Harold Rosenberg and Important Artists and Artworks
Girl before a Mirror (1932)
This mid-life painting by Picasso, while made before "Abstract Expressionism" or "Action Painting" were ever part of our vocabulary, is an apt example of painting as an event. Rosenberg often writes about the artist getting inside an image and developing a relationship with his canvas, and in Girl before a Mirror, Picasso is not only jumping into the canvas, but depicting his woman (possibly his beloved Marie-Thérèse) doing likewise with her reflection.
Organisation (1933-36)
The artist Arshile Gorky is a complex figure; born in Turkish Armenia, he later adopted the surname of a Russian writer, and schooled himself in the works of Joan Miró, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso before immersing himself in Surrealism and later, Abstract Expressionism. Gorky's artistic evolution, as it were, provides a wonderful example for Rosenberg's discussion of "Redcoatism" and "Coonskinism" in the essay 'Parable of American Painting.' It suggests that Gorky has so fully digested the history of modern painting that he is no longer encumbered by the need to learn, and to follow its rules - he can begin anew.
Trafalgar Square (1939-43)
One topic that fascinated Rosenberg was radicalism and revolution in art; not an easy thing to grasp. He didn't believe that radical art had anything to do with political radicalism, but with the artist's ability to "express his entire personality" in the canvas. When he looked upon Mondrian's strange and minimalist cityscapes, like the one seen above, he saw Mondrian "conceiving 'healthy and beautiful cities by opposing buildings and empty spaces in an equilibrated way.'" This was, according to Rosenberg, a New Order of painting.
Influences and Connections

- Paul Cézanne
- Pablo Picasso
- Arshile Gorky
- Willem de Kooning
- Saul Steinberg
- Guillaume Apollinaire
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Karl Marx
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Willem de Kooning
- Elaine de Kooning
- Al Held
- Jack Reilly
- John Russell
- Thomas B. Hess
- Tom Wolfe
- Herbert Read
- Barbara Rose
- Postmodernism
- Abstract Illusionism