She attended the Washington School of Art but decided it wasn't for her after only two weeks.
College/University
Gallery of Susan Rothenberg
Rothenberg enrolled at Cornell University and began studying sculpture. She soon quit however because the department head told her that she had no talent.
Rothenberg enrolled at Cornell University and began studying sculpture. She soon quit however because the department head told her that she had no talent.
Susan Rothenberg is an American artist best known for her paintings of animals and figurative scenes using quick, gestural brushstrokes and rich colors. Rendered in gestural brushstrokes reminiscent of the work of Philip Guston, her paintings tap into both collective and personal memory.
Background
Susan Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York in 1945 and spent most of her youth there. While her parents, Leonard Rothenberg and Adele Cohen, simply wished for her to graduate college and marry a man with a stable profession, such as a doctor, Rothenberg defied expectation and became interested in art from an early age. Her grandfather was a house painter and a family friend was an amateur artist, and together these influential characters, as well as frequent trips to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery stoked an enthusiasm for both painting and sculpture. Both in her youth and beyond, Rothenberg also loved rock 'n roll and dance, and she had professional training in modern dance and ballet.
Education
Rothenberg enrolled at Cornell University and began studying sculpture. She soon quit however because the department head told her that she had no talent. The artist herself remembered being a "goofy girl" and said, "it wasn't an ambition of mine to become an artist; I thought I'd be the muse of a famous painter. I think that I've grown into it." She left for a five-month sojourn to the Greek island of Hydra and when she returned to Cornell she switched courses and took up painting. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1965, she attended the Washington School of Art but decided it wasn't for her after only two weeks.
Following a time of restlessness, Susan Rothenberg went back to Buffalo and then decided to head to Nova Scotia. While stopping in Montreal she pivotally decided to change her ticket and switched destination from Halifax to New York.
Once in New York City Rothenberg quickly established herself with financial assistance from her parents and artistic connections from Cornell friends. For a time, she was involved in performance art, working for Joan Jonas and Nancy Graves; she also befriended the artists Alan Saret and Gordon Matta-Clark. She was intrigued by the Warhol Factory but determined that she didn't have an interesting enough persona to present to the Warhol machine, so she stayed downtown.
In 1974 Rothenberg drew a vertical line on a canvas and then added the figure of a horse thinking primarily of good proportion and questions of beauty, thus beginning her famous and influential “Horse” series. Her first solo show was in 1975 at 112 Greene Street, an alternative art space in SoHo, where she showed three of these new and large-scale horse paintings. Art critic Peter Schjeldhal deemed the horses a "eureka moment" and Rothenberg herself said at the time that she felt she had "found her voice." She sold her first painting for $1,500 when she was thirty years old, a fact that she still recalls vividly due to her routine of logging every painting she ever made in a now-tattered notebook.
Art world fame came to Rothenberg with her inclusion in the Whitney Museum's exhibition entitled “New Image Painting.” The featured artists had little in common other than their inclusion of the figure in painting at a time when this was seen as anathema. Rothenberg was then later classed as a Neo-Expressionist for her indulgence in dynamic brushstrokes, visceral paint, and the continuing presence of the figure.
Rothenberg never abandoned the horse completely, but by 1980 she was incorporating a more diverse array of imagery in her works such as birds, other animals, including dogs, body parts, and even the modernist Piet Mondrian. She also started using oil paint instead of acrylics at the suggestion of friend and fellow artist Elizabeth Murray, who said "you can get so much more texture in oil" and knew that Rothenberg's style in particular would benefit from this.
Throughout the 1980s Rothenberg participated in dozens of single and group shows, whilst famously saying in 1982 that she would not be a part of any group show where she was the only female artist.
Rothenberg met famed artist Bruce Nauman at a dinner party in 1988 and within three months the two were married. After a year and a half of going back and forth from New York (so Maggie could finish high school) to Galisteo, New Mexico, where Nauman owned a sprawling 700-acre ranch, Rothenberg moved to the Southwest permanently. The couple own numerous horses and dogs and even two yaks. The artist and her dogs go walking in the desert for an hour or two every morning and she considers herself somewhat of an amateur archeologist, digging for arrowheads and piecing together whole pots from shards left in the sand.
The sensory experience of the desert and concomitant feelings of isolation and spirituality permeate, at least to an extent, Rothenberg's late canvases. She and Nauman don't often leave the area, though they maintain an East Village studio and she still tries to be somewhat connected to the art world. She currently lives and works in New Mexico.
Rothenberg has achieved great success as an instinctive painter, holding on to a formal technique, pleasure in material, and a quest for proportional beauty in times when the pressure is always to be more political. Making colossal paintings, similar in their exquisite handling of paint to those of Agnes Martin, Rothenberg paradoxically uses size to draw our attention to the importance of quiet simplicity, to give due attention and space to relatively ordinary everyday musings.
Like the pioneering English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, Rothenberg is particularly good at capturing motion through her depiction of horses. Departing from the Victorian representation of the creature however, the artist presents a less realistic and more a mystical depiction designed to uncover feelings of hidden and ancient spirituality.
She successfully uses the technique of sparseness and presentation of parts to ultimately give a more profound image of the whole. Sometimes there are separated limbs, floating eyes, and multiple heads strung across the artist's canvas and as such, fragmentation comments more acutely on the fluid and uncontainable nature of human identity.
Quotations:
“Most artists really wish they had a series where one painting would lead to the next painting and it would be a variation on it. That’s what happened in my early career — the horses. Now the paintings are more of a battle to satisfy myself with and I do not have a sense of series.”
Personality
Susan Rothenberg was a precocious child and had an artistic urge and rebellious streak from an early age: sometimes, after being kicked out of class for talking out of turn, she would talk her way into an in-progress art class in a different part of her school.
Quotes from others about the person
...fundamentally, drawing is as much a matter of evocation as it is of depiction, of identifying the primary qualities of things in the world and transposing them without a loss of quiddity. This at any rate is what drawing has been for Rothenberg.
Interests
dancing, ballet
Artists
Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, and Clyfford Still
Music & Bands
rock 'n roll
Connections
Susan married the sculptor George Trakas in 1970 after meeting him at a Jonas piece that both of them were participating in. Both were part of an interdisciplinary circle of dancers, painters, sculptors, and musicians and Rothenberg at this point was already painting prolifically. Rothenberg and Trakas had a daughter, Maggie, born in 1972. The couple divorced in 1979, but always thereafter remained good friends. Rothenberg met famed artist Bruce Nauman at a dinner party in 1988 and within three months the two were married.