Berta Rosenbaum Golahny Art for Sale and Sold Prices

b. 1925 - d. 2005

Berta Rosenbaum Golahny (February 7, 1925 – November 4, 2005) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor.

Golahny was born into a Jewish immigrant family in Detroit, Michigan. Her parents were Fannie Henkin Rosenbaum (1889–1953, b. in Belarus) and Gedaliah Rosenbaum (1889–1985, b. in Wlodova, Poland). As a child, Golahny began to draw while watching her father design wrought-iron pieces for the company he founded, Liberty Ironworks, some of whose ornamental gates and railings remain standing in Detroit.[1]

She was educated at Detroit’s Cass Technical High School and then in 1943-4 the Art Students League of New York, having received a National Scholarship. There, George Grosz encouraged her drawing and French artist Ossip Zadkine introduced her to sculpture.

Golahny continued her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. After receiving her Bachelor's in Fine Art from the Art Institute in 1947, Golahny completed her studies at the University of Iowa, from which she received a Master's in Fine Art in 1950. At Iowa, she studied printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky, art history under William S. Heckscher, and painting under Eugene Ludins. Her thesis painting, The Resurrection, was awarded the Painting Prize by juror Ben Shahn. In 1951, she was awarded a fellowship from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. While at Iowa, she married Yehuda Golahny, an engineering student in Detroit. When Yehuda began to pursue a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering at MIT (class of 1954), the couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. After two years, they moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where they settled.

From 1959 to 2001, she taught at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.[3] The Center now gives an annual award in her honor.[4] She exhibited in the US and other countries in several hundred juried and invitational shows, and was very well reviewed.[5] Today her work is held in private collections in America, France, and Israel, and in museums including the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Wichita Art Museum, the Williams College Art Museum, the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the E. J. Pratt Library at the University of Toronto.

Golahny used the traditional media of etching, wood engraving, and woodcut. She experimented with monotype, with different ways of biting the plate, and with electric tools to incise lines upon zinc and copper plates.[6]