Susan Rothenberg, who died this week, at the age of seventy-five, in Galisteo, New Mexico, her home for thirty years, was the best thing that happened to the art of painting in New York in the nineteen-seventies. I say “thing” because the effect of the horse paintings that Rothenberg sprang on the world in 1975, at the scruffy loft gallery 112 Greene Street, in a nascent SoHo, in a city wracked by poverty and chaos, was like an asteroid impact. It triggered mass extinctions among the time’s dinosaur species of mannerly formalist abstraction. There were rebellious realist styles at the time, and infusions of conceptualist ideas. But nothing prepared us for the powers of a young woman from Buffalo—trained as a sculptor and, small and lithe, sometimes a dancer—who had been painting for barely two years.
Married to the sculptor George Trakas at the time, Rothenberg started with small works in water-soluble mediums—fields of broken brushwork with lines down the middle, stabilizing silhouette images of horses—so that she could wash her hands quickly when their baby daughter, Maggie, cried. She and Trakas later divorced. (It would be good to have a month-by-month chronology—what ensued in her life from then until the Greene Street show—to enhance the major museum retrospective that, shockingly, Rothenberg has yet to be given, despite her secure fame.) At 112 Greene, her huge paintings in acrylics made some of us laugh with sheer wonderment. In stentorian blacks and orangish browns, they had formal rigor aplenty, as flat and integral as any current abstraction. But that was perfunctory, a nod to the tradition that Rothenberg commenced to blow sky high. The great horses loomed, ranging in form from crude cartoonishness to hints of plausible equine anatomy. All seethed with emotion—the isotope that had gone missing from the mandarin styles of the day, in which carefulness had displaced suggestions of anything worth caring about. The works conveyed anger, exaltation, and self-abandoning intrepidity. They felt personal, albeit on a grand scale. In an era preoccupied with what to do in art and how to do it, Rothenberg addressed and answered a rarer question: Why? She palpably made the pictures not only because she could but because she had to. The historic upshot was a rebirth of Expressionism, with kinetic force and unmistakable authenticity. So it seemed to me then and seems to me now.
The rest is a long story replete with changing imagery—heads and human figures, usually fragmentary, as well as animals—and ever more eloquent touch. (One of her masterpieces is a vision of Piet Mondrian dancing the foxtrot, as was his wont, in a blizzard of feathery strokes.) Tiring of acrylics, Rothenberg mastered oil paints, which brought fugitive beauty and aching tenderness to her furiously worked surfaces. I take pride in having introduced Bruce Nauman to her work in a show at the superb, now bygone Willard Gallery, in 1981. (It was fun to watch his stony skepticism of painting crack a little.) They met subsequently, married in 1989, and moved to Nauman’s ranch outside Santa Fe, living on familial terms with horses, chickens, dogs, cats, and ambient treasures of ancient Indian petroglyphs and pottery shards. Rothenberg seldom revisited New York except for periodic shows of her work at the Sperone Westwater gallery, rendering her rather ghostly, while legendary, as a presence on the contemporary scene. But stand in front of one of her paintings. She’s fully there, with a jolt of what permanently rearranged my sensibility, and the art world’s, in 1975.
