Judith Rothschild (September 4, 1921 – March 6, 1993) was an American abstract painter and collagist, best known for the collage-like relief paintings she created late in her career. Influenced by European abstract masters, including Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse, she worked in a style that achieved, in the words of art critic and curator E.C. Goossen, a "bold juxtaposition of the realistic and the abstract".
Rothschild studied with Hans Hofmann and other prominent American artists. In a career spanning the late 1940s to the early 1990s, she exhibited frequently in solo and group shows in the United States and abroad. Her work is held in the collections of major institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Harvard Art Museums.
At her death, Rothschild owned a collection of works said to be "one of the finest privately held collections of 20th-century painting and sculpture in this country". Her will established a foundation to use the sale of these works for the benefit of the underappreciated artists of her generation.
Early life and education
Rothschild was born in New York City to art-loving parents. Her art education began while she was young. While attending New York's Fieldston School, she received training from Victor D'Amico, the head of the school's art department. Graduating in 1939, she entered Wellesley College, a school that then provided instruction in art history but not studio art. For that reason, she obtained art instruction during her summer vacations: in 1940, from artist and art instructor Herman Maril; in 1941, from artist Maurice Sterne; and in 1942, from Zoltan Sepeshy at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. After graduating in the spring of 1943, she took summer classes at the Art Students League, where artist Reginald Marsh was one of her instructors, and later studied with the well-known abstract painter and instructor Hans Hofmann.
In 1944, Rothschild wrote an essay discussing the differences between the non-objective and non-representational style championed by collector Hilla von Rebay and an abstract style that referenced "the material world". She wrote that in negating the material world, non-objective art failed to provide "a sound basis for artistic experience". In contrast, she said, the representational abstractions of artists like Hofmann, Joan Miró, and Paul Klee were "touched with a breath of life".
A year later, both for her own benefit and for the use of other artists, she began translating the art theories of European modernists such as Miró, Max Ernst, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Arp. She also translated a 1920 essay of Mondrian's explaining his influential neoplastic theory of art.
In the late 1940s, Rothschild studied in a graphics workshop called Atelier 17 run by British artist Stanley William Hayter. To help pay tuition, she served as Hayter's studio monitor.
Career in art
During her long career, Rothschild participated in many solo and group exhibitions. She showed in commercial and nonprofit galleries as well as museums and other public spaces in the United States and abroad.
Selected solo exhibitions in the United States
Rothschild's first solo exhibition appeared at the Jane Street Gallery in the winter months of 1945–1946. Operating in a rented Greenwich Village storefront, the gallery was a cooperative venture by a small group of like-minded artists, most of whom had studied with Hans Hofmann and some of whom had come to admire the work of Mondrian and Arp. Her show of 20 abstract paintings in oil and gouache drew forth a pair of reviews by artist-poet Ben Wolf in Art Digest and the Herald Tribune. He called her a "remarkable young talent" and said the paintings showed a "sureness and maturity" that belied her age. Rothschild later said she was pleased to have made some sales from the show and especially gratified to receive praise from artist Karl Knaths, who later became a mentor and close associate. In the fall months of 1946, she was one of the first artists shown in a new gallery run by art dealer Joseph Luyber in Manhattan. Reviewing this show, Edward Alden Jewell credited her with a "warm sincerity of purpose" and expressed his confidence that she would learn to express greater individuality. Writing in Art Digest, Ben Wolf saw improvement in these new paintings, saying her color was more integrated and her line better controlled.
The artist Marcel Duchamp had been impressed with the paintings he saw in Rothschild's 1945 solo at the Jane Street Gallery. He introduced Rothschild to gallerist Rose Fried, who, in 1957, gave Rothschild her next solo. In 1962, Rothschild showed new paintings and collages at the recently opened Knapik Gallery on Fifth Avenue. Rose Fried gave Rothschild a second solo in 1965. The following year, Rothschild received a solo exhibition in a Manhattan gallery specializing in modern European masters called La Boétie.
In 1972, she received the first of several solos at Manhattan's Landmark Gallery. In 1975 and again in 1976, the New York art publisher and gallerist Lee Ault showed recent relief paintings of hers at his Manhattan gallery. Reviewing the first show in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer said Rothschild possessed considerable talent and, in her Matisse-like reliefs, came close to freeing herself entirely from being "locked into the master's repertory of shapes and gestures".
In 1977, she was given her first museum solo, an exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art, at the State University of New York, Purchase. The following year, she participated in the first of four joint solo exhibitions with members of the Long Point Gallery group, a cooperative formed the previous year in Provincetown, by a small group that included Rothschild, Robert Motherwell, Leo Manso, and Fritz Bultman.
