Guide to the Samuel Rosenberg Papers and Photographs, 1918-2011
Arrangement
Repository
Heinz History Center
Title
Samuel Rosenberg Papers and Photographs
Creator
Rosenberg, Samuel, 1896-1972
Creator
Rosenberg, Libbie, 1898-1987
Creator
Rosenberg, Murray Z., 1925-1996
Collection Number
MSS 576
Extent
4 linear feet linear feet(4 boxes and 3 shelf volumes)
Date
1918-2011
Abstract
Samuel Rosenberg (1896-1972) has been called the "painter laureate of Pittsburgh." He spent nearly his entire professional life in Pittsburgh, creating a body of award-winning artwork that reflected a succession of styles from portraits to realistic Pittsburgh landscapes to abstract and non-representational paintings with emphasis on light and color. In addition, he was for many years an inspirational teacher of art at the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University, or CMU), the Young Men and Women's Hebrew Association, and the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University). This collection includes materials that document Rosenberg's teaching career, artistic development, and exhibition history, including posthumous exhibitions.
Language
The material in this collection is in English.
Author
The guide to this collection was written by Martha L. Berg.
Samuel Rosenberg (1896-1972) was born in Philadelphia, PA, to Solomon and Anna (Dickstein Turetsky) Rosenberg. As a young child, he moved with his family first to Erie and then, in 1907, to Pittsburgh. He attended the Osceola public school but dropped out at age fourteen. He was interested in art from an early age, taking classes at the Columbian Council School and receiving individual tutoring from Pittsburgh painter Jacob R. Coblens. Rosenberg spent one year (1916-1917) at the National Academy of Design in New York, then returned to Pittsburgh, where he held a variety of jobs while beginning to establish his career as a portraitist. During the course of his life in Pittsburgh, Rosenberg lived in the Oakland, Hill District, and Squirrel Hill neighborhoods. He served briefly in the U. S. Army in 1918, founded the Neighborhood Art School at the Irene Kaufmann Settlement in 1917, and in 1920 exhibited his work for the first time in the Carnegie International.
In 1922, Rosenberg married Libbie Levin (1898-1987), the daughter of Joseph Levin, who was the cantor at Tree of Life Congregation for more than 40 years. They had one son, Murray Z. Rosenberg (1925-1996). In 1924, Samuel Rosenberg began teaching drawing to architecture students in the night school at Carnegie Institute of Technology (CMU), where he continued to teach, ultimately as full Professor of Painting and Drawing in the College of Fine Arts, until his retirement in 1965. He completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at CMU in 1926. His best-known students at CMU were Philip Pearlstein and Andy Warhol.
From 1926-1964, Rosenberg taught an art class for adults at the Young Men and Women's Hebrew Association; from 1937-1945 he was also the Director of the Art Department at Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University). Shortly before his retirement, Rosenberg also taught for two summers at the University of Southern California. While Rosenberg put a great deal of effort into his preparations for teaching, he did not attempt to mold the stylistic choices of his students but rather to give them a solid technical foundation for their own artistic development. He encouraged self-exploration and experimentation in his students and was a gentle and positive critic of their work.
Rosenberg had given up commissioned portraiture in the 1940s, finding it too limiting, and he then concentrated on painting urban Pittsburgh scenes, especially in the Hill District, where he had lived in the 1920s. Rosenberg's painting style gradually became more abstract, expressing universal themes and human emotions through color and line. During the World War II years, Rosenberg painted subjects related more directly to his Jewish heritage and indirectly to the suffering, melancholy, and darkness of a world at war
In the 1950s, Rosenberg returned to a more representational style and included religious images among his subjects. In 1951, he was commissioned to paint a mural of Jesus teaching the children, for the entry to St. Henry's Church in the Arlington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. For this project, which took more than a year to complete, the murals were painted at Rosenberg's summer studio in Humbert, Somerset County, PA, and then installed in the church narthex.
From the 1950s to the end of his life, Rosenberg continued in the direction of greater abstraction, often creating small collages of blocks of colored paper as preparatory sketches for larger oil paintings; most of the paintings of this period emphasize the interaction of light and color. Rosenberg retired from teaching at CMU in 1965 and continued to paint until the end of his life, despite increasing health problems.
Samuel Rosenberg's work has been exhibited in group or solo shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Associated American Artists Gallery, all in New York City; at the Carnegie Museum of Art (where he was invited to submit artworks in every Carnegie International from 1933-1964), Carnegie Institute of Technology (CMU), Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Pittsburgh Plan for Art, Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center, and the Jewish Community Center, all in western Pennsylvania; and at many other universities, community art centers, and galleries throughout the United States.
Samuel Rosenberg's creative output included more than 500 paintings, as well as hundreds of preparatory drawings, sketches, and collages. His work has received many prizes and has been purchased and collected by museums, schools, corporations, and individuals. His influence on generations of art students in Pittsburgh continues to be felt through their own artistic output, and his reputation as the "painter laureate of Pittsburgh" remains unchallenged.
Scope and Content Notes
The Samuel Rosenberg Papers and Photographs consist of papers, correspondence, photographs, sales records, news clippings, scrapbooks, exhibition catalogs, database printouts, sketchbooks, and audio-visual materials related to the artistic career of Samuel Rosenberg.
