Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg (February 2, 1906 – July 11, 1978) was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. Rosenberg is best known for his art criticism. From 1962 until his death, he was the art critic of The New Yorker.

Background

Harold Rosenberg was born on February 2, 1906, in Brooklyn, New York. After studying at the City College of New York from 1923 to 1924, he received his LL.B. from Brooklyn Law School (then a unit of St. Lawrence University) in 1927. Later, he often said he was "educated on the steps of the New York Public Library." Rosenberg embraced a bohemian lifestyle upon contracting osteomyelitis shortly after attaining his degree; the condition ultimately necessitated his use of a cane for the rest of his life.

Career

Throughout the 1930s, Rosenberg embraced Marxism and contributed to such publications as Partisan Review, The New Masses, Poetry and Art Front, which he briefly edited.

For much of World War II, he was deputy chief of the domestic radio bureau in the Office of War Information and a consultant for the Treasury Department from 1945 to 1946. Rosenberg deplored the attempts at commercialization of authentic experience through techniques of psychological manipulation available to mass media producers. He wrote mockingly of mass culture's efforts to consolidate and control the intricacies of human needs: The more exactly he grasps, whether by instinct or through study, the existing element of sameness in people, the more successful is the mass-culture maker. Indeed, so deeply is he committed to the concept that men are alike that he may even fancy that there exists a kind of human dead center in which everyone is identical with everyone else, and that if he can hit that psychic bull's eye he can make all mankind twitch at once.

Action painting

Rosenberg first used the term "action painting" in the essay "American Action Painters," published in the December 1952 issue of ARTnews. (The essay was reprinted in Rosenberg's book The Tradition of the New in 1959.)

title="The Bird for Every Bird" |quote=

I said to him: Why do you delay? He said: Because of what you desire. And I: You command my desires... So sweetly the argument went on from year to year.

Meanwhile it was raining blood and rage. The two Marquis, the white and the black Were crying like gulls out of my throat— My throat uncaring as the summer sky—

All to avenge themselves upon the dust. Leopards drowsed on the diving boards. I knew who had sent them in those green cases. Who doesn’t lose his mind will receive like me That wire in my neck up to the ear. — Harold Rosenberg

"The Bird for Every Bird"

Rosenberg wrote "The Bird for Every Bird", a brief poem of three stanzas and thirteen lines with violent imagery. The poem was significant for its association with an early artwork by the abstract expressionist artist Robert Motherwell which later inspired the Elegies to the Spanish Republic, one of the artists' longest running and best known series of works.

During 1947–48, Rosenberg collaborated with Motherwell and others to produce Possibilities, an art review. During the latter year Motherwell created an image incorporating Rosenberg's poem, meant for inclusion in the review's second issue. The top half was a handwritten, stylized rendering of the poem's final three lines, and the bottom half was a visual element consisting of roughly rendered black ovoid and rectangular forms against a white background. The stark image was meant to "illustrate" the violence of the poem in an abstract, non-literal way; Motherwell therefore preferred the term "illumination". The second issue of Possibilities did not materialize, and Motherwell placed the image in storage. He rediscovered it roughly one year later

Along with Clement Greenberg and Leo Steinberg, he was identified in Tom Wolfe's 1975 book The Painted Word as one of the three figures of "Cultureburg", so named for the enormous degree of influence their criticism exerted over the world of modern art.

Saul Bellow wrote a fictional portrait of Rosenberg in his short story "What Kind of Day Did You Have?".

He was a mentor to the critic, essayist, reporter, and novelist Renata Adler.

In 1987, Alan M. Wald quotes Rosenberg's 1965 "Death in the Wilderness" at the opening of his introductory chapter entitled "Political Amnesia" in his book The New York Intellectuals.