Amalie Rothschild

Amalie Rothschild (1916–2001) was an American artist who lived and worked within the art community of Baltimore, Maryland. An accomplished painter and sculptor, she was also an art teacher, philanthropist, patron, and cultural advocate. Over the course of a long career, she made oil and acrylic paintings as well as drawings, watercolors, and other paper works. She also sculpted using found objects, Plexiglas, metals, and particleboard. Originally working in a realist style, she became well known for geometric abstractions based on figurative subjects. In 1993 a critic described this approach as " alkinga tightrope between the abstract and the representational with a suggestion of three-dimensional depth." Rothschild was by choice a regional artist. Although she occasionally exhibited elsewhere, she did not actively promote her career outside a mid-Atlantic region centered on Baltimore. Thus, in 1997 a critic wrote, "Amalie Rothschild is a fixture and ornament of the Baltimore art world." At the time of her death a critic gave this career summary: "She was one of the leading artists of her time in this area. Her work is thoroughly modern and related to geometric abstraction, but without losing the figure. It has emotional reserve, often contains a hint of humor and at times recalls the childlike sagacity of the great Paul Klee."

Early life and training

In her youth Rothschild attended a mix of public and private elementary schools. From age six to fifteen she took classes every Saturday morning at the Maryland Institute. She attended an accelerated public junior high called School 49 and then Western High School in Baltimore. Having graduated at age 16 in 1932, Rothschild initially joined the freshman class at Goucher College, but quickly changed her mind and began study at the Maryland Institute for the Mechanical Arts, now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her parents cautioned her against majoring in a subject, such as fine arts, where graduates' job prospects were practically nil. She chose fashion illustration and, after graduating two years later, in 1935 she spent half a year at the Parsons School of Design (then called the New York School of Fine and Applied Art). She was offered a scholarship to study in Paris, France for 6 months, but her widowed mother forbid her to go abroad, so she returned to Baltimore and began to freelance as an illustrator, making drawings for department store ads. Starting in 1937 she took private instruction from local artist Richard Dicus and showed her work to Baltimore artist, Herman Maril.

Career in art

Rothschild had a few small landscape oil paintings accepted for the seventh annual exhibition of Maryland painters, a juried show held in 1939 the Baltimore Museum of Art. Three years later her first appearance in a solo exhibition was also at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Early in the 1940s she showed in the annual Christmas sales exhibition held at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the museum's founder, Duncan Phillips, bought her painting "Slum Clearance" for the collection. In 1951 she was commissioned to design a curtain for the Torah ark in the newly built synagogue of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. In 1957 the Corcoran Gallery of Art bought a painting of hers, "Penelope" which had been awarded a prize in the 12th Annual Area Exhibition, and in 1959 included her work along with works by Washington artists Anne E. Baum and Helene Herzbrun in a three-person exhibition.

In 1958 she began showing in commercial galleries, first in a group exhibition at the IFA Galleries in Washington (1958) and then, in the 1960s, in group shows at the Juster Gallery in Manhattan and the Rumsey Gallery (Rumsey Island, Maryland, 1966). In the 1970s and 1980s her work often appeared in solo exhibitions in commercial galleries, including Jacob's Ladder (Washington, 1972), B.R. Kornblatt (Baltimore, 1978, 1980), C. Grimaldis (Washington, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1999), and Franz Bader (Washington, 1989, 1991). Her gallery during the last decade of her life was Gomez (Baltimore).

Beginning in the 1960s she was given an increasing number of solo exhibitions in the museums and public galleries of the Baltimore area, including shows at Goucher College (1964, 1968), the Baltimore Museum of Art (1971), and the Maryland Institute of Art (1985). Her first major retrospective exhibition covering 50 years from 1933 to 1983 was held in 1984 at the Academy of Arts (Easton, Maryland)Monograph "Amalie Rothschild" (2012) Angelo Pontecorboli Editore–Firenze 512 pages, Chronology p. 491 and her last retrospective was at Maryland Art Place in 1997. In 1986 she created two unusual cello case sculptures in the shape of women. The pair contained loudspeakers and were used in a piece of music performed by Vivian Adelberg Rudow, a Baltimore composer, musician, and performance artist. Rothschild made a conscious decision to remain a regional artist and did not energetically seek to establish a national reputation.

Rothschild has been portrayed as suffering from the male-oriented art culture of her time but, as one commentator has pointed out, she did not have to support herself through art and, to the contrary, had sufficient financial resources to be an art patron. After the birth of her children, she had constant household help. In general, "she had the freedom and opportunity to invest time into her art and advocate for artists." A few months before she died, an oral historian, Jean Freedman, interviewed Rothschild for the Jewish Women's Archive. Asked about her experience as an artist and a woman, she said, "Well, you know, I’ve been asked that question as an artist, 'How does it feel to be a woman artist? Have you felt discriminated against?' And I say, 'Well, not that I’m aware of.' I’ve been lucky, my art has prospered, and when I’ve applied to galleries I’ve frequently been accepted."

