Joseph Feury, who is married to the actress Lee Grant, is exhibiting work that includes images of sunflowers, symbols of Ukraine.
The full article appeared on the New York Times March 12, 2024. Click here to read the full article
The actor and producer Joseph Feury has had a second career, as a painter who signs his canvases Joseph Fioretti, his birth name. Several months ago, when he began thinking about a show of his works, his wife said, “Why don’t you do it for Ukraine, and donate the proceeds?”
His wife is Lee Grant, who starred in movies like “Detective Story” and “In the Heat of the Night” and in the television serial “Peyton Place.” For her, Ukraine had a personal connection: Her mother had fled the strategic port city of Odesa at age 12, during a brutal Russian pogrom that took hundreds of Jewish lives.
Grant said that had stirred a passion to support President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine against Russia.
Odesa became a flashpoint in the current conflict last week when Russia launched a missile strike while Zelensky and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece were there, visiting the sites of earlier Russian strikes and paying tribute to victims.
Fioretti took Grant’s advice about his art show, and tonight “Fioretti — Family, Friends & Flowers” will open at the Ukrainian Institute of America, at 2 East 79th Street. Listed as co-hosts on the invitation are people who appeared in Feury’s films and other projects, including Joy Behar, Judy Collins, Michael Douglas, Gwyneth Paltrow, Verino Pettinaro, Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas, Brenda Vaccaro and Peter Yarrow.
Sean Penn — who was also listed as a co-host and who, with Aaron Kaufman, directed the documentary “Superpower” about the war — introduced Fioretti to Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, who is expected to attend a reception tonight. The show will be open to the public for two weeks starting Friday.
Fioretti said he hoped to refocus attention on the continuing conflict. “The Israeli crisis with Hamas has taken the eyes off Ukraine,” he said. “Maybe we can bring some of the eyes back.” He said he had raised $40,000 from friends to mount the show, along with $100,000 that would go to the Ukrainian Institute for humanitarian work, especially in trauma centers.
“I only do work that my eye catches and moves me, whether it be a portrait, whether it be a house or something,” he said. “It has to grab me, and I know this immediately, that it’s something I want to spend that much time exploring and doing.” He turned the dining room in his and Grant’s apartment into a studio, with brown paper on the floor, for when he is working in pastels. For projects with oil paint, he works in a studio downtown.
“Tying it all in to Ukraine was very easy,” he said. “I’m married to an ex-blacklisted actress with deep political views, and over the 60 years we’ve been together, I’ve picked up those views. When Putin invaded Ukraine, I knew there was something terribly wrong morally and that it was internationally dangerous.”
One of the canvases he painted for the show is a portrait of Zelensky, with the bright yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag.
Eight others are images of sunflowers, a symbol of Ukrainian solidarity — at the State of the Union address in 2022, Jill Biden, the first lady, wore a Sally LaPointe dress with a sunflower embroidered on the wrist. Sunflowers were also a centerpiece of the Ukrainian economy: Before the war paralyzed harvests, Ukraine was the world’s largest exporter of sunflower oil.
“All flowers are easy for me,” Fioretti said, standing next to a canvas of sunflowers on a Klimt-like background of gold leaf and silver leaf.
The bright yellows of the sunflowers belie a fact about Feury: He is colorblind, something he said he did not know until he had an eye test for the Army in 1959. “The biggest obstacle is I can’t tell the difference between dark blue and dark gray,” he said. “I just live with it. I’m always walking in to where Lee is and saying, ‘What color is this?’”