The Power of Her Paintbrush: The Story of Theresa Bernstein

Gr 3-6–This customary biography of artist Theresa Bernstein chronicles her persistence against discrimination due to her gender and Jewish identity. Most impressively, Bernstein lived to be 111, though the book leaps from age 29 to 106 in the last pages. Hechter (Where Are the Women?: The Girl Scouts’ Campaign for the First Statue of Women in Central Park) highlights how the artist went by T. Bernstein to gain recognition in the male-dominated art world of the early 1900s, an important point that is paired with scenes of her renderings of historic moments, like the women’s suffrage movement. The text, however, is simple to the point of being reductive. The illustrations also fail to honor the artist. The figures are depicted with bizarre shadows and almost sickly skin tones. Their facial expressions, bodily poses, and proportions are peculiar. The backgrounds often appear incomplete or have clumsy, inaccurate angles. If Bernstein’s art looked like this, she would never have attained critical acclaim. A more successful biography of a female artist is Sarah J. S. Suzuki’s Yayoi Kusama: From Here to Infinity! or Monica Brown’s Frida Kahlo and Her Animalitos.