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INVENTORY OF THE HAROLD ROSENBERG PAPERS,
1923-1984
980048
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Title: Harold Rosenberg papers
Dates: 1923-1984
Collection number: 980048
Creator:
Rosenberg, Harold, 1906-1978
Extent:
ca. 30 linear ft.
(64 boxes, 8 flat file
folders)
Repository:
Getty Research Institute
Research Library
Special Collections and Visual Resources
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, CA
90049-1688
Abstract: American art critic who developed the concept of "action painting" to describe the work of New York School painters such as
De Kooning and Pollock. In 1967 Rosenberg became the regular art reviewer for
The New Yorker. The papers offer a comprehensive view of his professional life from the early 1930s until his death in 1978, with the greatest
portion of material from the 1960s and 1970s.
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Language: Collection material in English
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Library Rights and Reproductions
Harold Rosenberg papers, 1923-1984, Getty Research Institute,
Research Library, Accession no. 980048.
Acquired in 1998.
Papers were processed in 1998-1999.
Harold Rosenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1906. Like many of
his generation of New York intellectuals, he was educated in the 1920s at City
College, where debate about Marxism and its relationship to the arts
flourished. The issues that concerned Rosenberg, and peers such as Irving Howe,
Irving Kristol, Dwight MacDonald, Norman Podhoretz, and William Phillips, would
generate influential journals such as
Partisan Review,
Dissent, and
Commentary along with numerous other, often short-lived
little magazines. It was in the little magazines that Rosenberg for many years
found his readership. While working for the Works Progress Administration in
the 1930s and for the Office of War Information in the 1940s and for the
Advertising Council of America until 1973, he persistently published in these
journals a prodigious number of poems, book reviews, art reviews, and
theoretical essays. A selection of the essays were published as a book,
The Tradition of the New, in 1959, when Rosenberg was
fifty-three. The book reached a wider audience than the individual pieces had,
and from that point on Rosenberg was in demand as a speaker, writer, and
professor. In 1963 he gave the Gauss seminars at Princeton, and from 1966 until
his death in 1978 he taught at University of Chicago as a member of the
Committee on Social Thought. In 1962, he began publishing art reviews in
The New Yorker, becoming, in 1967, their regular reviewer.
These reviews, along with pieces he wrote for other prominent journals, were
collected in the form of several books, including
The Anxious Object (1964),
Artworks and Packages (1969),
The De-Definition of Art (1972), and
Art On the Edge (1971). He also wrote books on individual
artists he admired, such as William De Kooning, Saul Steinberg, and Barnett
Newman.
Rosenberg's particular fusion of Marxist theory and modernism
employed existentialism. In the late '40s and early '50s, he published in
Les Temps Modernes and other French publications with the
help of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Rosenberg's theoretical
interests and critical observation of artists such as DeKooning and Pollock
crystallized in his signature piece, "The American Action Painters," published
in
Art News in 1952. He argued that for these artists
painting was a spontaneous event in the search for individual identity, and the
resultant work on canvas was but a record of that search and not an object
created for the purpose of aesthetic pleasure. This argument was ever afterward
associated with Rosenberg, and he continued to revise and adapt it for the rest
of his career as an art reviewer.
A brilliant polemicist who loved debate and discussion, Rosenberg had
many enduring friendships among the intellectual elite of his day. The mutual
animosity he and Clement Greenberg felt for each other, is also, however, an
integral part of Rosenberg's personal history and the history of the New York
School, whose work these critics so assiduously championed. From their early
rivalry over a staff position at
Partisan Review, to later mutual attacks in public and in
print, Rosenberg and Greenberg, equally influential, came to represent two
opposing approaches to the art of their day, even if, from the vantage point of
the present day, they held many assumptions and judgements in common.
Rosenberg was married for more than forty years to the late May
Natalie Tabak, a fiction writer who, like Rosenberg, published in
The New Yorker. They had a daughter, Patia Rosenberg, who
survives them.
Scope and Content of Collection
The Harold Rosenberg Papers present a comprehensive view of
Rosenberg's professional life from the early 1930s until his death in 1978,
with the greatest portion of material from the 1960s and '70s. Correspondence
offers a history of the issues and debates that concerned New York
intellectuals who published and edited influential journals such as
Dissent,
Commentary,
Partisan Review, and
Art News. The manuscripts show the range of topics
Rosenberg's thoughtful writings encompassed in the little magazines that
embraced him for three decades, writings on politics, literature, art, art
education, and philosophy. They also show the maturation of his style as a
reviewer for
The New Yorker. Interviews and teaching files give a
glimpse of Rosenberg as a dynamic and spontaneous speaker, a dimension of him
that the audiotape also preserves. The relatively small amount of personal
material, such as family correspondence, journals and photographs, evoke the
climate of his personal life, while clippings and printed matter chronicle the
social and intellectual era in which Rosenberg lived and worked.
Arrangement
The papers are arranged in seven series:
Series
I. Correspondence, 1932-1984
Series
II. Manuscripts, 1929-1978
Series
III. Clippings, serials and printed matter, 1925-1981
Series
IV. Personal, 1923-1978
Series
V. Manuscripts by others, 1953-1978
Series
VI. Photographs and Artwork, 1942-1977
Series
VII. Audiotape, undated
De Kooning, Willem,
1904-
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881
Gorky, Arshille,
1904-1948
Newman, Barnett, 1905-1970
Pollock, Jackson, 1912-1956
Rothko, Mark,
1903-1970
Steinberg,
Saul
Commentary (New York, N.Y. :
1945)
Dissent (New York, N.Y. :
1954)
Partisan review (New York, N.Y. :
1936)
Location (New York, N.Y. : Longview
Foundation, Inc., 1963)
Nation (New York, N.Y. :
1865)
New Yorker (New York, N.Y. :
1925)
United States—Works Progress
Administration
United States—Office of War
Information
New York School of
Art
Abstract
Expressionism
Existentialism
World War, 1939-1945—Art
and the war
Audiotapes
Diaries
Posters
Photographs,
original
Photographic
prints
Scores
Barthelme,
Donald
Bellow, Saul
Burke, Kenneth,
1897-
Beauvoir, Simone de,
1908-
Guston, Philip,
1913-
Hess, Thomas
B.
Howe, Irving
Kaprow, Allan
Kristol,
Irving
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice,
1908-1961
Motherwell,
Robert
Phillips, William, 1907
Nov. 14-
Podhoretz,
Norman
Raeburn, Ben
Reinhardt, Ad,
1913-1967
Shapey, Ralph,
1921-
Tabak, May
Natalie