ROSE, HERMAN

ROSE, HERMAN (1909– ), U.S. painter, watercolorist, and educator. Born in Brooklyn, he studied at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design and served in the WPA. Although Rose painted subjects in England, Israel, Spain, and Mexico, he is best known for depicting the architecture of New York City and Brooklyn in small cityscapes with a palette of sober colors. An oil painting like Blake Avenue, Brooklyn (1940) manages to evoke intimacy while also depicting the Brooklyn street of the title as a dynamic diagonal which plunges the viewer from foreground to background. Rose's work has a picturesque, quietly emotive quality which compares to that of the 18th-century English Romantics. The artist often utilized a painting technique which involved applying small spots of paint to the surface of his work, and then moving warm and cool tones over one another; this resulted in a low level relief in which the paint dabs retained their identity. For instance, the painting Manhattan Tops, which the artist painted from his New York rooftop studio, depicts the city skyline dominated by a thickly textured sky. Rose also painted portraits and still-lifes. He carried the nuances of his vision from pale tonal impastos to thinner, more luminous washes throughout the years. His work has been exhibited at many museums and galleries, including the "Fifteen Americans" exhibition of 1952, the Pennsylvania Academy of Art and the Rutgers University Art Gallery. He received a Lee Krasner award in recognition of lifetime achievement. Many major museums and galleries own examples of his work, including the Newark Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Norton Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Berman and J. Wechsler, Realism and Realities: the Other Side of American Painting, 1940–1960, January 17–March 26, 1982 (1981); L. Campbell, "Objects on Parade – Paintings by Herman Rose," in: Art in America, vol. 84 (Jan. 1996). (Nancy Buchwald (2nd ed.)