Painter, Pastel Artist, Lithographer, b. 1889 - d. 1971
Doris Patty Rosenthal (July 10, 1889 – November 26, 1971) was an American painter, printmaker, designer, and educator, who made solitary explorations into remote areas of Mexico in search of indigenous peoples. Over several decades beginning in the 1930s, Rosenthal made hundreds of sketches in charcoal and pastel depicting the everyday life and domestic activities of Indian and mestizo peasant culture, which she later used to create large-scale studio paintings. LIFE magazine featured Rosenthal’s art and travels in Mexico in a five-page spread in 1943.
Doris Rosenthal setting out on a sketching trip, Pátzcuaro, Mexico, 1943
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Rosenthal a fellowship in 1931 to do creative work in painting in Mexico, where she was to live for two years beginning in August 1931. Thereafter, she made yearly trips to the country residing in small villages during the summer months. The Guggenheim Foundation awarded her a second fellowship for further work in Mexico in 1936. Rosenthal moved permanently to Mexico in 1957, and died in the city of Oaxaca in 1971.
Early life and career: Rosenthal was born in Riverside, California, in 1889 into a prosperous Jewish family and raised on a ranch. Her father, Emil Julius Rosenthal, had settled in Riverside in 1872 from Müelhasen, Thüringen, Prussian (Germany), and married Anna Jane Unruh.[6] Rosenthal launched her career as an artist in Los Angeles in the 1910s, when progressive trends were emerging in southern California art. Rosenthal was close to Helena Dunlap, the pioneer Los Angeles modernist and founder in 1916 of the Los Angeles Modern Art Society, one of the first modernist groups to form in the region.
Rosenthal and Dunlap traveled to Taos, New Mexico, in 1917. There, they briefly resided and exhibited alongside the leading American painters George Bellows, Robert Henri and others in the inaugural exhibition in Santa Fe’s new Fine Arts Museum. Rosenthal exhibited in the California Art Club spring exhibitions at the Los Angeles Museum in 1917 and 1919, showing Indian Women of Taos in 1917.
Rosenthal went to New York to study at the Art Students League with Bellows and John Sloan in 1917–1918, and attended classes in the studio of the broad-minded bohemian George Luks. In 1920, she worked as a commercial designer of silks in order to fund a trip to Europe.
Later career: Rosenthal studied first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, and then went on a sketching trip to Berlin, Rome, and Munich, staying throughout 1921 and 1922. Following her European tour, she married Charles “Jack” Charash, a press agent, theatrical manager, dramatist, and co-founder of the Anglo-Jewish Theatre, a unit of the WPA Federal Theatre Project.
In the late 1920s, Rosenthal published a series of portfolios featuring design motifs drawn from the art and artifacts of an international array of museum collections. The Prim-Art Series portfolios are arranged around themes such as transportation, costumes, and animal motifs. The series signaled her study of ethnographic or “primitive” art and culture and were instrumental in winning her two Guggenheim awards to work in Mexico. The portfolios helped introduce new aesthetics to design, and were acclaimed as useful resources for professional designers and as teaching tools for art instructors.
Rosenthal was a lifelong art instructor and educator, having earned a degree in teaching from Los Angeles State Teachers College in 1910, and Teachers College of Columbia University in 1913. She taught painting and drawing in Columbia University’s Teacher’s College from 1924 to 1931, and at James Monroe High School in the Bronx thereafter.
Doris Rosenthal produced a large body of work over a six-decade career. Her Depression-era American Scene paintings focusing on Mexican life and culture were nationally respected and covered by major art publications and popular magazines such as LIFE, Newsweek, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New Yorker. She had the support of the eminent critics and historians Edward Alden Jewel, Lewis Mumford, and Carleton Beals; and the Midtown Galleries in New York handled her paintings and works on paper. Her work was included in important exhibitions such as American Painting Today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
According to Mexican art critic Gulliermo Rivas: "Doris Rosenthal is not striving to escape her work, but rather to go out and meet it."
Rosenthal, Doris (American, 1889-1971), Flowers and Fruit, lithograph, 15 x 11.5 inches, pencil signed and numbered 23/95, framed measuring 23 x 19 inches, Provenance: Midtown Galleries, New York
Doris Rosenthal (1889-1971) American, Lithograph. 1946 lithograph titled 'Night Train' and numbered 32/73. Pencil signed in the lower right, titled and numbered in the lower left. Doris Rosenthal is known for Mod genre, landscape, still life painting. Few American painters have as an adventurous spirit as Doris Rosenthal. Fearlessly and alone she has traveled to the remotest Indian corners of Mexico in search of material, not merely for her paints, but to feed that spirit of freedom and exaltation out of which good art has always been distilled. For many the more direct story of her personal adventures, both physical and spiritual, would quite likely be fully as exciting as her canvasses, into which she has poured the essence of her experience. Most American painters who have felt the "Mexican urge" have been trapped into sterile limitation of such native masters as Diego Rivera or Clemente Orozco, or they have been too easily duped by picturesque or the bizarre. But Doris Rosenthal's paintings has remained wholly original and more basic, and though the setting, when she is not concerned with American themes, may be unusual, she has remained so close to the warm realities of simple everyday life, wherever she has found herself, be it in New York or the jungles, that she immediately bridges, without losing the essential quality of alien incidents, the gulf of geography, race and culture that separates us from our southern neighbors. The deepest enjoyment of her paintings comes not so much from the novel scene as from the human warmth, the universality of the emotions and acts she portrays, plus her shrewd organization of theme, her rhythmic design, her strong but subdued colors, and her skillful brushwork. Her sincerity, honesty and knowledge are well fused in nearly every canvas. Overall Size: 17 1/8 x 13 1/8 in. #5221 Location BOX 11
