Amalie Rothschild

The artist Amalie Rothschild (1916-2001) lived and worked her entire life in Baltimore, Maryland. During her six-and-a-half decade career she made significant contributions to the cultural and artistic environment of the city and local area. She is best known as a painter and sculptor working in a variety of materials including Plexiglas, aluminum, bronze, bark, handmade cast paper, and particle board, as well as oil, acrylic, and watercolor. Her oeuvre encompasses the dramatic range of style, media and message that characterized the questing spirit of the best of 20th-century art. Her work also explores the challenges faced by a creative woman in an era of major social change. Her output, despite its often abstract geometric appearance, was frequently self-referential and regularly dealt with the issues of balancing the duties of wife and mother with the strivings of the artist, while at the same time paying homage to historical themes. The book, a practical “portable museum” of her most significant creations, makes her varied artistic output available to a wider public. As contributor Nancy G. Heller observes: “Amalie Rosenfeld Rothschild appeared on the American art scene at a challenging time. She was a woman, when artists were supposed to be male; she was American, at a time when important art was still expected to come from Europe; and she lived in Baltimore—which, while hardly a cultural backwater, was not New York City, then regarded as the center of art in the U.S…Over the course of six and a half decades she managed to surmount traditional prejudices—about the abilities, rights, and obligations of American women; about commercial vs. fine art; about artists who constantly explore new ways to express themselves; about people who live outside New York City; and about the validity of supposedly-serious art that also dares to be funny.”