Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne | |
|---|---|
 Bengelsdorf c. 1936 | |
| Born | Rosalind Bengelsdorf April 30, 1916 New York, N.Y. |
| Died | February 10, 1979 (aged 62) New York, N.Y. |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Art critic, painter, educator |
| Spouse | Byron Browne (1907–1961) |
Rosalind Bengelsdorf (April 30, 1916 – February 10, 1979) was an American painter, art critic and educator. She is also known as Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne and as Rosalind Browne.
Rosalind Bengelsdorf was born April 30, 1916, in New York, NY. [1]
She studied at the Art Students League of New York as a teenager (1930-1934) with John Steuart Curry, Raphael Soyer, Anne Goldthwaite, and George Bridgman. In 1935 she joined the atelier of artist Hans Hofmann. She held a growing belief that the picture plane was a “living reality” of forms, energies, and colors. Because of this belief, Hofmann became a mentor to her for his dedication to painting as an independent object. Like Hofmann, she believed that “the shapes that compose the picture below to nothing else but the picture.” With his encouragement, she began to merge the idea that space is filled with “myriad, infinitesimal subdivisions” that changed into vibrating interplay of elements into her work. She felt that the abstract painter was observing the world and nature, tearing it apart, and putting it back together in a unique way. [2]
In 1936, she began working as a WPA Federal Art Project muralist with Burgoyne Diller for the Central Nurses Home on Welfare Island. The mural, entitled Abstraction (now destroyed), balances simple geometric forms through position and color. [2]
Bengelsdorf married the artist Byron Browne in 1940. The couple agreed there should be only “one painter in the family,” so Bengelsdorf stopped painting and pursued teaching and writing. She resumed painting after her husband's death in 1961. [3]
A founding member of the American Abstract Artists, [4] Bengelsdorf championed the cause of abstract art throughout her career.
The Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne papers [5] and a 1968 oral history interview [6] are located at the Archives of American Art. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, [7] the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, [8] the National Gallery of Art, Washington, [9] the Museum of Modern Art, New York [10] and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. [11]
Abstract Expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the immediate aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the epicenter of this movement, included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, and Willem de Kooning, among others.
Helen Frankenthaler was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades, she spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition curated by Clement Greenberg that introduced a newer generation of abstract painting that came to be known as color field. Born in Manhattan, she was influenced by Greenberg, Hans Hofmann, and Jackson Pollock's paintings. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s. In 2001, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
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