The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires Horizontal (1973) by Judith Bernstein

Kasmin is proud to announce the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of Judith Bernstein’s iconic work Horizontal (1973), a 9 x 12 ½ feet charcoal drawing of a phallic screw rendered in her signature emphatic style. Notoriously censored from public view despite protests from major artists, curators, and critics, the work is now widely celebrated as an exemplar of feminist critique. The acquisition marks Bernstein’s first work in the museum’s renowned permanent collection.

Since receiving her MFA from Yale in 1967, Judith Bernstein has developed a reputation as one of the most unwaveringly provocative artists of her generation. For over 50 years, her work has explored connections between the political and the sexual. Steadfast in her cultural, political, and social critique, Bernstein surged into art world prominence in the early 1970s with her monumental anti-war and feminist charcoal drawings of penis-screw hybrids—one of the artist's most recognizable motifs, of which Horizontal is a prime example. Bernstein has been awarded numerous accolades throughout her career and has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at museums in New York and abroad.

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