By Pam Hersh
Princeton-based artist Sydney Anne Neuwirth has no problem talking about her age.
During a conversation last week, in front of one of her art pieces at the Cranbury Station Gallery in Princeton’s Palmer Square, she told me, “I am 84 years old – and that’s just fine with me. Nowadays, women artists in their 80s are supposedly ‘hot’…. I have been lucky because I have gotten recognition throughout my life. Now that I am in my 80s, however, it is a particularly good time for me.”
This is in reference to the fact five of her large pieces soon will be on permanent exhibition at the Princeton University Lewis Center for the Arts.
Even though, nowadays, senior-citizen-aged elected officials and wannabe elected officials seem unfazed by their advanced age, many people still dismiss seniors as leisure-and-discount-seeking retirees.
Talking to Neuwirth, who has been living and working in Princeton since the late 1950s, inspired me to continue my campaign of getting people – particularly employers – to take another look at the impressive productivity of the over-70-year-old set.
And looking at Neuwirth’s productivity – watercolors, acrylics and mixed media collages – is sheer joy.
“Basic to all my work,” said the artist, “is the fact that color, in all its gradations, expresses the feelings that give each piece its reason for being.”
Studying the pieces of art throughout the gallery, I saw vibrant colorful forms that seemed to sway and leap off the canvas like a ballet dancer leaping and swaying on stage. It was no surprise, therefore, when Neuwirth told me she danced from the time she was 7 years old until she was 47 years old. She never thought of a professional career as a dancer, but danced because she simply loved to move – a movement that is reflected in her art.
“In my 40s, my knees gave out, and even though I still exercise (calisthenics, walking) dancing is no longer an option for me. Nothing however stops my painting … I can’t stop. I paint every day from about noon to 5:30 or 6 p.m.”
To keep up this intense work schedule, she has had to give up some other chores – like cooking.
“No great loss….. There is nothing else I want to do other than paint,” said the artist, who estimates she has created thousands of works of art over the course of five decades and exhibited in galleries throughout the United States. Hundreds of pieces have been donated for sale at numerous fundraisers for local charities.
“The only area of so-called ‘slowdown’ is that I stopped the hassle of trying to exhibit in multiple galleries spread geographically all over the place,” she said.
Now the only retail gallery for her works of art, her exclusive agent is the Cranbury Station Gallery.
“I have had a relationship with the gallery and its owner Kathy Moraldo for 27 years – and it has been wonderful,” said the artist, who landed in Princeton because she married her husband, Lee, when he was a senior at Princeton University.
Lee, a mathematician, helps Sydney document her work and download images from the Internet to inspire some of her creations. She plans her paintings, she said, “in my head before putting anything down on paper.”
Painting always has been part of her life, thanks to the fact that as a child she had access to an unlimited supply of art materials. Growing up in Newark, she was from a retail merchant family, whose business was selling house paint and other art supplies.
Neither her son, Peter, nor her daughter, Beatrice, is a painter. Peter inherited his father’s mathematical talent, and after graduating from Harvard, he became an actuary. Beatrice, aka Bebe, got Sydney’s artistic flair.
“Bebe is a potter,” said her mother, but “obviously” far more renowned as an award-winning television and stage actor and a famous alumnus of Princeton Ballet, where Sydney volunteered for decades doing “anything that was needed, including writing press releases, designing brochures, and serving as a trustee and eventually board president.”
“I had considered a career as a writer,” said Neuwrith, who graduated from Douglass College as an English major and art minor. “I love writing poetry and children’s literature – I even was editor-in-chief of a national trade journal called Laundry, Cleaning World – not terribly artistic sounding, but I learned a lot.”
In spite of her love of dancing and writing, “being a painter was inevitable. It was as though I had no choice,” inexorably drawn to the profession that will be in the picture “for as long as I am,” she said before heading home to her studio to paint.