Samuel Rosenberg ― Portrait of the Painter

While other artists moved to New York or Paris, painter Samuel Rosenberg, 1896-1972 never left the city he called home. From the age of twelve, when he took his first art class at a settlement house in Pittsburgh's Hill District, through a vigorous career that spanned six decades. Rosenberg was challenged by the complex city whose artistic legacy he did much to shape. In Pittsburgh, Rosenberg created more than five hundred paintings, engaged with the dynamic progress of American painting in the twentieth century, and inspired generations of students. This book is the first full study of his work and influence.
The constancy of Rosenberg's career was change. He began as a portraitist, 1915-1930, influenced by Velazquez, Rembrandt, Matisse, and later, Picasso. In the 1930s, however, Rosenberg turned to portray the city around him. Inspired by the steep hills, densely polluted atmosphere, crooked houses, and layered immigrant populations with intersecting poverties, he created emotional urban landscapes that ensured Pittsburgh's place in the American regionalist art movement.
Samuel Rosenberg's paintings were exhibited widely, from the World's Fair, 1939, to the nation's preeminent museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. D.C., and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He had twenty-six solo exhibitions during his lifetime, and he was accepted into the prestigious Carnegie International in 1920, 1925, and every subsequent exhibition from 1933 to 1967.
But it is possible that Rosenberg's most enduring legacy is his teaching. For more than forty years he taught drawing and painting at Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University where his students included Philip Pearlstein. Mel Bochner, and Andy Warhol - whom Rosenberg saved from expulsion in 1947. He chaired the art department at the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College). He directed art programs and taught for decades at two community art schools: the Irene Kaufmann Settlement in the Hill District and the Isaac Seder Educational Center for the Young Men's and Women's Hebrew Association, which merged in 1961. A revered and devoted master teacher, he awakened several generations of Pittsburgh artists to the "adventure," as he called it, of art.

Barbara L. Jones is curator of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.