Doris Rosenthal New York, California / Mexico, (1889 - 1971) Boquet etching Pencil signed lower right, Numbered 29/30, and titled lower left. From the Archives of askART: The Mexican Odyssey of an American Painter: Doris Rosenthal By Carleton Deals for Midtown Galleries, 605 Madison Avenue, New York City (circa 1970) Few American painters have as an adventurous spirit as Doris Rosenthal. Fearlessly and alone she has traveled to the remotest Indian corners of Mexico in search of material, not merely for her paints, but to feed that spirit of freedom and exaltation out of which good art has always been distilled. For many the more direct story of her personal adventures, both physical and spiritual, would quite likely be fully as exciting as her canvasses, into which she has poured the essence of her experience. Most American painters who have felt the "Mexican urge" have been trapped into sterile limitation of such native masters as Diego Rivera or Clemente Orozco, or they have been too easily duped by picturesque or the bizarre. But Doris Rosenthal's paintings has remained wholly original and more basic, and though the setting, when she is not concerned with American themes, may be unusual, she has remained so close to the warm realities of simple everyday life, wherever she has found herself, be it in New York or the jungles, that she immediately bridges, without losing the essential quality of alien incidents, the gulf of geography, race and culture that separates us from our southern neighbors. The deepest enjoyment of her paintings comes not so much from the novel scene as from the human warmth, the universality of the emotions and acts she portrays, plus her shrewd organization of theme, her rhythmic design, her strong but subdued colors, and her skillful brushwork. Her sincerity, honesty and knowledge are well fused in nearly every canvas. Born in California, Miss Rosenthal was graduated from Los Angeles State Teacher's College and completed her studies at Columbia University. At the Art Students League, she studied under Bellows and Sloan, among others, then traveled extensively in Europe, sketching and gaining knowledge. She began her own teaching career at Teacher's College in New York City and at present is an instructor at the James Monroe High School, a 10,000 pupil institution, in the same city. She is one of the few persons who have twice received a Guggenheim Fellowship ( in 1932 and 1936). She utilized the stipends to live and work in Mexico over long periods of time. Her one-man exhibits from time to time at the Midtown Galleries in New York City have nearly always been favorably and often enthusiastically received by nearly all the critics, and she is now represented in leading public collections in the country. Her Sacred Music, purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of New York, has been described by an outstanding authority as "typical of her most distinguished gift, that of rhythmic yet disciplined design." I first met Doris Rosenthal at a luncheon ten years ago in the home of Frances Adams in New York City. Later in Mexico City, I had the pleasure of accompanying her and her husband, who is connected with theater in New York, on their first visits to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Tenayuca and Santa Cecilia and on various other excursions. When opportunity has presented, I have visited them in their studio apartment on 86th Street in New York and in their home in Silvermine, Connecticut. Once my wife and I were lengthy guests in their somewhat primitive but thoroughly delightful quarters on a roof in Mexico City, reached through quaint back alley corridors and a caracole iron ladder. The thrill of such visits has always been when Doris would finally reluctantly pull out her most recent work to show us. She has an irrepressible enthusiasm about everything and everybody she meets, a perennial eagerness for experience and knowledge. Her comments are keen, sharp-edged, often dismayingly frank, but they are invariably accompanied by so much laughter and good cheer that I have never seen anyone take offense however direct her thrust. She is jealous of her working time, but boundless in her hospitality. In Mexico she soon found herself quite as much at home as her own country, not merely in the capital, but out in the remotest Indian pueblos in the mountains where in some cases, no white person had been seen in a generation. She just missed a tidal wave on the far west coast of Colima. She lived long periods alone in the mountains of Michoacán among the Tarascan Indians of the famous but little known "Eleven Pueblos, " in Cheran, Mahuatzin, Cucuchuehu and Ihuatzio. She has been in the Tierra Caliente -- the hot country--and has spent time in far-off Tacambaro and down on the Gulf in Alvarado, the quaint mestizo fishing town below Vera Cruz at the broad mouth of the Papoloapam, the River of Butterflies. Not everyone would enjoy spending his Christmas in an alien setting, on a far, narrow strip of sand and wind-blown pines, down among the smelly fish wharves, the piled up puestos of bananas and pineapples, and the chatter of market women, but for Doris--initiated into the mysteries of the hilarious pre-Christmas festivals, the posadas, the uproarious breaking of the pinatas, and the quaint candle-bearing processions of children along the ancient weather-beaten streets and through the patios--it was probably the happiest Christmas she ever spent. With only and Indian guide she struck through the most rugged part of the Oaxaca Sierras, up to the famed Yalalag of the women of sixty necklaces; and in the western mountains of Nayarit, she traveled through what is usually considered very dangerous country from Acaponeta over to Huajicori. In the Sierra de Puebla she lived in Acaxochitlan and Huechinango, and only last summer mule-backed up through those same lofty peaks and valleys far into the interior to Pahuatlan, and from Zaragossa on horseback to Cuetzalan-- gorgeous country all of it, where from high up in the clear crisp southern air one can see the far silver-blue waters of the Gulf. One suspects that in one of her canvases Arrivals and Departures the primitive Mexican courtyard of milling animals and muleteers and stacked carbines, of the village posada called El gran Hotel Paris, the figure modestly entering off to one side of a burro, loaded down with artist's paraphernalia, is perhaps a humorous representation of the artist herself embarked on one of her numerous inland voyages. Humor constantly peeks into the details of Doris' canvases--usually it is warm and kindly, but occasionally more mordant. Rarely however does her work have a purely anecdotal quality; her mastery of form and color, her intimacy with plants, animals, human beings and settings is too profound for her to depend on mere story telling to carry her canvases. She has an original rhythm of line, very dominant yet subtle, which gives her paintings a structural quality different from that of any other artist, a composition usually daring yet so mastered that it never startles one away from appreciation. Proper balance--not merely technical, but