Harold Rotenberg (1905-2011)
After recently giving a PowerPoint presentation at the Cape Ann Museum, Pleasant St., Gloucester, I realized I had barely scraped the surface of what I planned to say. Trying to keep up with those slides rolling over every two minutes make it difficult to include everything you would like to say, so I thought I would share a few more thoughts on this great artist via this webpage.
Briefly, for those of you who aren't familiar with Harold Rotenberg's long and successful career in art, here are a few pertinent details with which to begin.
Inspired by the art work of an elder brother - Harold was the youngest of eight children born to an immigrant Austrian couple, Louis and Etta Rotenberg - Harold began his art education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1923. He was 18 years old. However, the Museum School had a long established history as the center of the conservative 'Boston School style,' and a year later he left in order to join his parents on an extended journey through Europe to discover his roots.
Rotenberg and his family spent nine months touring Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Egypt, Jerusalem, England and Wales. While in Jerusalem, Rotenberg enrolled at the Bezalel Art School, which has been established in 1906 to help Jewish artists "find visual expression for the much yearned for national and spiritual independence," (Oakes, 2018, p. 20) and whose curriculum, do Rotenberg's delight, favored French Post-Impressionism.
Returning to the United States, Rotenberg began studying with Charles Hawthorne, at his Provincetown-based school on Cape Cod, where he mingled with the more avant-garde painters visiting from New York. This more or less set the course for Rotenberg's future career as an artist and teacher. He taught at the Museum School, as well as several settlement houses in Boston, such as Hecht House, where he influenced numerous youngsters, such as Boston Expressionists David Aronson, Reed Kay, Jason Berger, Barbara Swan, Edna Hibel and Jack Levine.
Rotenberg's early work from the mid to late thirties display the traditional approach of the Cape Ann painters - he was now living in Rockport, after first trying Gloucester - and where he had become friendly with W. Lester Stevens, Emile Gruppe and A. T. Hibbard.
The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive. —Hans Hofmann
(left): , c. 1950s, o/c; (right): , c. 1960s, oil on canvas, private collection
Again, Rotenberg uses color to create depth and atmosphere. On the left, he uses almost a fan like design where the boats in the distance and their very distinct triangular sails – which increase in size as they move to the middle – draw your eye to the building and then down to the light note of the reflection then to the hull of the boat and then along the dark note of the hull and up and back to the sails. The large sail and the reflection almost cut the design in two vertically, but his use of light and dark reflections break up that illusion, and there’s the odd note the small red shape right on the center line, but the red note on the extreme left balances the red signature on the right creating a triangular design that ties the whole together.
On the right we have the ‘abstract cityscape’ design he used many times, and yet each is a standalone canvas, and no two pieces are the same, for Rotenberg uses an individualist look and palette to convey the effect of urban skyline and highly colored reflections. Very expressionistic. And what is ‘expressionism? One definition from Fitchburg Art Museum Director, Nick Capasso, is that "Descriptive reality was abandoned in favor of a stylistic approach, heavily indebted to Munch, van Gogh, Picasso, and early-twentieth-century German Expressionism ….
… [E]vocative non-naturalistic color, bold lines, and virtuoso painterly brushwork [erupt] from intuitive (rather than analytic) creative processes, … communicating what a subject feels likerather than … looks like."(Capasso, 2002)
( top row: center) Harold Rotenberg, ,c. 1960s o/c pc.
“Color, that was [Hawthorne’s] big thing.” — Harold Rotenberg
The strong color and design of the brightest notes emphasize the curvilinear perspective. This is a great example of the phrase “jewel encrusted palette.” The strong red notes in the foreground anchor the design while complimentary swathes of green tones pull the eye up and around the painting. See how the brush strokes create movement with sweeping lines that keep the eye moving around. Curvilinear is characterized by the curved line, just as an eyeball is curved. A bit like the fishbowl effect. Rotenberg often uses this motif to suggest the bower of the sky, arcing over his subject.
As Edward Hopper said, “If you could say it in words, there'd be no reason to paint.” How true!
(Top row: left) Claude Monet, (1897) oc 35 x 36 White House, Washington DC, 963.509.1 Gift of family of John F. Kennedy in memory of President Kennedy. (Top row: right) Harold Rotenberg, , c. 1970s, mixed media, private collection.
Contrast Rotenberg on the right with the Monet on the left – Color first! As Lilla Cabot Perry reported Monet saying, “Try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, a house, a field…. Merely think, 'Here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow,' and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives you your own impression of the scene before you.’
Notice the similar curving lines of the design, an excellent way, perhaps the only way, to create movement, rhythm and harmony in a painting.
“The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all's said and done, a matter of habit.”
—Claude Monet
“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.”
