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Overview
Louis Conrad Rosenberg (1890–1983) was an outstanding printmaker, but he is not one of the most famous names in 20th century art. He spent over half his long life in Oregon, a beautiful corner of the world (probably the closest counterpart in the US to New Zealand), but hardly a location central to that nation’s stories of art. He was a trained architect and a contemporary of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, but had little obvious sympathy with their uncompromising modernism. And though his etchings and drypoints were once part of an avidly collected, elite sub-culture known as the Etching Revival, this does not prominently feature in art history today.
Rosenberg was of Swedish parentage and grew up in a goldmining camp in Galice, southern Oregon. His rise to acclaim shows how the American Dream could be a reality in that era. After training in architects’ offices in Portland (including that of expatriate New Zealander Phillip Chappell Brown), Rosenberg went on to study architecture at the University of Oregon. He then won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he graduated in 1914.
Rosenberg’s earliest surviving prints date from 1921, when he was on a travelling fellowship awarded by the University of Oregon, which took him to Europe. Until the mid-1920s etching dominated his output, but from 1924-25 drypoint became his favoured mode, after having studied with Malcolm Osborne at the Royal College of Art, London. Rosenberg’s status was reflected when he was in his late thirties, with attractive books on his printmaking published in London (1929) and New York (1930) respectively. But in the Depression years immediately following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the market for limited edition artists’ prints – Rosenberg included – all but collapsed.
Rosenberg’s prints span some 25 years and throughout his body of work a satisfyingly level-headed and steady-handed consistency is evident. They represent the vision and technical accomplishments of an architect, a draftsman and above all a printmaker. The last thing they evoke is a modern artist’s angst, probably because this was an emotion alien to him. Rosenberg does not bare his soul or tell stories. His works are therefore rather harder to talk about – the print’s the thing! If we can infer anything from them, it is the artist’s humility as he records, conveys and even subtly rearranges the age-old edifices before him.
With each building and wall surface, there is a rightness about Rosenberg’s rendition. He knows where and when to stop, and never overworks the plate with superfluous lines. Even when we compare him with contemporaries in the field that specialised in architectural themes, we are struck by Rosenberg’s reticence, restraint and absence of theatricality. Rosenberg knows his stones, bricks and mortar; he knows his classical orders and stepped gothic gables, and he knows his civil engineering, what makes a building stand up or crumble! Furthermore, he appreciates the history and heritage of whatever he depicts, its reasons for being.
Rosenberg weathered the Depression better than most of his contemporaries, thanks to his architectural background and the good commercial use that could be made of his 'perspectivist' skills. After World War 2, he became head designer in the New York alliance of Kiff-Colean-Voss and Souder, retiring to his native Oregon in 1964 in his early seventies for almost another 20 years.
Rosenberg's prints are overwhelmingly concentrated in a period of little over a decade, the early 1920s to the early 1930s, when demand for his work was at their height. Rosenberg’s critical champion, Malcolm Salaman, noted how ‘he could not see white stone walls as merely architectural features, he saw them artistically as elements of the living picture… Arab Coffee House is a plate of manners and customs delightfully rendered’. It is too bright and hot for the djellaba-clad coffee-drinkers to be doing very much. An abstract pattern is created by the birdcages hung over the doorway, where just enough light reveals hangings and shadowy human presences within. This is one of the most atmospheric and subtle works in Te Papa's collection by a consistently intelligent printmaker.
See: Mark Stocker, 'Prints fit for a Prince', http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/2015/04/07/prints-fit-for-a-prince-a-missive-to-prince-charles/
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art May 2018