In 1987 and 1988, the Gimpel Gallery gave her solo exhibitions, and in 1989 the Inger Gallery gave her one. In 1988, she received a solo exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in 1992, the André Zarre Gallery gave her what turned out to be the final solo in a Manhattan gallery before her death.
Selected solo exhibitions in Europe
When she showed at the Iolas-Jackson Gallery in 1985, John Russell of the New York Times noted the influence of Matisse and called the result "sumptuous" in general effect.
In 1976, 1981, and 1985, Rothschild received solo exhibitions in the Annely Juda Fine Art gallery in London. In 1981, 1988, and 1989, she received solo exhibitions at Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne. In 1981, she showed at the Centro di Cultura de Palazzo Grassi, Venice.
One of Rothschild's most remarkable exhibitions took place in Moscow in 1991, as the Soviet era drew to a close. It took place at the State Tretyakov Gallery, a museum that holds a large collection of Russian art and is listed as one of the most visited museums in the world. She was the first living Western artist and the first non-Russian-born artist to be given a solo exhibition there. A catalog of the exhibition, Beyond the Plane: The Relief Paintings of Judith Rothschild, by Richard H. Axsom (New York, Hudson Hills Press) appeared in 1992.
Selected group exhibitions
Rothschild's paintings appeared in group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Her works appeared in shows held in Manhattan by American Abstract Artists as well as the Grand Central Galleries, New York Coliseum, La Boétie Gallery, Landmark Gallery, and Luyber Galleries. She showed in Boston with the Boston Society of Independent Artists, at the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Mirsky Gallery; in Chicago at the Art Institute; and in Provincetown with the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Long Point Gallery, HCE Gallery, and Gallery 200. Group shows in London were mounted at the Juda gallery, in Paris at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, in Milan at Galleria Milano, and in Cologne at Galerie Gmurzynska.
Studio locations
In 1945 and 1946, Rothschild worked in her first studio, located on West 12th Street in Manhattan. In 1946, she began spending summers in Provincetown. After marrying the novelist Anton Myrer, she moved to California and in 1947 worked in Carmel, later moving to Monterey, where she worked from that year until 1956. She returned to Manhattan in 1956 and spent the next two years in Europe, where she worked in the studio formerly used by Nicolas de Staël in Cap d'Antibes. In 1958, she moved to Wellfleet on Cape Cod and in 1959 began splitting her work year between there and Saugerties, New York. In 1970, she moved into a townhouse on Park Avenue near East 90th, and, in 1978, needing more space, began working in Barnett Newman's old studio in a building adjoining Carnegie Hall on 7th Avenue.
Other career milestones
In addition to making works of art, Rothschild studied art theories, wrote art essays, and achieved prestigious sales of her works. She participated in artist cooperatives and art associations. She produced book illustrations and taught art classes.
Her first exhibition in 1945 produced substantial sales. The art dealer Karl Nierendorf, art historian Jere Abbott, and museum director Agnes Mongan were among the visitors who bought paintings from that show.
She helped to found the Long Point cooperative in 1977. She joined American Abstract Artists in 1946 and was then its youngest member. In 1978, she was elected its president.
In 1970, she was named the American representative for the French journal Leonardo and wrote an article for its pages called "On the Use of a Color-Music Analogy and on Chance in Paintings".
In 1971, she produced illustrations for a book of poems by Robin Fulton called The Spaces Between the Stones is Where The Survivors Live. (New York, New Rivers Press).
In 1971 and 1972, Rothschild taught advanced drawing as an artist-in-residence at Syracuse University and taught summer classes at both Pratt Institute and the Rhode Island School of Design.
During her career, she served on the boards of the American Federation of Arts, the MacDowell residency program, the New York Studio School, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
Artistic style
Critics noted three periods in the development of Rothschild's style. The first combined biomorphic and geometric elements, the second sometimes drew upon impersonal theories of color and musical composition and at other times incorporated figurative elements, and the third produced a dramatic change of medium that defined her mature style.
Early career, 1940s–1950s
During the first stylistic period of her career, Rothschild made paintings and collages that art historian and curator Richard H. Axsom saw as reflecting the European tradition of abstraction, showing influences of Cubism, Surrealism, and geometric abstraction. During this period, she made use of the art theories she had translated in her student years, including her 1944 essay on non-objective art that contrasted the abstract art that had its foundation in the real world with abstract art that did not. In translating Mondrian's neo-plasticism essay, she made note of his statement that art must reflect the material world the artist inhabits.
By the early 1950s, Rothschild had begun to make explicit the natural sources of her work. Two New York Times critics did not welcome this change in Rothschild's style. One complained of "figurative intrusions into her abstract compositions" at this time, and, reviewing a 1957 solo exhibition, another saw "a feeling toward nature that is too ambiguously expressed to be satisfactory".
Middle career, 1950s–1960s