of all the elements, color content and inner meaning, never permits false distortion. Miss Rosenthal covers over the ribs of her own technique competently. For a woman to travel alone in rural Mexico is wholly unconventional, and rural Mexico so isolated by poor communications, is sharply suspicious of all outsiders, let alone foreigners; yet Doris managed to overleap the barriers and establish herself on a footing of friendliness. Everywhere she went she has found folk to make friends with. Anyone who knows such places will realize that more coin of the realm would not procure a single model to draw. Persuasion, trust, friendly interest are the only things that could have turned the trick. The result is seen in her work. Not a single canvas fails to demonstrate the author's vital intimate knowledge of the places and peoples she depicts. She is not content with surface lines and colors, but goes behind to the essence. Hence all her work has considerably more than technical dimensions; it has spiritual penetration, a knowledge of cultural unity and continuity, of the relationship of people to their plants, their fruits, their animals, their dwellings, their food; and these relationships--which a scientific anthropologist would need a whole volume to classify--emerge in her canvases in a swift illuminating correlation of the bend of the arm to the arc of a banana stalk, of a falling fold of a rebozo to the drapery of Vegetation, the angle of a leg to the adobe hut or the truncated pyramid. The whole weaves into an integrated pattern that achieves a unity over and beyond her satisfying technical proficiency, because it is the unity also of the life which she discovered, participated in, felt and thought about. The synthesis is admirably achieved in one canvas I remember vividly, an adolescent Indian girl seated on a rude bench, holding a bunch of bananas on her head. The deep liquid eyes, the infinite patience tie in with the native aesthetic, the luxurious simplicity of flowing limbs and white garments, fluid curves echoed in the fruit forms and the whirl of black hair, the dark heavy background, portentousness achieved by mere color without detail. The whole is poignant and rich. Unlike many of her modern contemporaries, Miss Rosenthal nowhere reveals a bleeding artist's soul, crucified by our harsh times. Her canvases do not stagger toward any passionate unfilled striving. She has a more clear-eyed conception of her role. The emotions are to be created in the observer with relation to the material presented. Her own emotions are non-essential as a mere spectacle, they are essential only in so far as her art can recreate such emotional stresses in those who examine her work. For her the real values are to be found in the relationship set up between her audience and her materials, rather than her audience and her own ego. Perhaps this is one reason she never fell under the spell of the leading Mexican artists. She loves people, her material and her art too much to throw it into the maw of her own agonizing soul, as does Clemente Orozco. She is too honest and objective with her material to make it an unwilling hand-maiden to partisan propaganda as does Diego Rivera, who thereby frequently sacrifices the inner essence and presents us with a poster-like anecdote, often close to caricature. Doris is particularly happy in her pictures of children. She has a warm understanding for them, and her studies have such sentiment without over being sentimentalized. She understands the waywardness and deviltry of children just as much as their more blessed qualities. Her scenes of Mexican school roams, despite their friendly warmth, are freighted also with pathos and the tragedy of Mexico, a country long shrouded in ignorance and falteringly seeking new light. She is not wholly tied to the Mexican scone. Many of her canvases tell the authentic story of New England attics, old and warped. She knows the common denominator, true for all the centuries, of a Connecticut woman looking into a cracked mirror by a dormer window, and voluminously garbed women primping from rouge pots on a patio veranda in the distant tropics. She has poked around the sweat shops and ateliers of New York. Her canvas Regents shows that she is quite as fascinated by her own New York students as by those in Mexico. The Concert depicts two New York boys playing accordions, while a third listens intently. For ten years I have watched the talents of Doris Rosenthal steadily expand, her abilities increase, her understanding deepen, and I believe that her work will outlast our own times, that she has made a permanent contribution to American culture. And just as a foot note: if our good officials would sprinkle in a larger number of Doris Rosenthals, along with business men, army officers and diplomats, the good neighbor policy would be probably not so often gang aft aglee. Such contact, both north and south of the Rio Grand, bring a real contribution to the friendly interchange of knowledge and culture. The Mexicans who met her vividly realize that America is something greater than concessions and dollar chasing or even international policy. And those Americans who look at her work can not help but gain, in one swift illuminating moment, a whole new comprehension of the beautiful world discovered by the artist, and with it a feeling of warm generosity towards the people who live in her canvases. Information provided by Dennis M. Boyer, the artist's grand-nephew
Doris Patty (Charash) Rosenthal New York, California / Mexico., (1889 - 1971) Sleeping Girl, 1943 gouache / watercolor on paper signed lower right. Newcomb-Macklin Co. frame. Ex. Chidsey Collection No.304. From the Archives of askART: The Mexican Odyssey of an American Painter: Doris Rosenthal By Carleton Deals for Midtown Galleries, 605 Madison Avenue, New York City (circa 1970) Few American painters have as an adventurous spirit as Doris Rosenthal. Fearlessly and alone she has traveled to the remotest Indian corners of Mexico in search of material, not merely for her paints, but to feed that spirit of freedom and exaltation out of which good art has always been distilled. For many the more direct story of her personal adventures, both physical and spiritual, would quite likely be fully as exciting as her canvasses, into which she has poured the essence of her experience. Most American painters who have felt the "Mexican urge" have been trapped into sterile limitation of such native masters as Diego Rivera or Clemente Orozco, or they have been too easily duped by picturesque or the bizarre. But Doris Rosenthal's paintings has remained wholly original and more basic, and though the setting, when she is not concerned with American themes, may be unusual, she has remained so close to the warm realities of simple everyday life, wherever she has found herself, be it in