Samuel Rosenberg and his wife, Libbie Levin Rosenberg, operated very much as a team during the course of his career as an artist. Libbie Rosenberg handled the administrative work related to Samuel Rosenberg's artworks, freeing him to spend his time painting and teaching. She created a card file of his paintings, including their exhibition history, sales prices, and ownership. She also collected news clippings about Rosenberg and catalogs for the exhibitions in which his work was shown. During Samuel Rosenberg's lifetime, he and Libbie jointly carried out correspondence related to the exhibitions and sales of his artworks. After his death in 1972, Libbie Rosenberg continued the correspondence and administrative work alone.
After Libbie Rosenberg's death in 1987, the Rosenbergs' only child, Murray Z. Rosenberg, inherited his parents' records and continued to correspond with museums, dealers, and individual owners of Samuel Rosenberg's paintings. Murray intended to publish a catalogue raisonné of his father's work, and to this end he collated his parents' existing records and also did research to track down additional information about exhibitions and sales. He created a comprehensive database to document paintings and their ownership, but he did not live to complete the catalogue raisonné.
Murray's wife Arline Levinson Rosenberg maintained the family papers after Murray's death in 1996. She made the records available to Barbara Jones, Chief Curator of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, who curated a major exhibition of Samuel Rosenberg's work there in 2003 and is the author of Samuel Rosenberg: Portrait of a Painter (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), the companion volume to the exhibition.
Materials in this collection show evidence of creation, use, and/or handling by all of the persons named above, and the original order has not consistently been maintained. The current arrangement of materials reflects an effort to preserve indications of creation or use by the different persons involved while still maintaining a structure that promotes accessibility for researchers. For information about paintings by Samuel Rosenberg, the most recent and complete listings will be found in the printouts of tables from the database created by Murray Rosenberg, which dates from the 1990s. Earlier information is in the inventories and in the card file created by Libbie Rosenberg, which has been maintained in its original order, as well as in exhibition catalogs, correspondence and the Organizations and Collectors series.
The collection contains many photographs of individual artworks, taken at different times. For the convenience of researchers, all of these have been arranged, where possible, in numerical order according to the number assigned by Murray Rosenberg for the database he created (several different versions of which are located in Series VI) as the basis for the catalogue raisonné he was hoping to complete for publication. In Murray Rosenberg's numbering scheme, the first two digits represent the year, and the second two digits are numbered chronologically according to the works created in that year. Additional photographs of artworks may be found in Series IV, in the accession records of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.
Notes made by Barbara Jones, often made on yellow post-it notes, have been copied and retained where possible, to indicate her use of those materials in the creation of her book. She made additional handwritten notes directly on some of the documents.
Arrangement
The Samuel Rosenberg Papers and Photographs are housed in four archival boxes, three shelf volumes, and three oversize folders. The materials are arranged in ten series. Series have been designated for Biographical information; Correspondence; Artworks; Organizations and collectors; Teaching; Murray Z. Rosenberg's preparatory materials for a catalogue raisonné of Samuel Rosenberg's work; Sketchbooks; Audio-visual materials; Photographs, and Oversize materials.
Conditions Governing Access
None
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Gift of Arline Rosenberg, daughter-in-law of Samuel Rosenberg, in 2010.0165. Aquistion #2010.0165
Preferred Citation
Samuel Rosenberg Papers and Photographs, 1918-2011, MSS 567, Rauh Jewish Archives, Thomas and Katherine Detre Library and Archives, Senator John Heinz History Center
Processing Information
This collection was processed by Martha L. Berg in November 2011.
Conditions Governing Use
Property rights reside with the Senator John Heinz History Center. Literary rights are retained by the creators of the records and their heirs. For permission to reproduce or publish, please contact the Thomas and Katherine Detre Library and Archives of the Senator John Heinz History Center.
Related Materials
"Christ Teaching," Samuel Rosenberg's mural for St. Henry Church, is in the Museum Division (accession number 2001.11).
Samuel Rosenberg: Portrait of a Painter, by Barbara L. Jones (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), is in the Library.
Archival collections containing related material include Records of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, 1910-2003, (Bulk 1984-2000), MSS #399, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; Papers of Aaronel deRoy Gruber, 1954-1998, MSS# 335, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; Sibyl Barsky Grucci Papers, 1921-2005, MSS#423, Rauh Jewish Archives, Senator John Heinz History Center; Abe Weiner Papers and Photographs, 1936-2011, MSS#582, Rauh Jewish Archives, Library and Archives Division, Senator John Heinz History Center; and Records of the Irene Kaufmann Settlement, 1922-1957 (bulk 1922-1936), MSS#78, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.
A film by Kenneth Love, Samuel Rosenberg: Pittsburgh's Painter Laureate, documents Rosenberg's life and work.
Separated Materials
A collection of drawings, collages, small paintings, and sketchbooks has been separated to the Museum Division, with the accession number 2010.53. This collection also includes the painting "Bigelow Boulevard Under Construction" (oil and tempera on masonite, 1940), and two preparatory drawings for it.
