Judith Klein: a commitment to art and the arts community

Twelve years ago, painter and printmaker Judith Klein opened an unassuming gallery studio on Purchase Street in downtown New Bedford. At the time, it was but one of many in the thriving art-centric city center.

It gave her the opportunity to exhibit her own artwork but perhaps more significantly, it allowed her to curate exhibitions of regional artists, encompassing a wide range of disciplines including painting, printmaking, sculpture, fiber arts, furniture, photography and more.

In 2010, she relocated to a storefront on William Street; in 2013, she moved to a third-story walkup in the Kilburn Mills (now often referred to as the Kilburn Artisan Center) overlooking the hurricane dike and Clark’s Cove in the south end of the city. And by the time this sees print, she will have moved to a more spacious spot within the same building.

With each transition, a relatively consistent stable of artists traveled with her. They include printmaker Adrian Tio, ceramic sculptor Valorie Sheehan, furniture maker Andrew Peppard, and painters Beth Barry, John Irwin, Anthony Miraglia, Ron Lister, Ewa Romaszewicz, David Baggerly and Susanne Carey. And this is hardly a complete list.

With a palpable sense of commitment, Klein kept plugging away at the gallery biz. When economic hardship, mergers and the rise of substantial alternative exhibition spaces (shared office spaces, coffee shops and taverns) endangered the traditional gallery model, she persevered.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, Klein — like many other galleries and museums — arranged for virtual exhibitions and began formulating ways to open to the public, albeit with all the safety guidelines to be carefully adhered to.

Klein was born in Transylvania (she has, no doubt, heard every Dracula joke) in communist Romania in the city of Oradea, often referred to as “Little Paris” by the locals. Her mother worked as a translator of plays in the city theater, and she notes that from the ages of 5 to 14, the theater was her babysitter.

As a young girl, she broke her left elbow. During school vacation, she was homebound and she began drawing characters from her favorite French storybook, “Riquiqui et Roudoudou.”

Her parents were delighted and encouraging. Her mother had a younger sister who had been killed at Auschwitz and was the only artist in the family. Perhaps her mother saw some of the creative spark of her aunt in her.

At age 14, the family moved to Israel and she studied at an art high school in Tel Aviv. Later, she attended the Avni Art Institute, where she worked with Edward Solomon, and points to him as a great influence on her printmaking.

When she married Andrei Klein, they moved to Milan, Italy and she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. Her favorite painters were common choices but certainly understandable: Paul Klee, Edvard Munch and Henri Matisse.

An omnivorous consumer of culture, she absorbed the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Charles Aznavour, Ingmar Berman, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernardo Bertolucci and more.

Somehow all those influences feed her sensibility as a visual artist. Her paintings and prints are robust and romantic, mysterious and melancholy, sensual and sophisticated. Leaning into soft abstraction, her art never feels ungrounded. It is happily tethered to the objective world.

Like her commitment to the local artist community and its aficionados, her devotion to artmaking itself proves that perseverance is a virtue.