OPENING APRIL 15

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The history of art is peppered with artistic fathers and daughters, from the Italian Baroque painters Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi to the twentieth-century Mexican artists Guillermo and Frida Kahlo. In other arenas, such as theater, film, and music, one readily thinks of Henry and Jane Fonda, Tony and Jamie Lee Curtis, and, more recently, Lenny and Zoë Kravitz, Billy Ray and Miley Cyrus, and Ethan and Maya Hawke. Whether artistic inclinations and talents are genetic, absorbed through an atmosphere of familial influence, honed through years of diligence and training, or involve some combination thereof is a matter of perspective and subject to debate.

This exhibition explores the artistic trajectories of the illustrator Edward Sorel and his daughter, the artist Madeline Sorel. Born in the Bronx in 1929, Edward Sorel has created some of the best-known and beloved covers and illustrations for The New Yorker, The Nation, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, as well as a number of books created with his late wife, the author and historian Nancy Caldwell Sorel (1934-2015). In 1954 he founded Push Pin Studios along with his Cooper Union classmates Seymour Chwast (b.1931) and Milton Glaser (1929-2020); this award-winning art agency would in many ways define the look of 1950s and 1960s graphic design. Sorel’s now instantly-recognizable graphic style, characterized by spontaneous, gestural pen and ink drawings made without preliminary pencil sketches, was one developed over decades; examples on view here from his extensive career reflect his continuing search for an artistic approach that would convey both personal integrity and individuality. Still working at 97, Edward Sorel remains a fervent freethinker who has long skewered the sacred cows of politics and religion in his work, exposing the hypocrisy and greed that often plague these professions, regardless of party or denomination (much like one of his heroes, the nineteenth-century French painter and illustrator Honoré Daumier).

Madeline Sorel’s journey as an artist has also been an exploration of self. As the daughter of a well-known artist, she understands the struggle to shine one’s creative light under such a respected but daunting shadow. In the 1980s and 1990s she established herself as an illustrator for New York newspapers and for book projects such as The Printer’s Apprentice (1995); like her father, she searched for a medium and working method that would allow her the freedom to fully express herself and her personal outlook. After attending a workshop of the fiber artist Jean Gauger, she began experimenting with Nuno felt, a hand-worked blend of wool and silk from which she now creates large, colorful, landscape-like forms and unique wearable pieces. In her book Nuno Felt Art (2018), she described the process in almost sublime terms, a communion with natural elements that she likens to another art form in which she also excels, collage. The Family Line documents her work in all these media, a path that rhymes, not echoes, that of her father.

For students of Kingsborough Community College, where Madeline Sorel has taught for twenty-five years, the lives and careers of Edward and Madeline Sorel contain lessons for life as well as art: regardless of where you are at the moment, keep striving for the development of your most genuine self; borrow, but don’t blindly imitate; and find the medium or style that allows you to best express your own view of the world. Above all, their art reminds us all that speaking truth to power is an integral responsibility of civic engagement.