Irving Petlin, Artist Who Recorded Injustice, Dies at 83 By Richard Sandomir Sept. 7, 2018

It is with great sadness that we report that the artist and activist, IRVING PETLIN died in Martha’s Vineyard after a long battle with cancer. Petlin shared with his contemporaries the aspiration to “investigate the truth’ and its underlying ideological, philosophical and moral assumptions, as well as the ambiguities involved in refusing to view ‘reality’ in isolation from the social, economic and political contingencies and historical contradictions. His early subjects, drawn from the experience of immigration and diaspora, reflect his anarchist, socialist, internationalist and democratic republic leanings. In totality, Petlin and Leon Golub, as well as Bacon, Freud and R.B. Kitaj would all connect in the realm of psychological narrative. While Petlin believed himself to be essentially non-religious, he admitted that he could never shed the historical struggles of being a Jew. With works that strove for poetry rather than journalism, Petlin placed himself as a distant observer. Memory, not simply as the resurrection of one’s past, but also the past of others was ever present in his mind, each element reflecting light of all the others. For Petlin, there was always been a hunger to see everything at once, with a startling and enduring relevance.