The goings on at Ricco/Maresca are garnered with dreamy backward glances. When the New York gallerist Frank Maresca, a curator known for championing self-taught artists, was a teenager and fledgling photographer, waiting one day for a turn to enter his high school darkroom, he chanced upon Sidney Janis’s book, They Taught Themselves (1942). He opened and leafed through it, encountering Morris Hirshfield’s luminous and luscious Nude at the Window (1941) opposite the introduction. Its homespun celebration of a painter from his own Bensonhurst, Brooklyn neighborhood, overflowing with Italian and Jewish families, changed young Maresca’s life.
Ill health had forced Hirshfield’s retirement as a designer in 1935. Four years later, the artist, manifesting a persistent urge to paint in his Brooklyn home, came to the attention of Janis, then advising MoMA founder Alfred H. Barr Jr. who selected the artist for the Contemporary Unknown American Painters exhibit.
Then in 1942, the largest US Surrealist show to date opened in November to introduce American audiences to the movement—including Hirshfield. Meanwhile Marcel Duchamp and André Breton mischievously installed Sixteen Miles of String (1942) (an exaggeration) at that First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, filling the Whitelaw Reid Mansion at Manhattan’s Madison Avenue and 50th Street with a daunting web of twine. Duchamp asked Janis if his young son Carroll and six friends could attend the opening wearing spikes and sports uniforms to play, toss balls and ignore attendees. The younger Janis discussed those instructions with Duchamp decades later to the delight of both men.
Meanwhile, Hirshfield faded from view despite MoMA’s full-scale retrospective from his oeuvre of meticulously wrought works. But prior to that, Breton, Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington posed for two photographs—one a portrait before Ernst’s colorful Surrealism and Painting (1942) and the other staged theatrically, venerating Hirshfield’s Nude at the Window.
A larger than life photo replication and the numinous painting in it provide twin centerpieces for Morris Hirshfield: Brooklyn Tailor, co-curated by Maresca, the teen photographer-turned-curator with the very Carroll Janis who once frolicked in the mansion as a boy. They re-elevate Hirshfield into his paired roles as both a high modernist and a “folkie.”
The Jewish Polish immigrant and former slipper manufacturer somehow painted charming pictures exuding an all-American handmade quality capturing innocent rural life and nature in a naive style, shunning conventional rules of perspective and proportion. Even sagacious female smiles and painterly nude torsos display a decorative sensibility that appear passed down through generations not the inventions of a self-taught artist. They convey the mass appeal and folksy values of a Henri Rousseau with a sideways surreality that has its own quirky traditions.
A couple of symmetrical landscapes—College Grounds (1941) and Landscape with House I (1940)—are adorned with carefully constructed plumes, trees, and shrubs providing a rural feel. Ornate birds and animals, such as the happy mongrels in Dog and Pups (1944) are reminiscent of horses or wolves worthy of indigenous cultures.
Two graphite studies on paper elegantly mounted on canvas for Inseparable Friends (1941) and The Artist and His Model (1945) dominate the room, accompanied by convincing photo mechanical reproductions of their painted doppelgangers at the Museum of Modern Art and the American Folk Art Museum, respectively, displaying Hirshfield’s poignant combination of keen skill and fetching compositional choices. The sensuously brushstroked Nude at the Window (subtitled Hot Night in July), surrounded by Surrealists and a mannikin in the nearby photo, features not only rows of stylized ornamentation that may or may not resemble breasts but another Hirshfield emblem: carefully-executed footwear that resemble fish floating beneath his subjects
In an adjoining room, Sarah Theresa Lee’s show What Big Eyes You Have seamlessly continues Hirshfield’s playful explorations, ushering us from the WWII era to the contemporary with an enraged humanoid octopus wearing eight high-heeled shoes in a cigarette-induced cloud (Bad Luck Betty, 2024).
In You are the Friendliest Wolf I Have Ever Met (2024), When You Awake I Will Still Be Here, How to Write a Love Story (2025), and Handle with Care (2025), menacing “others,” usually animals, interact with Lee’s hapless but resigned proxies in a theater of horror-hilarity.
In A Girl’s Best Friend, Continental Toy Spaniel, and The Cookie Monster (all 2025), lacy undergarments or a human hand create flimsy shields warding off danger.
Finally, in works like Monster Baby with Her Kitten and The Gruesome Twosome (both 2025), masked children are center stage in origin myths suggesting both powerlessness and culpability as do Self Acceptance and You are Very Tacky and Everyone Hates You (both 2025) which feature mirrors as symbols of vulnerability.