CARNEGIE HILL — Jack Goldstein grew up on TV.
The artist's first-ever retrospective is on display at The Jewish Museum, and it is clear from his works that Canadian-born Goldstein was deeply moved by motion pictures on screens small and big — applying traditional techniques to mass media imagery.
"Jack Goldstein X 10,000" will be at the Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., from May 10, 2013 until Sept. 29, 2013.
The show, which first debuted at the Orange County Museum of Art in 2012, features many of Goldstein's films, paintings, recordings, installations, and some selected writings.
Though Goldstein's fame waxed and waned throughout his career until his suicide in 2003, the retrospective comes with intensely renewed interest in the artist.
Madison Avenue gallery Venus Over Manhattan, for example, hosted a show from November 2012 to January 2013 focusing on Goldstein's oft-forgotten acrylics.
Highlights from the present exhibition include 17 short films from 1971 to 1983 — including a "celebrated 1975 film of a growling Metro-Goldwyn Mayer lion," Museum officials said.
Goldstein also used vinyl records as art, which he made by "editing together stock film-industry sound effects of unnerving or frightening moments," officials said.
Like these records, his paintings use popularized images — such as World War II and nature photos as well as computer graphics — and portray them with a poppy, "photographic gleam."
In one 1983 work on display, Goldstein famously applied this technique by painting Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of the 1941 Moscow bombing, from Life magazine.
Goldstein's pieces also directly reflect his association with the "Pictures Generation" of the 1970s and 1980's — a term used to describe the "first generation of American artists to be raised with television," officials said.
Phillip Kaiser, show curator, said the extensive display of work puts Goldstein into important historic perspective.
"This use of different media is super post-modern," said Kaiser, 40. Nowadays every artist does that, but Jack Goldstein was really the first. He turned painting into a special effect."
"He's not a painter when he paints — he acts as a conceptual artist," Kaiser added. "The quality of his work is breathtaking."
