Women’s Work

Provenance:

The Artist

Private Collection, New York

Exhibited:

New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Judith Rothschild: An Artist's Search, May 19-September 6, 1998; also traveled to: The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., May 15-August 15, 1999 and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, October 25, 2001-January 2002, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue by Jack Flam, plate 36 (illus.)

Note:

This work has been registered with The Judith Rothschild Foundation.

Lot Note:

In his exhibition catalogue accompanying the traveling exhibition originating in 1998, Jack Flam comments on Southwest, 1980: “the motif of the picture within the picture is present in a number of Rothschild’s works during the 1980s – as if she was note quite able to give up her involvement with literal depictions of nature and somehow wanted to have it both ways by utilizing naturalistic and abstract imagery in separate sections of the same painting…Perhaps nowhere is this format more successful than in Southwest of 1980… it is as if we are viewing simultaneously night and day views of the same landscape. The day scene is rendered abstractly and evokes the heat of the place and the way the brilliant light flattens and eats away the details of the forms, while the dark view within it seems to evoke the way in which the forms of the landscape actually become clearer as the light fades, and the way in which coolness is perceptible by the eye as well as by the rest of the body (Flam, p. 88).