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October 13, 2006 through January 28, 2007 Carol & Louis Della Penna Gallery in New Hope 
Sponsored by RAGO Arts and Auction Center
For some painters a single way of working can last a lifetime. This was not Charles Rosen's story. Rosen began his creative career as a highly successful landscape painter, prominently associated with the impressionist art colony centered in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in the early twentieth century. His best-known New Hope canvases are large-scale snow scenes and spring scenes, utilizing a simple but elegant compositional style sometimes reminiscent of Japanese prints. These landscapes explore many different techniques and often exhibit a stylistic restlessness.
In his late thirties and early forties, Rosen became dissatisfied with the landscape style, and under the influence of modernist ideas his work changed radically. He completely abandoned traditional landscapes in favor of a manner of working that might be described as both rhythmic and semiabstract, one that usually used man-made structures as subjects and was based on a passionate exploration of form as a living, organic phenomenon. Rosen himself described this idea as "form that radiates life" and spoke of the "effort to achieve this in paint." In 1920 he moved to Woodstock, New York, where he taught at the Art Students League summer school. He developed close friendships with fellow Woodstock painters George Bellows and Eugene Speicher, and also taught painting in Columbus, Ohio, and San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition featured more than 48 works, including major examples of both his landscape and modernist styles, as well as works on paper.
The exhibition was accompanied by a major publication that provides an in-depth examination of the life and work of Charles Rosen, studying both phases of his career and featuring paintings from major museum and private collections that demonstrate this unusual range of styles. Principally authored by the Michener's Senior Curator Brian H. Peterson, the book also includes an essay on Rosen's Woodstock years by Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History at Bard College; it is co-published by the Michener Art Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Press.
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