Amalie Rothschild

Amalie Rothschild (1916–2001) was an American artist who lived and worked within the art community of Baltimore, Maryland.

An accomplished painter and sculptor, she was also an art teacher, philanthropist, patron, and cultural advocate.

Over the course of a long career, she made oil and acrylic paintings as well as drawings, watercolors, and other paper works.

She also sculpted using found objects, Plexiglas, metals, and particleboard.

Originally working in a realist style, she became well known for geometric abstractions based on figurative subjects.

Having graduated at age 16 in 1932, Rothschild initially joined the freshman class at Goucher College, but quickly changed her mind and began study at the Maryland Institute for the Mechanical Arts, now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Her parents cautioned her against majoring in a subject, such as fine arts, where graduates' job prospects were practically nil.

Her first major retrospective exhibition covering 50 years from 1933 to 1983 was held in 1984 at the Academy of Arts (Easton, Maryland) and her last retrospective was at Maryland Art Place in 1997.

She chose fashion illustration and, after graduating two years later, in 1935 she spent half a year at the Parsons School of Design (then called the New York School of Fine and Applied Art).

She was offered a scholarship to study in Paris, France for 6 months, but her widowed mother forbid her to go abroad, so she returned to Baltimore and began to freelance as an illustrator, making drawings for department store ads.

Starting in 1937 she took private instruction from local artist Richard Dicus and showed her work to Baltimore artist, Herman Maril.

Rothschild had a few small landscape oil paintings accepted for the seventh annual exhibition of Maryland painters, a juried show held in 1939 the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Three years later her first appearance in a solo exhibition was also at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Early in the 1940s she showed in the annual Christmas sales exhibition held at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the museum's founder, Duncan Phillips, bought her painting "Slum Clearance" for the collection.

During the Jewish Women's Archive oral history interview Rothschild said that she her style gradually evolved from realist to abstract during the 1940s and early 1950s.

She made the change entirely on her own in a slow self-taught process.

In 1951 she was commissioned to design a curtain for the Torah ark in the newly built synagogue of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.

In 1957 the Corcoran Gallery of Art bought a painting of hers, "Penelope" which had been awarded a prize in the 12th Annual Area Exhibition, and in 1959 included her work along with works by Washington artists Anne E. Baum and Helene Herzbrun in a three-person exhibition.

In 1958 she began showing in commercial galleries, first in a group exhibition at the IFA Galleries in Washington (1958) and then, in the 1960s, in group shows at the Juster Gallery in Manhattan and the Rumsey Gallery (Rumsey Island, Maryland, 1966).

Beginning in the 1960s she was given an increasing number of solo exhibitions in the museums and public galleries of the Baltimore area, including shows at Goucher College (1964, 1968), the Baltimore Museum of Art (1971), and the Maryland Institute of Art (1985).

In the 1970s and 1980s her work often appeared in solo exhibitions in commercial galleries, including Jacob's Ladder (Washington, 1972), B.R. Kornblatt (Baltimore, 1978, 1980), C. Grimaldis (Washington, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1999), and Franz Bader (Washington, 1989, 1991).

Her gallery during the last decade of her life was Gomez (Baltimore).

This painting can be seen in the 1984 photo of Rothschild along with an earlier self-portrait.

In 1986 she created two unusual cello case sculptures in the shape of women.

The pair contained loudspeakers and were used in a piece of music performed by Vivian Adelberg Rudow, a Baltimore composer, musician, and performance artist.

Rothschild made a conscious decision to remain a regional artist and did not energetically seek to establish a national reputation.

Rothschild has been portrayed as suffering from the male-oriented art culture of her time but, as one commentator has pointed out, she did not have to support herself through art and, to the contrary, had sufficient financial resources to be an art patron.

After the birth of her children, she had constant household help.

In general, "she had the freedom and opportunity to invest time into her art and advocate for artists."

A few months before she died, an oral historian, Jean Freedman, interviewed Rothschild for the Jewish Women's Archive.

Asked about her experience as an artist and a woman, she said, "Well, you know, I’ve been asked that question as an artist, 'How does it feel to be a woman artist? Have you felt discriminated against?' And I say, 'Well, not that I’m aware of.' I’ve been lucky, my art has prospered, and when I’ve applied to galleries I’ve frequently been accepted."

In 1993 a critic described this approach as "[walking] a tightrope between the abstract and the representational with a suggestion of three-dimensional depth."

Rothschild was by choice a regional artist.

Although she occasionally exhibited elsewhere, she did not actively promote her career outside a mid-Atlantic region centered on Baltimore.

Thus, in 1997 a critic wrote, "Amalie Rothschild is a fixture and ornament of the Baltimore art world."

At the time of her death a critic gave this career summary: "She was one of the leading artists of her time in this area. Her work is thoroughly modern and related to geometric abstraction, but without losing the figure. It has emotional reserve, often contains a hint of humor and at times recalls the childlike sagacity of the great Paul Klee."

In her youth Rothschild attended a mix of public and private elementary schools.

From age six to fifteen she took classes every Saturday morning at the Maryland Institute.

She attended an accelerated public junior high called School 49 and then Western High School in Baltimore.

In viewing a retrospective exhibition of her work, a critic said in 2012 that Rothschild's 1948 oil painting "Portrait of Me (Self Portrait with Crossed Arms)" seemed to be a transitional work, particularly as it emphasized Rothschild's angular shoulders and arms.