Background
Ralph Rosenborg was born on June 9, 1913 in New York, United States to Swedish immigrants. In his youth he sketched scenes of the Long Island countryside while his mother worked as a domestic cook.
Ralph Rosenborg was born on June 9, 1913 in New York, United States to Swedish immigrants. In his youth he sketched scenes of the Long Island countryside while his mother worked as a domestic cook.
During high school Rosenborg began training in art seriously through the School Art League at the American Museum of Natural History in 1929. He went on to study privately from 1930 to 1933 with Henriette Reiss, an associate of Kandinsky. His teacher’s insights into European culture prompted Rosenborg to explore avant-garde developments, causing him to abandon his academic style to explore his interests in gesture and abstraction.
While delving into modernism despite the stigma applied to American abstraction at the time, Rosenborg‘s skills were put to use in both the Public Works of Art Project and the Teaching, Easel, and Mural divisions of the Works Progress Administration. While in the Mural division he worked alongside Arshile Gorky, and was in the company of modernists such as Ad Reinhardt, William Baziotes, and Joseph Stella in the Easel division. After his experience teaching within the WPA, Rosenborg became part of the original faculty at the Brooklyn Museum School, and held positions at New York’s Public Schools 9, 43, and 72, as well as the University of Wyoming and University of North Carolina.
From the opening of his first solo show of oils and watercolors at New York’s Eighth St. Playhouse in 1935, Rosenborg regularly exhibited in New York and throughout the country. Then Rosenborg taught at the Brooklyn Museum School in 1936-1938. In 1938 he contributed the essay "Non-Objective Creative Expression" to the Yearbook that accompanied the American Abstract Artists’ second annual exhibition at the Gallery of American Fine Arts Society.
Besides, Rosenborg explored the use of symbols and featured hieroglyphics in a number of works. On the whole, however, Rosenborg’s style was directly based in nature, abstracting landscape forms and developing atmospheric depth in layers of color. His expressionistic take on abstraction relied on sensory impressions, demonstrating the artist’s interaction with reality.
Beginning in the late 1930s Rosenborg took up work as a guard for Baroness Hilla Rebay’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting, a position shared with Jackson Pollock.
In 1949 and 1950 Rosenborg took part in Studio 35, a series of evening discussions on subjects of avant-garde art.
In 1966 Rosenborg traveled to Europe. During the 1970s he became largely reclusive, but remained committed to painting. His work would exhibit frequently throughout the next several decades, including exhibitions hosted by the State Department and U.S. Embassy of Dublin as well as the Butler Institute of American Art.
In 1991 after suffering a stroke, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he died on October 22, 1992.
Ralph Rosenborg was the first recognized pioneer in Abstract Expressionism in the United States during the mid 1930s.
Besides, Rosenborg was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Childe Hassam Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1960 and the Arts and Humanities Award awarded by the National Council of the Arts in 1966. He also received the awards from the Hereward Lester Cooke Foundation in 1981 and the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation in 1982.
An Italian Landscape with Trees
American Landscape: A Summer Day
Landscape with Weeds, Spain
Landscape: A Country Road and Wild Flowers
Composition in Red and Black
Landscape with Hills and Lake
Landscape Study: Sky and Clouds
Landscape: Summer Flowers
American Landscape: Mountain with Archaic Forms
Monhegan Island Seascape
Flower Garden
American Landscape: Garden of Flowers
Autumn Landscape
In 1936 Rosenborg became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, participating in the group’s annual exhibitions and contributing to their multi-faceted efforts to bring attention to the development of modern art in America.
The same year Rosenborg joined "The Ten", a group of abstract painters including Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Louis Schanker, who formed to promote experimentation within modern art.
Besides, he was a member of the Southern Printmakers Society, Scandinavian-American Artists, Federation of Modern Painters & Sculptors, and Woodstock Art Association.
Ralph Rosenborg married Margaret Rosenborg in 1951.