New York or the jungles, that she immediately bridges, without losing the essential quality of alien incidents, the gulf of geography, race and culture that separates us from our southern neighbors. The deepest enjoyment of her paintings comes not so much from the novel scene as from the human warmth, the universality of the emotions and acts she portrays, plus her shrewd organization of theme, her rhythmic design, her strong but subdued colors, and her skillful brushwork. Her sincerity, honesty and knowledge are well fused in nearly every canvas. Born in California, Miss Rosenthal was graduated from Los Angeles State Teacher's College and completed her studies at Columbia University. At the Art Students League, she studied under Bellows and Sloan, among others, then traveled extensively in Europe, sketching and gaining knowledge. She began her own teaching career at Teacher's College in New York City and at present is an instructor at the James Monroe High School, a 10,000 pupil institution, in the same city. She is one of the few persons who have twice received a Guggenheim Fellowship ( in 1932 and 1936). She utilized the stipends to live and work in Mexico over long periods of time. Her one-man exhibits from time to time at the Midtown Galleries in New York City have nearly always been favorably and often enthusiastically received by nearly all the critics, and she is now represented in leading public collections in the country. Her Sacred Music, purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of New York, has been described by an outstanding authority as "typical of her most distinguished gift, that of rhythmic yet disciplined design." I first met Doris Rosenthal at a luncheon ten years ago in the home of Frances Adams in New York City. Later in Mexico City, I had the pleasure of accompanying her and her husband, who is connected with theater in New York, on their first visits to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Tenayuca and Santa Cecilia and on various other excursions. When opportunity has presented, I have visited them in their studio apartment on 86th Street in New York and in their home in Silvermine, Connecticut. Once my wife and I were lengthy guests in their somewhat primitive but thoroughly delightful quarters on a roof in Mexico City, reached through quaint back alley corridors and a caracole iron ladder. The thrill of such visits has always been when Doris would finally reluctantly pull out her most recent work to show us. She has an irrepressible enthusiasm about everything and everybody she meets, a perennial eagerness for experience and knowledge. Her comments are keen, sharp-edged, often dismayingly frank, but they are invariably accompanied by so much laughter and good cheer that I have never seen anyone take offense however direct her thrust. She is jealous of her working time, but boundless in her hospitality. In Mexico she soon found herself quite as much at home as her own country, not merely in the capital, but out in the remotest Indian pueblos in the mountains where in some cases, no white person had been seen in a generation. She just missed a tidal wave on the far west coast of Colima. She lived long periods alone in the mountains of Michoacán among the Tarascan Indians of the famous but little known "Eleven Pueblos, " in Cheran, Mahuatzin, Cucuchuehu and Ihuatzio. She has been in the Tierra Caliente -- the hot country--and has spent time in far-off Tacambaro and down on the Gulf in Alvarado, the quaint mestizo fishing town below Vera Cruz at the broad mouth of the Papoloapam, the River of Butterflies. Not everyone would enjoy spending his Christmas in an alien setting, on a far, narrow strip of sand and wind-blown pines, down among the smelly fish wharves, the piled up puestos of bananas and pineapples, and the chatter of market women, but for Doris--initiated into the mysteries of the hilarious pre-Christmas festivals, the posadas, the uproarious breaking of the pinatas, and the quaint candle-bearing processions of children along the ancient weather-beaten streets and through the patios--it was probably the happiest Christmas she ever spent. With only and Indian guide she struck through the most rugged part of the Oaxaca Sierras, up to the famed Yalalag of the women of sixty necklaces; and in the western mountains of Nayarit, she traveled through what is usually considered very dangerous country from Acaponeta over to Huajicori. In the Sierra de Puebla she lived in Acaxochitlan and Huechinango, and only last summer mule-backed up through those same lofty peaks and valleys far into the interior to Pahuatlan, and from Zaragossa on horseback to Cuetzalan-- gorgeous country all of it, where from high up in the clear crisp southern air one can see the far silver-blue waters of the Gulf. One suspects that in one of her canvases Arrivals and Departures the primitive Mexican courtyard of milling animals and muleteers and stacked carbines, of the village posada called El gran Hotel Paris, the figure modestly entering off to one side of a burro, loaded down with artist's paraphernalia, is perhaps a humorous representation of the artist herself embarked on one of her numerous inland voyages. Humor constantly peeks into the details of Doris' canvases--usually it is warm and kindly, but occasionally more mordant. Rarely however does her work have a purely anecdotal quality; her mastery of form and color, her intimacy with plants, animals, human beings and settings is too profound for her to depend on mere story telling to carry her canvases. She has an original rhythm of line, very dominant yet subtle, which gives her paintings a structural quality different from that of any other artist, a composition usually daring yet so mastered that it never startles one away from appreciation. Proper balance--not merely technical, but of all the elements, color content and inner meaning, never permits false distortion. Miss Rosenthal covers over the ribs of her own technique competently. For a woman to travel alone in rural Mexico is wholly unconventional, and rural Mexico so isolated by poor communications, is sharply suspicious of all outsiders, let alone foreigners; yet Doris managed to overleap the barriers and establish herself on a footing of friendliness. Everywhere she went she has found folk to make friends with. Anyone who knows such places will realize that more coin of the realm would not procure a single model to draw. Persuasion, trust, friendly interest are the only things that could have turned the trick. The result is seen in her work. Not a single canvas fails to demonstrate the author's vital intimate knowledge of the places and peoples she depicts. She is not content with surface lines and colors, but goes behind to the essence. Hence all her work has considerably more than technical dimensions; it has spiritual penetration, a