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Rosenberg (Harold) Papers
980048
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Title: Harold Rosenberg papers
Date (inclusive): 1923-1984
Number: 980048
Creator/Collector:
Rosenberg, Harold
Physical Description:
30 Linear Feet
(64 boxes, 8 flat file folders)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, California 90049-1688
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/askref
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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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.
Open for use by qualified researchers.
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Library Reproductions and Permissions .
Harold Rosenberg papers, 1923-1984, Getty Research Institute, Research Library, Accession no. 980048.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa980048
Acquired in 1998.
Papers were processed in 1998-1999.
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.
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
Steinberg, Saul
Rothko, Mark
Newman, Barnett
Pollock, Jackson
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Gorky, Arshile
De Kooning, Willem
United States. Works Progress Administration
United States. Office of War Information
New York School of Art
Existentialism
World War, 1939-1945 -- Art and the war
Abstract expressionism
Location (New York, N.Y. : Longview Foundation, Inc., 1963) New Yorker (New York, N.Y. : 1925) Commentary (New York, N.Y. : 1945) Nation (New York, N.Y. : 1865) Partisan review (New York, N.Y. : 1936) Dissent (New York, N.Y. : 1954)
Audiotapes
Diaries
Scores
Photographic prints
Photographs, Original
Posters
Tabak, May Natalie
Shapey, Ralph
Rosenberg, Harold
Reinhardt, Ad
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Motherwell, Robert
Hess, Thomas B.
Howe , Irving
Kaprow, Allan
Kristol, Irving
Phillips, William
Podhoretz, Norman
Raeburn, Ben
Beauvoir, Simone de
Barthelme, Donald
Guston, Philip
Burke, Kenneth
Bellow, Saul