RALPH ROSENBORG (1913 - 1992) The American Artist
Ralph Rosenborg is the first recognized pioneer whose experimental art announced the coming of Abstract Expressionism in the United States during the mid nineteen thirties. Rosenborg was the first to introduce and instruct Jackson Pollock on Abstract Expressionism while at the Non-Objective Painting Museum in the early 1940's, which became the Guggenheim Museum. Documents establish Rosenborg was the first painter under contract by Marian Willard of the Marian Willard Gallery, two years before Pollock.
Ralph Rosenborg is The American Artist. Rosenborg produced daring artworks and explored the possibilities of movements that are expressive of ideas, sensations and passions intended to provoke pure emotions.
RALPH ROSENBORG IS THE PURE ARTIST
No compromise
Landscapes, trees, flowers, and all that is natural
FOR THE MANY YEARS THAT I HAVE KNOWN HIM
HE IS IN THE PLACE OF PURE CREATION.
The changing seasons
Air, earth, water and fire
HIS PAINTINGS ARE SPIRITUAL CLARITY.
HE HAS REMAINED PURE TO HIMSELF.
LOUISE NEVELSON,
March 10, 1988
Ralph Rosenborg's artwork moves through his chosen repertoire of subjects: landscapes, heads, and flowers. Elements that remain constant are primarily his need to push color mediums to their fullest capacity, secondarily his approach to the subject is based on a distillation of remembered sensations rather on direct perception, and finally a reverential attitude towards the process of creation. Each artwork has something to do with a spiritual experience that has a clean quality. If you recognize meaningful art Rosenborg painting's give the viewer a feeling of excitement. A picture has no value but what it does for a person inside themselves. Thus the heads are not specific people, the flowers not identified and the landscapes, while recalling seasonal color and light, are generalized celebrations of America's nature. Rosenborg: "They are composites of the world we know, everything that has been stored up in me since childhood."
When Rosenborg worked with oil, it was within a sculptural sense of the materiality of the medium. He uses an assortment of small palette knives to spread paint in buttery slabs, leaving thin edges that catch the light; occasionally he scoops out hallows or cuts incise lines within the thick pigment. As a counterpoint he takes up the brush to run the paint on top of and within thin glazes, dappling the surface with touches of color or create a delicate linear mark of a barely discernable quality. In watercolor, he is the master of layered transparencies and unleashes the full range of the medium's possibilities as he washes one hue over another without losing the clarity of each. Dense opaque areas are contrasted with thin transparencies, while the paper is scratched so that it absorbs tints in darkened, slightly blurred lines, while crevices left in paint allow white paper to show through as dazzling light.
Ralph Rosenborg was born in New York on June 9th, 1913 and resided most of his life in New York City.
Rosenborg began the study of painting in 1929 at the School Art League, American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and studied privately with Henriette Reiss from 1930 to 1933. Ralph Rosenborg won a scholarship while still in high school to Saturday art classes at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. After classes ended, he continued to study privately with his teacher there, Henriette Reiss, who provided not only exacting technical training, but broad-based instruction in music, literature, and art history. More significantly, Reiss had worked with Kandinsky earlier in her career and introduced her young protege to the vast arena of vanguard European ideas.
Ralph Rosenborg exhibited his artworks since as a teenager when he made dress patterns that were seen throughout the fashion society in New York City. His first One-Man Exhibit of oil paintings and watercolors was held in New York in June, 1935.