knowledge of cultural unity and continuity, of the relationship of people to their plants, their fruits, their animals, their dwellings, their food; and these relationships--which a scientific anthropologist would need a whole volume to classify--emerge in her canvases in a swift illuminating correlation of the bend of the arm to the arc of a banana stalk, of a falling fold of a rebozo to the drapery of Vegetation, the angle of a leg to the adobe hut or the truncated pyramid. The whole weaves into an integrated pattern that achieves a unity over and beyond her satisfying technical proficiency, because it is the unity also of the life which she discovered, participated in, felt and thought about. The synthesis is admirably achieved in one canvas I remember vividly, an adolescent Indian girl seated on a rude bench, holding a bunch of bananas on her head. The deep liquid eyes, the infinite patience tie in with the native aesthetic, the luxurious simplicity of flowing limbs and white garments, fluid curves echoed in the fruit forms and the whirl of black hair, the dark heavy background, portentousness achieved by mere color without detail. The whole is poignant and rich. Unlike many of her modern contemporaries, Miss Rosenthal nowhere reveals a bleeding artist's soul, crucified by our harsh times. Her canvases do not stagger toward any passionate unfilled striving. She has a more clear-eyed conception of her role. The emotions are to be created in the observer with relation to the material presented. Her own emotions are non-essential as a mere spectacle, they are essential only in so far as her art can recreate such emotional stresses in those who examine her work. For her the real values are to be found in the relationship set up between her audience and her materials, rather than her audience and her own ego. Perhaps this is one reason she never fell under the spell of the leading Mexican artists. She loves people, her material and her art too much to throw it into the maw of her own agonizing soul, as does Clemente Orozco. She is too honest and objective with her material to make it an unwilling hand-maiden to partisan propaganda as does Diego Rivera, who thereby frequently sacrifices the inner essence and presents us with a poster-like anecdote, often close to caricature. Doris is particularly happy in her pictures of children. She has a warm understanding for them, and her studies have such sentiment without over being sentimentalized. She understands the waywardness and deviltry of children just as much as their more blessed qualities. Her scenes of Mexican school roams, despite their friendly warmth, are freighted also with pathos and the tragedy of Mexico, a country long shrouded in ignorance and falteringly seeking new light. She is not wholly tied to the Mexican scone. Many of her canvases tell the authentic story of New England attics, old and warped. She knows the common denominator, true for all the centuries, of a Connecticut woman looking into a cracked mirror by a dormer window, and voluminously garbed women primping from rouge pots on a patio veranda in the distant tropics. She has poked around the sweat shops and ateliers of New York. Her canvas Regents shows that she is quite as fascinated by her own New York students as by those in Mexico. The Concert depicts two New York boys playing accordions, while a third listens intently. For ten years I have watched the talents of Doris Rosenthal steadily expand, her abilities increase, her understanding deepen, and I believe that her work will outlast our own times, that she has made a permanent contribution to American culture. And just as a foot note: if our good officials would sprinkle in a larger number of Doris Rosenthals, along with business men, army officers and diplomats, the good neighbor policy would be probably not so often gang aft aglee. Such contact, both north and south of the Rio Grand, bring a real contribution to the friendly interchange of knowledge and culture. The Mexicans who met her vividly realize that America is something greater than concessions and dollar chasing or even international policy. And those Americans who look at her work can not help but gain, in one swift illuminating moment, a whole new comprehension of the beautiful world discovered by the artist, and with it a feeling of warm generosity towards the people who live in her canvases. Information provided by Dennis M. Boyer, the artist's grand-nephew
Doris Patty (Charash) Rosenthal New York, California / Mexico., (1889 - 1971) Sleeping Girl, 1943 gouache / watercolor on paper signed lower right. Newcomb-Macklin Co. frame. Ex. Chidsey Collection No.304. From the Archives of askART: The Mexican Odyssey of an American Painter: Doris Rosenthal By Carleton Deals for Midtown Galleries, 605 Madison Avenue, New York City (circa 1970) Few American painters have as an adventurous spirit as Doris Rosenthal. Fearlessly and alone she has traveled to the remotest Indian corners of Mexico in search of material, not merely for her paints, but to feed that spirit of freedom and exaltation out of which good art has always been distilled. For many the more direct story of her personal adventures, both physical and spiritual, would quite likely be fully as exciting as her canvasses, into which she has poured the essence of her experience. Most American painters who have felt the "Mexican urge" have been trapped into sterile limitation of such native masters as Diego Rivera or Clemente Orozco, or they have been too easily duped by picturesque or the bizarre. But Doris Rosenthal's paintings has remained wholly original and more basic, and though the setting, when she is not concerned with American themes, may be unusual, she has remained so close to the warm realities of simple everyday life, wherever she has found herself, be it in New York or the jungles, that she immediately bridges, without losing the essential quality of alien incidents, the gulf of geography, race and culture that separates us from our southern neighbors. The deepest enjoyment of her paintings comes not so much from the novel scene as from the human warmth, the universality of the emotions and acts she portrays, plus her shrewd organization of theme, her rhythmic design, her strong but subdued colors, and her skillful brushwork. Her sincerity, honesty and knowledge are well fused in nearly every canvas. Born in California, Miss Rosenthal was graduated from Los Angeles State Teacher's College and completed her studies at Columbia University. At the Art Students League, she studied under Bellows and Sloan, among others, then traveled extensively in Europe, sketching and gaining knowledge. She began her own teaching career at Teacher's College in New York City and at present is an instructor at the James Monroe High School, a 10,000 pupil institution, in the same city. She is