Women’s Work

Provenance:

The Artist

Private Collection, New York

Exhibited:

Santa Barbara, California, Sullivan Goss Art Gallery, P-TOWN IN S.B.: Sidney Gordin | Betty Lane | Judith Rothschild, June 28-August 26, 2024

Note:

This work has been registered with The Judith Rothschild Foundation.

Lot Essay:

In the brochure that accompanied her exhibition of mid-1950s paintings at Rose Fried Gallery in New York in the fall of 1957, Judith Rothschild wrote: “…the expression of subjective emotions alone cannot suffice, still less mere concrete specifics - nor even a succession of sensitively wrought areas of paint on canvas. The idea is in the mountain: in the mountain rendered eloquently, structured, expanded, which recalls us to our own humanity, our own individual importance - and unimportance…” At this time, Rothschild had moved away from her more strictly abstract work of the 1940s, the era of the American Abstract Artists (of which she served as President) and the Jane Street Gallery (she was a co-founder), as well as having physically moved away from the New York art scene. She and her novelist husband had relocated to Monterey, California, maintaining a summer residence in Provincetown, Massachusetts. 

As she described so eloquently in her own words, Rothschild’s work of this time returned to nature, while at the same time looked inward, simplifying forms, flattening space and creating a stylized, almost atmospheric distance. Jack Flam described her work of this time as “imbued with a haunting kind of poetry,” which best describes Motif #2 from 1955. A symphony of blocky shapes and subtle colors, the horizon line and reaching tree branches clearly situate the scene as a landscape, but the complex foreground clearly give the sense that there is much more happening than a study of a specific place.