Crowd Scene, 1977-79

Sidney Goodman (1936-2013)

Sidney Goodman

Crowd Scene, 1977-79

oil on canvas

66 3/4” H x 144 7/8” inches

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

Today I am sharing a painter that is probably one of the earliest branches in my artistic lineage. It is fair to say that, while I am not always thinking about Sidney Goodman, there is a little bit of Goodman in every painting I make.

Sidney Goodman had a way of elevating the mundane. He painted the people and places of his surroundings in Philadelphia. While much of his work was based on his commonplace, the works feel surreal through his depiction of figures in seemingly uncommon scenarios or places. He would blend multiple events of his everyday life in one painting, sometimes using images referencing art history, giving the work a dreamlike feeling. As a professor at PAFA, he had access to their incredible cast hall and would often include images of those casts in his work. He also played heavily on the metaphor of natural elements as a part of his painted world. He would not shy away from depicting the worst of humanity as well as the best. Crowd Scene is a fairly straightforward image, providing the viewer with the seemingly mundane, a gathering of people to witness an event. The viewer is placed within the crowd making it less about the event and more about the crowd as the event. You, the viewer, a witness, an observer, is as much a part of the crowd as the depicted.

It was Crowd Scene that first introduced me to the work of Goodman. I pulled a catalog for a 1980/81 touring exhibition off the library stacks as a student at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. I would often make my way to the campus library to randomly browse the stacks. The Goodman catalog featured mostly black and white reproductions with a sampling of color images. Crowd Scene was on the cover image of the catalog, which initially got my attention. It was immediately clear that he held drawing and painting as equals. I also connected to his use of the commonplace as setting for his allegorical work. As a student new to the full expanse of art history and the contemporary art scene, I had found someone making paintings and drawings from things that were also familiar to me. He linked the past and the present. Goodman showed me how a contemporary painter could continue the craft, expand it, and honor it all based in his own place and time. Inside the catalog was one after the other of images that instantly excited me. Drawings like Burning Vehicle, 1978, a charcoal with the addition of pastel on paper, rendered a turned over vehicle on fire. It blended both modern sensibilities with realism. It was messy but precise. Figures in Landscape, 1972 placed contemporary figures and everyday objects in an everyday scene. However, in classic Goodman form, he charges the scene by presenting a stormy sky and separating the figures’ positions and their postures making the image entirely uncomfortable.

I was uniquely positioned between Philadelphia and New York while attending KU. I remember on a day of gallery hopping in Midtown New York in 1995, I went into Terry Dintenfass Gallery to see an exhibition of works on paper by Goodman. A version of Night Vision was included in that exhibition. Night Vision is a perfect example of how Goodman’s work slides into the dreamlike by depicting his wife sleeping with the Laocoön figure and serpent on the opposing side of the drawing. It was after seeing this exhibition that I started making my own large charcoal drawings.

Sidney Goodman, Night Vision, 1992-99, charcoal and pastel on paper, 59.5 ×5 2.5 in.

It was only a few months later that I would stumble upon an exhibition including his work at a newly opened exhibition space at Lebanon Valley College in the quiet town of Annville, PA¹. The exhibition included a large Goodman painting as well as other Philadelphia painters, Bo Bartlett and Renee Foulks, among others. In 1996 I would have the chance to see the retrospect of his work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I think it is fair to say that much of my work between 1994 and 1999 was inspired by Goodman. I eventually moved on from Goodman, but I think a little of his bold draftsmanship and compositional choices remain in my work today, part of my artistic DNA.

Goodman is relatively well represented in Mid-Atlantic collections. His work can mostly be found in any of the Philadelphia museums, though often not on view. I am hoping to one day visit the VFMA to to be reacquainted with Crowd Scene.

Explore more of Goodman’s work on Artsy

Thanks for Pondering with me.

1. The Suzanne H. Arnold Art Galley is mere minutes from where I live today. It is only a few more miles from Hershey, PA where I happened to be spending most of my time in the mid-90’s, while dating my, now wife, Jessica. I will also be exhibiting in that very space in October 2026.