a speaking likeness that reveals inner character. Witkin has been succinctly characterized as "a virtuoso figurative painter whose work mixes elements of the old masters, social realism and Abstract Expressionism ..."
Witkin was born in Brooklyn, New York, the twin brother of photographer Joel Peter Witkin. Recognized as a prodigious talent, at fourteen he entered the High School of Music and Art in New York, and subsequently studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Cooper Union, the Berlin Academy, and the University of Pennsylvania. A Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship enabled him to travel, study and further develop in Europe. After his return to the United States, Witkin received a Guggenheim Fellowship, began exhibiting at galleries in New York and joined the faculty of the Maryland Institute College of Art. He later taught at the Manchester College of Art in England, Moore College of Art, and in 1971 became a professor of art at Syracuse University.
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