one of the few persons who have twice received a Guggenheim Fellowship ( in 1932 and 1936). She utilized the stipends to live and work in Mexico over long periods of time. Her one-man exhibits from time to time at the Midtown Galleries in New York City have nearly always been favorably and often enthusiastically received by nearly all the critics, and she is now represented in leading public collections in the country. Her Sacred Music, purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of New York, has been described by an outstanding authority as "typical of her most distinguished gift, that of rhythmic yet disciplined design." I first met Doris Rosenthal at a luncheon ten years ago in the home of Frances Adams in New York City. Later in Mexico City, I had the pleasure of accompanying her and her husband, who is connected with theater in New York, on their first visits to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Tenayuca and Santa Cecilia and on various other excursions. When opportunity has presented, I have visited them in their studio apartment on 86th Street in New York and in their home in Silvermine, Connecticut. Once my wife and I were lengthy guests in their somewhat primitive but thoroughly delightful quarters on a roof in Mexico City, reached through quaint back alley corridors and a caracole iron ladder. The thrill of such visits has always been when Doris would finally reluctantly pull out her most recent work to show us. She has an irrepressible enthusiasm about everything and everybody she meets, a perennial eagerness for experience and knowledge. Her comments are keen, sharp-edged, often dismayingly frank, but they are invariably accompanied by so much laughter and good cheer that I have never seen anyone take offense however direct her thrust. She is jealous of her working time, but boundless in her hospitality. In Mexico she soon found herself quite as much at home as her own country, not merely in the capital, but out in the remotest Indian pueblos in the mountains where in some cases, no white person had been seen in a generation. She just missed a tidal wave on the far west coast of Colima. She lived long periods alone in the mountains of Michoacán among the Tarascan Indians of the famous but little known "Eleven Pueblos, " in Cheran, Mahuatzin, Cucuchuehu and Ihuatzio. She has been in the Tierra Caliente -- the hot country--and has spent time in far-off Tacambaro and down on the Gulf in Alvarado, the quaint mestizo fishing town below Vera Cruz at the broad mouth of the Papoloapam, the River of Butterflies. Not everyone would enjoy spending his Christmas in an alien setting, on a far, narrow strip of sand and wind-blown pines, down among the smelly fish wharves, the piled up puestos of bananas and pineapples, and the chatter of market women, but for Doris--initiated into the mysteries of the hilarious pre-Christmas festivals, the posadas, the uproarious breaking of the pinatas, and the quaint candle-bearing processions of children along the ancient weather-beaten streets and through the patios--it was probably the happiest Christmas she ever spent. With only and Indian guide she struck through the most rugged part of the Oaxaca Sierras, up to the famed Yalalag of the women of sixty necklaces; and in the western mountains of Nayarit, she traveled through what is usually considered very dangerous country from Acaponeta over to Huajicori. In the Sierra de Puebla she lived in Acaxochitlan and Huechinango, and only last summer mule-backed up through those same lofty peaks and valleys far into the interior to Pahuatlan, and from Zaragossa on horseback to Cuetzalan-- gorgeous country all of it, where from high up in the clear crisp southern air one can see the far silver-blue waters of the Gulf. One suspects that in one of her canvases Arrivals and Departures the primitive Mexican courtyard of milling animals and muleteers and stacked carbines, of the village posada called El gran Hotel Paris, the figure modestly entering off to one side of a burro, loaded down with artist's paraphernalia, is perhaps a humorous representation of the artist herself embarked on one of her numerous inland voyages. Humor constantly peeks into the details of Doris' canvases--usually it is warm and kindly, but occasionally more mordant. Rarely however does her work have a purely anecdotal quality; her mastery of form and color, her intimacy with plants, animals, human beings and settings is too profound for her to depend on mere story telling to carry her canvases. She has an original rhythm of line, very dominant yet subtle, which gives her paintings a structural quality different from that of any other artist, a composition usually daring yet so mastered that it never startles one away from appreciation. Proper balance--not merely technical, but of all the elements, color content and inner meaning, never permits false distortion. Miss Rosenthal covers over the ribs of her own technique competently. For a woman to travel alone in rural Mexico is wholly unconventional, and rural Mexico so isolated by poor communications, is sharply suspicious of all outsiders, let alone foreigners; yet Doris managed to overleap the barriers and establish herself on a footing of friendliness. Everywhere she went she has found folk to make friends with. Anyone who knows such places will realize that more coin of the realm would not procure a single model to draw. Persuasion, trust, friendly interest are the only things that could have turned the trick. The result is seen in her work. Not a single canvas fails to demonstrate the author's vital intimate knowledge of the places and peoples she depicts. She is not content with surface lines and colors, but goes behind to the essence. Hence all her work has considerably more than technical dimensions; it has spiritual penetration, a knowledge of cultural unity and continuity, of the relationship of people to their plants, their fruits, their animals, their dwellings, their food; and these relationships--which a scientific anthropologist would need a whole volume to classify--emerge in her canvases in a swift illuminating correlation of the bend of the arm to the arc of a banana stalk, of a falling fold of a rebozo to the drapery of Vegetation, the angle of a leg to the adobe hut or the truncated pyramid. The whole weaves into an integrated pattern that achieves a unity over and beyond her satisfying technical proficiency, because it is the unity also of the life which she discovered, participated in, felt and thought about. The synthesis is admirably achieved in one canvas I remember vividly, an adolescent Indian girl seated on a rude bench, holding a bunch of bananas on her head. The deep liquid eyes, the infinite patience tie in with the native aesthetic, the luxurious simplicity of flowing limbs and white garments, fluid curves echoed