Tom Goldenberg

Tom Goldenberg (born 1948) is an American artist, best known for landscape and abstract paintings. He has shown throughout the United States and internationally, and his work has been covered by The New York Times, The New Criterion, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Art & Antiques, and The New York Observer, among other publications. Critics often note his landscape works for their contemporary interplay of stylization and observation and concern for form over verisimilitude, pointing to his beginnings in abstraction as a foundation that underlies his ordered pictorial structures. The New Criterion editor and writer Roger Kimball described his paintings as leading "double lives, as memorable evocations of rural landscape and tightly organized arrangements of abstract planes of color."

Life and career Goldenberg was born in 1948 in Evergreen Park, Illinois, a suburb just south of Chicago. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (BFA, 1970) and moved to New York City in 1973, taking a loft in Soho. His first solo exhibition there was at the Sarah Y. Rentschler Gallery in 1978; he has since then shown throughout the United States, at the George Billis Gallery, Danese, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries (1983–2004) and City University (CUNY) in New York, Hokin Gallery (Chicago), Watson de Nagy & Co. (Houston), and Swope Gallery (Venice, CA), among others. He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and the Krannert Art Museum. His work belongs to numerous corporate collections and those of CUNY, Bucknell University and the Ringling Museum.

Goldenberg is a Professional Fellow at the Morgan Library and has taught at the Art Students League, The New School and the New York Studio School. Critic Robert Messenger notes a resulting "Cubist sensibility that shines through in places," —influenced by artists such as Clyfford Still and Richard Diebenkorn, which largely consisted of painterly fields and architecturally ordered, rectangular areas of color.

Contemporary landscapes (1998–2012) In the late 1990s, Goldenberg turned to landscapes derived from the woodlands, rolling hills and farms of Dutchess County, New York, which culminated in a 1999 show that critic Hilton Kramer wrote, put him on the map as "one of the leading landscape painters of his generation." Kramer particularly admired as "virtuosic" the pictorial dialogue between the depicted, richly variegated terrain and its distorted reflection in water landscapes such as Pond and Brook (both 2000). In 2002, Goldenberg traveled to Porto Santo Stefano on the Tyrrhenian Sea, to paint a new environment.

In 2010, Goldenberg created his "Central Park Cherry" series of compressed charcoal, walnut ink and pastel drawings. It was also a departure from his more reflective landscapes in its limited palette, expressive Japanese-brush-like line, and imagery extracted from the natural context and set against the stark white of the paper. The final exhibited drawings and tonal paintings echoed the landscape's scope and drastic foreshortening with its contrasting foreground marks and linear furrow lines receding into the horizon. Writers have observed in these new paintings, such as Journal (2019), suggestions of "interior landscapes" reminiscent of ancient ritual sites (an influence that Goldenberg has acknowledged, based on travels to Israel, Greece and Macedonia) or architectural schematics.

"Drawing on Collections" course (2001–14) In 2001, Goldenberg designed a course about seeing and appreciating Master Drawings through The New School, called "Drawing on Collections", which he taught independently and at the Drawing Study Centers of the Morgan Library, the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hispanic Society of America, Brooklyn Museum and private collections in New York City. The course conducted close study—sometimes under magnifying glass—and discussions of hand-selected drawings brought out from behind glass from different museum or private collections.