Artistic style

During the Jewish Women's Archive oral history interview Rothschild said that she her style gradually evolved from realist to abstract during the 1940s and early 1950s. She made the change entirely on her own in a slow self-taught process. In viewing a retrospective exhibition of her work, a critic said in 2012 that Rothschild's 1948 oil painting "Portrait of Me (Self Portrait with Crossed Arms)" seemed to be a transitional work, particularly as it emphasized Rothschild's angular shoulders and arms. This painting can be seen in the 1984 photo of Rothschild along with an earlier self-portrait. The photo is shown in the box at top. In the interview she also said her experience as a volunteer art therapist in the 1950s helped her to move away from planned and structured work and to move toward a more spontaneous expression of emotion. In 1958 a gallerist described the paintings in her emerging geometric style as "personal abstract statements characterized by subtlety of color, symbol, and pattern." Her interest in the human figure persisted even as what was seen as her "distinctive take on geometric abstraction" evolved, and many of her paintings contain elements that derive from parts of the body as seen from unusual angles. The 1968 acrylic painting "Ripening of the Oranges, Sicily" (shown at left) is said to be a first-rate example of how she relied upon a "gridded composition that allowed for both structural variation and representational allusion."

During the 1960s Rothschild made a transition from being mainly a painter to being mainly a sculptor. She took evening sculpture classes at the Baltimore Museum of Art and began to make assemblages using found objects, including pieces of wood that she arranged to have cast in bronze at a foundry in Pennsylvania. She gradually expanded the scope of her sculptural work to include a wide variety of materials including found objects, Plexiglas, metals, and particleboard. She usually made her sculptures by herself, without outside help. In size they range from large outdoor and sometimes monumental pieces to small works that can be held in the hand. Her 1996 sculpture, "Birth of a Mermaid," (shown right) shows her mature style in this medium.

In the early 1980s Rothschild learned paper-making at the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland. She used this new skill to make what one critic called "highly embossed sculptural works." One of these sculptural works, "Josepha" (1984), can be seen at left.

In 1993 she contrasted two aspects of her method, one, called "material to idea," in which she created sculptures with found materials, and the other, "idea to material," in which she started with a drawing and then assembled the material to create the final product.

During the years in which sculpture dominated her output she continued to make quick and spontaneous works on paper, both drawings and watercolors. One of these drawings, "Art Quotes" (1966) can bee seen at right. Shortly before her death she made a return to figuration in a set of small works on paper prepared for a solo exhibition at the C.Grimaldis Gallery called "Artist and Model." A critic said that in these works (in ink, watercolor, and oil) she explored how the models the artists depicted could be "reduced to their definitional lines," showing them as compositional elements rather than living beings.

When in 1997 a critic reviewed the whole body of her output he commented on her stylistic consistency. He wrote, "A group of Baltimore artist Amalie Rothschild's sculptures and drawings demonstrate the consistency of this artist's work: its sure craftsmanship, its sly humor and its debt to the superficially childlike but deeply wise work of Paul Klee." Throughout her career she was similarly consistent in her work habits. In 2012 broadcast journalist Sheila Kast said "Amalie Rothschild (1916-2001) was one of Baltimore’s most prolific visual artists during the 20th century."

In the oral history interview she gave in the last year of her life Rothschild said that Matisse's practice of what she called "automatic drawings" helped her to achieve greater self-expressiveness. She said her earlier work had not successfully conveyed her inner feelings and that she had gradually changed her style to make it more expressive. All the same, a critic who reviewed a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Gomez Gallery saw her "singular devotion to her vision of abstractions based on geometric forms" as overly formal. "Her work is pleasing, disciplined, often clever," he wrote, "but not amply challenging," adding that there he saw too little sense of struggle or pushing of boundaries. Some years later, the same critic said her work had "emotional reserve," but did not then see this characteristic as a flaw. He wrote, "Her work is thoroughly modern and related to geometric abstraction, but without losing the figure. It has emotional reserve, often contains a hint of humor and at times recalls the childlike sagacity of the great Paul Klee."

Art teacher

Between 1956 and 1970 Rothschild volunteered as an art therapist at the Springfield State Mental Hospital where she and another volunteer, her closest artist friend Cecile Baer, gave what she called "kindergarten level" instruction to severely disabled adults. Her goal was not so much to teach them art as to help them to express themselves in some way through paint and paper. During the next four years she taught at a small school that had been established to offer an alternative to what the organizers saw as the extreme conservatism of the Maryland Institute of Art. Called the Metropolitan School of Art, it folded when the Maryland Institute brought in a new director and changed its policies. One of her fellow instructors, Gladys Goldstein, later became a prominent Baltimore abstract painter. Beginning in 1960 Rothschild spent eight years as a part-time instructor at Goucher College. She taught students painting and drawing in one course each semester and resigned when asked to work full-time.

Philanthropist, art patron, advocate

Soon after the end of World War II Rothschild took the first of many influential positions within the Baltimore arts community. Between 1948 and 1950 she was president of the city's Artists' Union. In 1952 she initiated the idea and helped to found the Baltimore Outdoor Art Festival which was subsequently held for nearly a quarter of a century in Druid Hill Park

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