Susan Rothenberg (b. 1945)
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Susan Rothenberg (b. 1945)

Diagonal

Details
Susan Rothenberg (b. 1945)
Diagonal
acrylic on canvas
46 x 60 in. (116.8 x 152.4 cm.)
Painted in 1975.
Provenance
Willard Gallery, New York
Sable-Castelli, Ltd., Toronto
Private collection, Detroit
Anon. sale; Sotheby's, New York, 5 November 1985, lot 78
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
Toronto, Sable-Castelli, Ltd., Susan Rothenberg, 1976.
Cincinnati Art Museum; New Orleans Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Making Their Mark-Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, 1970-85, February-December 1989, p. 50, no. 24 (illustrated in color).
Special notice
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Lot Essay

Susan Rothenberg has always had a complex relationship to her medium. Many critics have noted how she needed to find a subject that would elicit an emotional response before even putting brush to canvas. She found it in the image of the horse, which she has used as a formal element for many years to help her explore the medium of painting.

Often seen as a key figure in the transition from Minimalism to Neoexpressionism, Rothenberg introduced symbolic imagery to Minimalist abstraction. The first paintings she produced after moving to New York in 1967 primarily consisted of geometric abstractions. In 1973, she began painting horses; one art historian relates how the project began after Rothenberg "inexplicably doodled a crude horse on a small piece of unstreched canvas" (M. Auping, Susan Rothenberg: Paintings and Drawings, New York, 1992, p.17).

Over the next five years, Rothenberg completed a series of approximately forty horse paintings that brought her both critical attention and public recognition. Her first solo exhibition in New York in 1975, which comprised three large-scale painting of horses, was heralded for introducing imagery to Minimalist art and imparting a new sensitivity to figurative painting. Critic Peter Schjeldahl noted that "the large format of the pictures was a gesture of ambition" and that "the mere reference to something really existing was astonishing."

Rothenberg's first horses-- like the animal in Diagonal-- were rendered with powerfully simple means, with figure and ground in the same monochromatic palette (black, white, or sienna). The "elegantly primitive" horse was often depicted in profile, its contours lined by a few strong vertical or diagonal lines. Although equine symbolism is rather fraught, Rothenberg did not have any personal relationship to the figure of the horse, but rather used it as a vehicle for formal investigation. As she explained,

"One of the things that drawing added to horse paintings was a sense of geometry. I remember I made a number of small drawings in which I drew straight lines through the horse. . . . But the lines in those drawings added geometry, which added a needed tension to the paintings. It was a way of making this big, soft animal tougher and a bit more abstract, and also a way of unifying figure/ground spatially." (Artist's interview in Ibid, p.50).

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