MICHENER ART MUSEUM SHOWS THE PAINTINGS OF CHARLES ROSEN

Wednesday, 27 September 2006 06:39

New Hope, PA – The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown is pleased to announce the exhibition Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen on view from October 13, 2006 through January 28, 2007.  Rosen was one of the most distinguished Pennsylvania Impressionist artists; he began his career as a successful landscape painter and later changed his work dramatically to a more modernist style.

Rosen’s work is in more than 20 museum collections, and the exhibition features over 48 works, including major examples of both his landscape and modernist styles, as well as works on paper.  Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen is curated by the Michener’s Senior Curator Brian H. Peterson.  The exhibition will travel to the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Platz, where it will be on view from February 21, 2007 through May 13, 2007.

For some painters a single way of working can last a lifetime.  This was not Rosen’s story.  He began his creative career as a highly successful landscape painter, prominently associated with the impressionist art colony centered in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in the early twentieth century.  His best-known New Hope canvases are large-scale snow scenes and spring scenes, utilizing a simple but elegant compositional style sometimes reminiscent of Japanese prints.  These landscapes explore many different techniques and often exhibit a stylistic restlessness.

In his late thirties and early forties, Rosen became dissatisfied with the landscape style, and under the influence of modernist ideas his work changed radically.  He completely abandoned traditional landscapes in favor of a manner of working that might be described as both rhythmic and semiabstract, one that usually used man-made structures as subjects and was based on a passionate exploration of form as a living, organic phenomenon.  Rosen himself described this idea as “form that radiates life” and spoke of the “effort to achieve this in paint.”  In 1920 he moved to Woodstock, New York, where he taught at the Art Students League summer school.  He developed close friendships with fellow Woodstock painters George Bellows and Eugene Speicher.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication that provides an in-depth examination of the life and work of Charles Rosen, studying both phases of his career and featuring paintings from major museum and private collections that demonstrate this unusual range of styles.  Approx. 200 pages in length and lavishly illustrated with 183 color images, this book represents the oeuvre of an artist not only of prodigious talent and vision but also of tremendous sensitivity and imagination.  Principally authored by the Michener’s Senior Curator Brian H. Peterson, the book includes an essay on Rosen’s Woodstock years by Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History at Bard College, and is co-published by the Michener Art Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Peterson has more than twenty-five years experience as a curator, critic, artist, and arts administrator in the Philadelphia area.  He has been responsible for guiding the Michener’s exhibition program since 1993.

The James A. Michener Art Museum is an independent, non-profit institution dedicated to preserving, interpreting and exhibiting the art and cultural heritage of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania region. Visit : www.michenerartmuseum.org