― Maria Montessori
(Bottom row, left and middle (detail) , c. 1970s, gouache on board, private collection
“Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.” (Paul Cezanne)
Rotenberg uses strong tones and bold design - a signature style - to suggest light and shadow in this painting. And observe the close up of the brushwork (middle) to see how expressionistic his brushstrokes are. Each stroke is necessary and vital to the composition. Note how important the red and orange counterpoints(vertical strokes) are in the foreground. If just one of them were missing, the design would fall apart.
Just as counterpoint and harmony follow their own laws, and differ in rhythm and movement, both formal tensions and color tensions have a development of their own in accordance with the inherent laws from which they are separately derived. Both, however, aim toward the realization of the same image. And both deal with the depth problem. (Hans Hofmann
(Left): , c. 1960s mixed media; aka (Paris) 1960, oil on canvas 25 x 30; (right):, c. 1960s mixed media. catalogue.
"The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive". —Hans Hofmann
On the right, these small squares of color create an almost 3-D effect. Color turns form. See how Rotenberg uses different textures to create his finish, thicker and more impasto like on the left and more refined on the right. Think ‘Variety within unity….’
Harbor scenes: (left): , o/c, pc; (right): , undated, gouache on board.
“My work now is richer in color, more abstract, and more free. For me, each painting has to be a new experience. … I work on the spot and like to feel the challenge of the subject. I need to be fired and inspired!” — Harold Rotenberg
We can see from both these paintings that Harold’s brushwork was lively and energetic. Few artists, then or since, have been able to come close to emulating Harold Rotenberg’s expressive brushstrokes.
(right) shows backlight, probably sunrise, so the shadowed front of the red Motif 1 actually turns to shades of blue and purple in the shadow due to the luminosity and atmosphere.
c. 1973 oil on canvas, private collection (Aka , oil on canvas, 12x31)
"The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive."—Hans Hofmann
This painting is an interesting combination of dramatic atmospheric brushwork in the sky, and a somewhat flat middle ground to emulate distance. And look, too how he has designed this composition; two trees – one large and one small – leaning away from one another to create a viewpoint to the houses on the hill. And then the two figures dressed in blue walking into the picture. They are balanced by the notes of blue on the right-hand side and in the upper right of the sky. I think this is one of Rotenberg’s most dramatic skies, especially the way the light notes, which reflect upon the tree tops creating the form of the trees. And if we look at this next slide …
(Right): Close up of . Look closely at the brushwork in the bower of the sky; Rotenberg used gold undertones beneath the paint to create a luminescent glow.
"When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also." —Cezanne
(left) and the Nautilus effect
The image on the right shows Rotenberg’s great eye for composition with the, perhaps, unconscious use of the nautilus design. Not that Rotenberg was drawing the nautilus spiral on his canvas to start with, but in observing his design, we can see how the artist uses the dark note of the window as a focal point from which everything else emanates along the spiral, to keep the viewer's eye moving through the composition. Without that window note, the composition simply would not hold together. Also, Rotenberg uses the unusual technique of a hot orange sky juxtaposed against the blue note of the water. Generally, artists use cooler blue notes in the sky to denote distance and atmosphere, but Rotenberg sets that theory upon its head and creates his own inimitable look.
"In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light." —Hans Hofmann
Abstraction – the ‘shattered’ look – came about as an challenger to traditional work at the beginning of the 20thcentury after the Armory show in NY in 1913, because so many artists were creating too much form in their work for the sake of creating form. It was a natural rebellion you might say. Rotenberg understands, and demonstrates, how color and shape is more important to the understanding and application of good design.
Middle: c. 1960s, mixed media on canvas. Collection of Jon Rotenberg
Many people see strong notes of black in a painting and assume it is from the artist's 'depressed' period. That is not always the case. This painting - a favorite of the artist's which adorned the wall next to his favorite chair in the later years of his life - suggest this negative primeval space exists so that the painter can pull out the brilliant jeweled notes and tones of an abstract cityscape reflected upon the water. An innovative, imaginative design.
Right: Close up of Abstract Cityscape shows Rotenberg's unique paint application. During his Paris years, he began experimenting with different mediums and techniques as a means of discovering fresh and innovative ways to portray his ideas. “I kept on experimenting,” he explained. “I never wanted to paint with one … recipe.”
"Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world". – Hans Hofmann
References:
Oakes, Martha, Harold Rotenberg: An American Impressionist; Gloucester, MA: Cape Ann Museum, © 2018
Capasso, Nicholas, Expressionism: Boston’s Claim to Fame. Originally published in Painting in Boston: 1950-2000, edited by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, Nicholas Capasso, and Jennifer Uhrhane. University of MA Press, Amherst, MA © 2002, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.
