Exploring the remarkable range of Esphyr Slobodkina, a rare woman modernist whose inventive work bridged painting, textiles, illustration, and design.
The wheels are in motion at Rosenberg & Co. gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and the catalyst for this is the versatile oeuvre of Esphyr Slobodkina. Slobodkina was once an almost-unsung hero of modernist painting, but she won’t be for long, as her works will be presented at three locations – Independent 20th Century fair from September 24 to 27, the Rosenberg & Co. gallery on the Upper East Side from October 7 to November 14, and the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut until November 1st. With a biography that includes a life lived in multiple places like Siberia and China before culminating into a successful career in New York City, the perspective that Slobodkina’s work brings is definitely a delight to behold.
Marianne Rosenberg, the founder of the eponymous art gallery, is thrilled to have close to twenty works of Slobodkina under one roof. The granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, who represented Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, Marianne Rosenberg continues the family legacy after the gallery (known at the time as Paul Rosenberg & Co.) was moved to New York City from Paris in 1940 due to the onset of the Second World War.
At the helm of the modernist movement in the 1930s and the 1940s, Slobodkina was one of the few women artists who achieved popularity among the American audiences. Subject to the equivalent of today’s “gig culture,” the artist took on many projects in various artistic disciplines to ensure a steady cash flow. Today, she is best known for her illustrations for children’s books with Caps for Sale (1940) the most popular of them all.
But Rosenberg focuses the viewer’s eye on Slobodkina’s abstract paintings, a group of works on canvas which use not only paint but also dip their feet deep into the sparkling waters of the mixed-media realm with other materials such as textiles and haberdashery.
One significant work by Slobodkina features textiles and buttons. An engineer of clothing, one might say, Slobodkina’s skillset ranged from fashion design to illustration with large-scale paintings in between. Another work on canvas at the gallery features abstract forms of pink, blue, and white,whose shapes evoke the interior of a machine – a motif that was a nod to the rise of industrialization of the time. The artist caught the eye of patrons such as Alfred Barr and Peggy Guggenheim.
The exhibition is not organized chronologically, as Rosenberg doesn’t consider the artist to have had specific “periods” that are prevalent in the oeuvres of artists such as Picasso and Klimt. Instead, the focus is on the variety of media that the artist has to offer. A modest and mighty collection of about twenty pieces of Slobodkina’s work will be presented in New York and in addition to this collection presented by Rosenberg & Co., her work is also on view at the New Britain Museum of Art in Connecticut through November 1st. A fantastic example of the multitude of facets of an artist’s skillset, Esphyr Slobodkina’s work will delight the senses with its visual tactility and refined craftsmanship.