in the fruit forms and the whirl of black hair, the dark heavy background, portentousness achieved by mere color without detail. The whole is poignant and rich. Unlike many of her modern contemporaries, Miss Rosenthal nowhere reveals a bleeding artist's soul, crucified by our harsh times. Her canvases do not stagger toward any passionate unfilled striving. She has a more clear-eyed conception of her role. The emotions are to be created in the observer with relation to the material presented. Her own emotions are non-essential as a mere spectacle, they are essential only in so far as her art can recreate such emotional stresses in those who examine her work. For her the real values are to be found in the relationship set up between her audience and her materials, rather than her audience and her own ego. Perhaps this is one reason she never fell under the spell of the leading Mexican artists. She loves people, her material and her art too much to throw it into the maw of her own agonizing soul, as does Clemente Orozco. She is too honest and objective with her material to make it an unwilling hand-maiden to partisan propaganda as does Diego Rivera, who thereby frequently sacrifices the inner essence and presents us with a poster-like anecdote, often close to caricature. Doris is particularly happy in her pictures of children. She has a warm understanding for them, and her studies have such sentiment without over being sentimentalized. She understands the waywardness and deviltry of children just as much as their more blessed qualities. Her scenes of Mexican school roams, despite their friendly warmth, are freighted also with pathos and the tragedy of Mexico, a country long shrouded in ignorance and falteringly seeking new light. She is not wholly tied to the Mexican scone. Many of her canvases tell the authentic story of New England attics, old and warped. She knows the common denominator, true for all the centuries, of a Connecticut woman looking into a cracked mirror by a dormer window, and voluminously garbed women primping from rouge pots on a patio veranda in the distant tropics. She has poked around the sweat shops and ateliers of New York. Her canvas Regents shows that she is quite as fascinated by her own New York students as by those in Mexico. The Concert depicts two New York boys playing accordions, while a third listens intently. For ten years I have watched the talents of Doris Rosenthal steadily expand, her abilities increase, her understanding deepen, and I believe that her work will outlast our own times, that she has made a permanent contribution to American culture. And just as a foot note: if our good officials would sprinkle in a larger number of Doris Rosenthals, along with business men, army officers and diplomats, the good neighbor policy would be probably not so often gang aft aglee. Such contact, both north and south of the Rio Grand, bring a real contribution to the friendly interchange of knowledge and culture. The Mexicans who met her vividly realize that America is something greater than concessions and dollar chasing or even international policy. And those Americans who look at her work can not help but gain, in one swift illuminating moment, a whole new comprehension of the beautiful world discovered by the artist, and with it a feeling of warm generosity towards the people who live in her canvases. Information provided by Dennis M. Boyer, the artist's grand-nephew
Doris Rosenthal Untitled (At The Blackboard) Circa 1930s. The genre scene of children at a blackboard in Mexico where Doris Rosenthal spent much of her time painting is signed lower right in black pigment and displayed in an outstanding period frame. The right stretcher verso is stamped 'EXH P.A.F.A 1936' in black ink. According to Who's Who in American Art, Ms. Rosenthal exhibited her work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art frequently throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The palette of this painting is brighter than many of the artist's works and reminiscent of Mexican Saltillo serapes of the period. Doris Rosenthal's biography is replete with impressive credentials in study and accolades, including the successful exhibition of paintings throughout the entirety of her long career. Canvas measures 16.25 x 24.25 with a framed size of 23 x 30.75 inches. We happily provide seamless in-house packing and shipping services on nearly everything we sell. Until further notice, we cannot offer international shipping in-house.
DORIS ROSENTHAL (1895-1971) Summer Breezes No. 1 (Sleeper) . Lithograph. 345x250 mm; 13 5/8x9 7/8 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, numbered 10/40 and inscribed "#1" in pencil, lower margin. 1930. A very good impression. Rosenthal, native to California, studied painting while travelling extensively during the 1920s. Her graphic print portfolios took inspiration from a range of experiences--from scenes of new industry to museum artifacts she encountered. After winning two Guggenheim fellowships in the 1930s, she travelled to Mexico and became well-known and widely respected as a regionalist painter, eventually settling in Oaxaca permanently. She exhibited alongside Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968) at the 1933 Chicago Worlds' Fair.
Doris (Charash) Rosenthal (New York, California, Mexico 1889 - 1971) lithograph. Signed in pencil lower right. Titled and numbered 'Bottoms Up 64/109' in pencil lower left. Measures 10.125-in. x 13.75-in. image size, 11.5-in. x 16-in. sheet size. In G+/VG condition light toning along margin edges. Unframed, loose and not mounted or glued down. If lot is absent of a condition report a condition report may be requested via email. Condition report is provided as an opinion only and is no guarantee as grading can be subjective. Buyer must view photographs or scans to assist in determining condition and ask further questions if so desired. We ship most items in this auction in house and gladly combine shipping if possible of multiple items.
DORIS ROSENTHAL (1896 - 1971) Tin Roofs at Huautla de Jimenez , 1937 oil on canvas signed lower right: Doris Rosenthal inscribed verso: Tin Roofs / Huautla de Jimenez / 21 x 27 / Doris Rosenthal Dimensions: 21 x 27 inches Framed Dimensions: 29 1/2 x 35 1/2 x 3 1/4 inches Provenance: Midtown Galleries, New York, New York Peyton Wright, Santa Fe, New Mexico Private Collection, New Mexico
Doris Rosenthal original pencil signed lithograph. Signed in pencil "Doris Rosenthal" lower right. Titled in pencil lower left and numbered in pencil "66/75" lower left. Measures 15" x 21" (sheet size). Image is in good condition with very light toning over image area. Unframed, loose and not mounted or glued down. Provenance: Amity Art Foundation, Inc. collection. We ship all items in this auction in-house with the most fair shipping charges possible.
