Everything about the artist Jeremiah Goodman is a surprise, or at the very least, unexpected. The lush yet ethereal paintings of beautiful interiors for which he is best known might lead you to expect a dreamy fellow, an impeccable dresser. Instead, here’s a robust, outspoken guy in jeans and a pullover, a man who is approaching 89 but looks 15 years younger.
He lives and works in a New York City modern high-rise building that looks over the 59th Street Bridge and the East River. Unlike many artists, he couldn’t care less that he faces east and south, and gets no northern light. In fact, traditional lightness is intentionally absent in his apartment. The walls are painted black, but windows, mirrors and a lot of candlelight, give the space a romantic, smoky feel.
Goodman is a raconteur who laughs readily and often, someone you’d like to have next to you at a ghastly dinner party so you could hear stories from his long and sometimes giddy life. “I’m impressed by celebrity, by names,” says the man who has known everyone from John Gielgud to Nancy Reagan. “Less so than I used to be, though. They have to be nice.” That observation gives rise to two good stories—by chance, both about opera singers—that reveal a lot about the teller, as good stories often do:
Many years ago, he was invited to a New Year’s dinner in Palm Beach. The host asked if anyone was a good carver, willing to tackle a ham. “I am,” Goodman volunteered. “My father was a butcher.” As he stood in the kitchen carving, a small hand appeared at his side and began to grab up slices of ham. The hand belonged to Lily Pons, a tiny soprano of huge renown who wolfed down the ham like a Wagnerian. “How do you stay so slim?” the astonished Goodman asked. “I eat one day and starve the next,” she replied. Chuckling at the memory, Goodman pats his stomach and says, “I tried it. Doesn’t work.”
The second story is set in midtown New York. Goodman, then quite young, saw a stately African-American woman, swathed in a fur coat, fruitlessly trying to hail a cab. Not one would stop for her. The artist stepped off the pavement, immediately got a taxi, and ushered the woman into it. “It was Marian Anderson,” he says. “I didn’t tell her I knew who she was.”
How the butcher’s son came to be a highly regarded painter of interiors is a quintessential American tale—not quite on the level of Marian Anderson’s, but fascinating. Goodman’s European Jewish parents ran a small grocery store in Pennsylvania coal country. After floating loans to striking miners (many of them also immigrants), they went broke and moved to upstate New York. Jeremiah was born in Niagara Falls; when he was 9, the family relocated to Buffalo, which proved to be a fortuitous choice.
“I grew up in the horrors of the Depression,” Goodman says. Nonetheless, his parents didn’t try to steer their children to practical careers (two other sons went into show business). “My father didn’t care what we did as long as we were happy, and my mother was artistically inclined,” Goodman says. When he was getting ready to enter high school, he was attracted to a vocational one. “I was fascinated by doing things like decorative plaster at the vocational school,” he says. “I might have wound up making wedding cakes!” The pull of a high school with a strong arts program proved even stronger, however, and it was there that young Jeremiah found teachers who imaginatively nurtured his talent.
He went on to an art school in New York. “I was one of the few people who had a good background in drawing, and I caused a lot of resentment. I was precocious and obnoxious,” he says cheerfully. He was also mad for movies, as he had been since early childhood. “I wanted to be a set designer in Hollywood. I was always doing research at Cooper Union, at the Metropolitan Museum’s period rooms.” He got his shot, but it was a jungle film. Goodman decided to reset his sights.
Department stores offered him an unexpected canvas. In New York, he landed a job at Lord & Taylor, where for 35 years he did illustrations, including beautifully detailed, precise drawings of things such as cosmetics, hand bags and shoes. For years he also drew “creative room set-ups” for Macy’s. “They’d say, ‘Put a lot of furniture in the room,’ and every now and then they’d copy it. They actually made a sofa I drew.”
That creative labor, and illustrations he did for architects, was essentially anonymous. Goodman really made a name for himself in other ways. In the ’50s and ’60s, he produced countless memorable covers for Interior Design magazine. He also achieved his own kind of celebrity as a painter of interiors, first when he worked for interior decorators and designers, and then working privately for clients, creating what are in fact, portraits of their rooms. “I got to be known for interpreting a decorator’s style,” he says. Like any good portraitist, he deliberately renders his subjects with varying degrees of accuracy. Interestingly, his renditions of interiors often share a trait with fashion illustrations for which fine department stores remain famous: the graceful, impossibly high (often invisible) ceilings of the rooms he draws and paints are reminiscent of the graceful, impossibly long legs of the women in those advertisements.
What gave him the most pleasure, “in an oddball sort of way,” he says, was collaborating with Dorothy Rodgers on her book My Favorite Things. Working with her and her husband, Richard Rodgers, “made me realize I do my best work when I have to reach my highest level.” He also relishes his 1987 induction into the Interior Design Hall of Fame as a special honoree. “Being admired by people you admire is a wonderful thing,” he says.
Unlike many hall of famers, Goodman is still hard at work. Not long ago he completed a commission from Reed Krakoff, the CEO and creative driving force of Coach, of his house in Southhampton, New York. Goodman is also providing illustrations for the Great Lady Decorators, a book about ten late, legendary women decorators — Nancy Lancaster, Madeleine Castaing, Sister Parish — that Rizzoli will publish. “What matters most is that I’m still painting. People can’t believe it,” he says. “I could ask for nothing more. Imagine, supporting yourself doing something you love.”
Limited edition prints of Jeremiah Goodman's work are available through Dean Rhys-Morgan. See more of Jeremiah Goodman's work in our photo gallery here.
