Susan Rothenberg’s oil paintings are attractive, in the sense the term conveys when describing a room full of casually well-dressed people. They are remarkably and quite unfailingly good-looking, and they function as visual and intellectual balm as one surveys them. They have social ease, are intelligent and well-educated, pleasant and serious. They are beyond reproach. Attractive through the mouthpiece of a well-bred jaw; money with class.
What has long bothered me about Rothenberg’s work has something to do with a homogenizing system through which data—art-historical throughlines and conventions of process—are synthesized, if not exactly neutered then regularized, and somehow made to appear endemic to her scheme of things. Rothenberg has an excellent sense of composition; her paintings always strike a graceful balance between paint and line, the symmetrical and the out-of-kilter, event and emptiness. And one can spot them anywhere, which is all very well, but in staking out her pictorial identity Rothenberg does not so much claim authorship to an idiosyncratically expressed idea, or to a style, as she reiterates, in full earnestness, a good (nouvelle) recipe.
Simply put, Rothenberg does three things: she filters representational elements through etiolated screens of paint, ranging from slate grays to bluish whites, whose textures would resemble Robert Ryman’s but for the fact that they appear sensitized and not systematic; she joins the abstract/conceptual ideology of “the mark” to a kind of digest, loosely quoted, of an American, semiabstract landscape tradition which would, unexpurgated, include Albert Pinkham Ryder, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Miltnn Avery, and Philip Guston; she sets a currently revived esthetic of figurative awkwardness or primitivism off against a sophisticated, highly considered, and skilled technique. Rothenberg’s paintings are virtually foolproof. They seem quintessentially timely without seeming to mean a thing.
Rothenberg showed over fifteen works from the last two years in this spring show. In at least one of the most recent pieces, there were signs of greater emotional precision, of intensifying conviction. Black Dress, 1982–83, a paired-down figure study, supplies the ripples of anxiety missing from countless visions of loveliness, visions of female formality, from the sitters of John Singer Sargent to the roles of Loretta Young. This is valuable, and gives hope.
—Lisa Liebmann