Doris Rosenthal (American, 1889-1971), pastel on paper titled "Circus Tent II", matted and framed under glass. Exhibition label on verso from the Sidney Ross Gallery (New York) "The Theatre in Art". Frame measures 24-1/4" in height by 25-1/4" in width by 3/4" in depth, the sight image measures 17" in height by 18" in width. All measurements are approximate. Doris Patty Rosenthal (July 10, 1889 - November 26, 1971) was an American painter, printmaker, designer, and educator, who made solitary explorations into remote areas of Mexico in search of indigenous peoples. Over several decades beginning in the 1930s, Rosenthal made hundreds of sketches in charcoal and pastel depicting the everyday life and domestic activities of Indian and mestizo peasant culture, which she later used to create large-scale studio paintings. LIFE magazine featured Rosenthal's art and travels in Mexico in a five-page spread in 1943. She painted under Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico from 1931-1933 & 1936, and moved permanently to Mexico in 1957, and died in the city of Oaxaca in 1971.
Doris Rosenthal (1889-1971) original pencil signed lithograph. Signed in pencil 'Doris Rosenthal lower right. Titled and numbered "13/24 Mill Dam-Winter" lower left in pencil. Measures 14.75" x 11.75" (image size) and 18 3/8" x 15" (sheet size). Image is in excellent condition, sheet has some rippling in top and bottom margins. Unframed, loose and not mounted or glued down. Provenance: The Amity Arts Foundation Collection. We ship most items in-house with the exception of furniture, large or heavy artwork, heavier items or extremely fragile items.
Doris Rosenthal (American, 1889-1971), pastel on paper titled "Circus Tent II", matted and framed under glass. Exhibition label on verso from the Sidney Ross Gallery (New York) "The Theatre in Art". Frame measures 24-1/4" in height by 25-1/4" in width by 3/4" in depth, the sight image measures 17" in height by 18" in width. All measurements are approximate. Doris Patty Rosenthal (July 10, 1889 – November 26, 1971) was an American painter, printmaker, designer, and educator, who made solitary explorations into remote areas of Mexico in search of indigenous peoples. Over several decades beginning in the 1930s, Rosenthal made hundreds of sketches in charcoal and pastel depicting the everyday life and domestic activities of Indian and mestizo peasant culture, which she later used to create large-scale studio paintings. LIFE magazine featured Rosenthal’s art and travels in Mexico in a five-page spread in 1943. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Rosenthal a fellowship in 1931 to do creative work in painting in Mexico, where she was to live for two years beginning in August 1931. Thereafter, she made yearly trips to the country residing in small villages during the summer months. The Guggenheim Foundation awarded her a second fellowship for further work in Mexico in 1936. Rosenthal moved permanently to Mexico in 1957, and died in the city of Oaxaca in 1971.
DORIS ROSENTHAL (1895-1971): TO MARKET Lithograph in black on laid paper, signed and titled in pencil, numbered 14/15. 16 1/2 x 19 1/4 in. (sheet), unframed. Provenance: Helen Farr Sloan. Condition: With margins. Light- and mat staining. Remains of old glue staining showing through from the reverse of the sheet edges. Small creases at the bottom corners. Property of Wilkes University
Doris Rosenthal (American, 1895-1971), pastel on paper, "Circus Tent II", 17" x 18" sight, 24-1/4" x 25-1/4" overall, Exhibition label on verso from the Sidney Ross Gallery (New York) "The Theatre in Art"
DORIS ROSENTHAL (NY/CA/Mexico, 1889-1971) - "Flower Sellers", lithograph, pencil signed, no limitation (probably Associated American Artists), with Midtown Galleries of NYC label verso, in black stick frame, matted and glazed, OS: 16 3/4" x 20 3/4", SS: 11 1/2" x 15". Edge toned.
Doris Rosenthal, lot of seven lithographs, all signed and titled, all unframed, largest 17 1/2" h x 14 1/4" w (view), 21" h x 18" w (mat). Provenance: From a Massachusetts estate.
Doris Rosenthal (1895-1971), street scene with figures, Corbet, Martinique, 17" h x 22" w (view), 29" h x 33" w (frame), and view of Belle Ave, Porte Prince, 17" h x 22" w (view), 29" h x 33" w (frame). Provenance: From a Florida estate.
Doris Rosenthal American, 1889-1971 Still Life with Fruit in a Bowl on a Checkered Tablecloth, 1926 Signed Doris Rosenthal and dated '26 (lr) Charcoal on paper Sight 14 1/2 x 13 1/8 inches •
Doris Rosenthal American, 1889-1971 Still Life with Fruit in a Bowl on a Checkered Tablecloth, 1926 Signed Doris Rosenthal and dated '26 (lr) Charcoal on paper Sight 14 1/2 x 13 1/8 inches •
Doris Patty (Charash) Rosenthal (American, 1889-1971) Sefarino Drummer Boy Signed "Doris Rosenthal" l.r., titled and inscribed "...32 x 26/Doris Rosenthal..." on the reverse, identified on labels from Midtown Galleries, New York, The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut, and the Springfield High School Art Association, affixed to the reverse. Oil on canvas, 32 x 26 in. (81.3 x 66.0 cm), framed. Condition: Craquelure.
DORIS PATTY ROSENTHAL (1889-1971) 'Boy and Leaf', oil on canvas, signed lower left Doris Rosenthal. Also titled, signed and dated 1941 on verso. Gallery label on frame: Midtown Galleries, 605 Madison Ave, New York 22, N.Y. Contained in original parcel gilt frame. Condition: no visible defects. Dimensions: 18'' X 15'', frame 26'' X 23''. Provenance: Collection of Graham Shearing.
W/C ON BROWN PAPER- WOMAN ON HAMMOCK SEWING, BY DORIS ROSENTHAL (NY/MEX, 1889-1971), SIGNED LR, IN CARVED AND PICKLED COVE FRAME, RED MAT, SS: 19" X 23", OS: 29" X 33", SLIGHTLY WRINKLED.
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