Interview: Artist Shalom Neuman Talks to Anthony Haden-Guest About "Fusionism" at Georges Berges Gallery

Artist Shalom Neuman with art dealer Georges Berges

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST September 11th, 2026

Shalom Neuman was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1947. He lost twenty-one family members in the Holocaust, but he managed to get a green card and reached the United States at the age of twelve, Pittsburgh first, then New York. He began to make art early and grew increasingly ambitious. “I wanted to paint like Raphael or Chardin. And Salvador Dalí, of course,” he says. “I learned to draw the figure by myself when I was 16, 17. I copied Ingres day after day in my late teens. I could draw anatomy from memory.” At the Tyler School of Art, Cheltenham, Philadelphia, he made his own art, while devouring info on art and methods of its making. He was talking with Italo Scanga of the sculpture department, his professor, while walking down the welding department steps that he experienced what he calls “an epiphany.”

“I said it doesn’t make sense!” Neuman told Scanga. “If we aspire to capture reality why don’t we use all the senses? We are multi-sensory beings. We don’t see separately from hearing. That’s reality.” He would add to me that the art world had always focused on painting and drawing upon two-dimensional surfaces. “But why be confined to the prison of stretchers, linen, canvas? I said to myself forget all that shit! I decided that I was going to develop a methodology. That moment was my spiritual awakening.”

Such was the birth of Fusionism, which has since become a global entity supported by a number of artists. The Future He Already Made - Shalom Neuman: Fifty Years of Fusionism opened in the Georges Berges Gallery at 462 West Broadway, its new space in New York on September 10. Permanent shows of International Fusionism are up in spaces identified as IF museums in both Prague and Easton, Pennsylvania, which not only houses the IF Museum but a display of toys, soft toys for the most part, but also toys made from rubber and plastic. Where did he get them? “You find the toys in the streets, you don’t have to buy them,” he said. “And there’s an influx of soft toys from China in 99 percent stores, I never had toys as a kid. I didn’t have a single toy.” But that is fun stuff. It’s the hang of some two hundred oblong paintings which represents Fusionism. These are painterly assemblages of the same size and each is dominated by a central presence, which is almost always a strongly rendered human face. And there are ways of seeing to it that you don’t ignore the oblongs. Should you draw near they start talking at you in male and female voices, not piping down until you retreat.

Neo Nuky Madonna
 

So just how had Fusionism come into being?

“In 1967 I made probably my last painting,” Neuman said, “But I wanted to go further. To embed light, to embed sound, smells, everything I could to create an ephemeral experience, to move in time and build something.” He knew that the motion detectors which got the oblongs talking had those capabilities. “At that time in the late 70s nobody saw motion detectors as a commodity. But my brother-in-law was a scientist and he built motion detectors for me from scratch.”

Devices I found around Neuman’s workspace were identified as Sounds When You Need Them. These included Emergency Crow, Emergency Chicken, Emergency Frog and Emergency Cat which offered Mew, Meow and Catfight, and even a human voice, promising A Disappointed Sigh. I rather wondered though how Neuman was proposing to turn smells into an art material. No problem. “I had a one-person show at the Prague National Gallery in 2011,” Neuman told me. “I collected a whole lot of manure and put it in a metal box with holes in it. It smelled like a farm and it was underneath my piece.” He added, “And air fresheners are an easy way of adding some kind of smell.”

Wall of Cultural Confusion
 

Motion detectors have not been Neuman’s only foray into high tech. That same year he began working on a dimming system. “It was an attempt to create a humanoid, meaning that my art should be talking to me like an individual, like a person. What I saw is that there are going to be robots roaming the planet. Like they are now. That was the reality that I was living in.”

It is such inventive thinking that put Fusionism on the art world map. Worldwide Fusionist happenings over the last few years have included Toxic Paradise in Paris, which featured a monk praying to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, who was represented by a naked woman painted green. “We had this motorcyclist in the gallery,” Neuman says. “Venus climbed onto the back seat, he revved it through the crowd and created a lot of chaos. The police came.” Which enraged his audience. “People were complaining, calling for the Minister of Culture. They were pushing the police,” he said. Were there arrests? Nope. The cops were as unreal as the praying monk. “We rented the police uniforms from a theatrical production,” Neuman said. “They were really good actors.”

Fusion Golem

The last dozen years have seen many other such attention-grabbing Fusionist actions worldwide, including events in Estonia, Hungary, Poland and in New York. This had been with the Rivington School, the hot art spot on the Lower East Side. “It was a sculpture, two stories high and 150 feet wide,” he said. “Shalom Neuman would occasionally appear in the Rivington School sculpture garden at night,” says the sculptor Linus Coraggio. “Things could get visually intense with all the welding going on.” Shalom Neuman adds, “The essence of theater is that it is a text and the backdrop is subordinate. I wanted to make all equal: Movement, text, sound.”

 Shalom Neuman, Everybody’s Talking At Me, mixed media sculpture

Other events have included the Museum of Vision and Sound in Sao Paolo, Brazil, a show at Kafka House, Prague, which can be watched on YouTube. Also an event in Florence to celebrate the award to Neuman of the Galileo Prize 2000 for the invention of Fusionism which was held in the Pergola, one of the oldest theaters in Europe. Neuman says, “Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart performed there.” He asked the Pergola to remove the seats. “They look at me! Are you crazy? Nobody has asked us to remove the seats. But for some reason they did it.”

This Fusion event was attended by such prominent persons as Yehudi Menuhin, along with ambassadors and perhaps three dozen Italian artists. “I do not reject anybody,” he says. It became a hyperactive event with a dancing audience, and this also can be seen on YouTube. “I didn’t tell people what to do,” Shalom Neuman says. “I told them do what you want to do … do what you believe … do what you feel … It was mad, it was chaos. People were pouring into the streets. We stopped traffic. And it didn’t end till it ended.” WM