ROTHSTEIN, IRMA

ROTHSTEIN, IRMA (1906–1971), U.S. sculptor. Rothstein was born in Rostov, Russia, lived in Vienna, and immigrated to the United States in 1938. Her media included wood, cast stone, terracotta, and bronze. Her sculptures often featured expressive heads and torsos of women. Rothstein's style varied, from references to ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, to a compact, muscular terracotta of a sleeping nude evocative of Gauguin, to a bronze with an exaggerated, elongated neck and slightly tilted head, her haughty stare rendered with an Expressionist economy of means. Her well-known busts include George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway, and the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. She exhibited in New York art galleries, including the Galerie St. Etienne, as well as the American Artists Professional League, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New School for Social Research, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. She belonged to the American Artists Professional League and the National Association of Women Artists. Her work is in the collections of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, the George Walter Smith Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Newark Museum, New Jersey, among other institutions. (Nancy Buchwald (2nd ed.)