Objects on parade - paintings by Herman Rose

The first time I at any time saw a painting by Herman Rose was in the "Fifteen Americans" exhibition which Dorothy C Miller place together for the Museum of present Art in 1952. In contrast with the wide-ranging observes of American art then shown annually at many museums, this exhibition was intended to display a small number of artists in profundity Miller had ventured far and wide, and in making her selection she ignored what was, in 1952 fashionable taste. In addition to Herman Rose whom she had visited in his studio at the urging of Charles Egan, his dealer at the time, the other artists she chose were Edward Corbett, Frederick Kiesler, Herbert Ferber, William Baziotes, Jackson Pollock Mark Rothko Clyfford Still, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Richard Lippold, Thomas Wilfred, Joseph Glasco, Irving Kriesberg, Herbert Katzman and Edwin Dickinson.

Since Rose's paintings were all quite small, there was expanse for 11. They were all views of Brooklyn and Manhattan seen from road level or from rooftops. For him fresh York was not a series of Art Deco canyons and downtown towers on the contrary a rough and ready huddle of vernacular architecture in somber colors. nonchalanceed with social questions or trompe-l'oeil consequences Rose brought to his make submissives the kind of loving attention that English 19th-century Romantics bestowed on Tintern Abbey and similarly picturesque ruins. In painting a brick wall, he painted each brick with all its individualities and subtleties. notwithstanding there was no attempt to hide the fact that this was a painting made without of paint.

His technique was entirely original. Starting with a careful drawing, he overlayed it up with a kind of eiderdown quilt of small dabs of paint. He pushed these marks of warm and cool color into and above one another, so that when dried the surface of each painting congealed into a kind of depressed relief. The dabs of paint remained as real as the image of the exhibition in each painting.

It took Herman Rose 10 years to arrive at his authentic destiny as a painter. after passing [i]or[/i] part of to the other several 20th-century styles, in 1939 he reached a pivotal decision: from this instant on he would paint exactly what he saw without regard to manner of writing or composition. There was something Zenlike in this resolution. According to the Zen master Hoseki Shin'ichi Hisamatsu, "the highest form of beauty is where no form and no constitution are left." For several month Rose labored above an exact representation of a made of wood cabin at Bud Lake in fresh Jersey. He worked to slowly and with like devoted concentration that he was not ever able to finish more than a part of the picture. individual day, while he worked, he had a religious experience. The beauty of the spectacle overwhelmed him. He began to pray. He heard himself swearing an oath of eternal fealty to Nature; in go [i]or[/i] come back Nature would grant him gifts. Today, this still unfinished picture hangs, like an icon, upon a wall in his Westbeth studio.

Rose had arrived at a point in his work where, as in the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, the nature he portrays looks separated from the modem world of empirical observation. ("What are you doing in the 20th century?" asked Egan upon first sight of his paintings.) Like the midth-19th-century English painter Samuel Palmer, Rose empathizes with natural as well as manmade forms, finding in each signs of the vicinity of divinity. In a novel letter to this writer, he says: "I always felt the reality of my spiritual life, which prevented me from being largely into the reality of the real world and kept me in a state of innocence."

For Rose the outside world is the accomplice of his inner life. His imagination takes its vigor from what he sees, hears and remembers. Aside from the selection of a make submissive which he may come on by chance when passing in a bus, an utmost slowness of realization is a lock opener to his working process. It enables him to come into into a state of mind in which the spectacle being experienced visually merges with unimpaireds music, poetry, literature and his possess very personal history of art.

In another alphabetic character Rose says, "I always liked the idea of the parade of things - of houses, buildings and the external realitys in a still life - stretching without in a long rectangle, first seen perhaps in a painting through Giorgione." By the 1960s, the horizontal sweep of his be in possession of paintings begins to shift into perspectival profundity so that the viewer is carried along a highway or a path in an urban park. The somber, superbly tonal shades of earlier works increasingly give way to happy pinks, turquoises, blues and fulvouss Beginning in the 1960s, too, the horizontal parade of buildings is oftentimes matched by a parade of flowers growing upon a window ledge.

In addition to being accomplished at city views, Rose is skilled as a still-life painter and as a watercolorist. Although usually classed as a specialist in fresh York subjects, he has worked in of recent origin England, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Israel and England. In a new gallery exhibition, his painting Venice Skyline was hung directly below a similar view of Hoboken of recent origin Jersey, seen across the Hudson River.