Berta Rosenbaum Golahny

Berta Rosenbaum Golahny (February 7, 1925 – November 4, 2005) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor.

Golahny was born into a Jewish immigrant relations in Detroit, Michigan. Her parents were Fannie Henkin Rosenbaum (1889–1953, b. in Belarus) and Gedaliah Rosenbaum (1889–1985, b. in Wlodova, Poland). As a child, Golahny began to pull while watching her daddy design wrought-iron pieces for the company he founded, Liberty Ironworks, some of whose ornamental gates and railings remain standing in Detroit.

She was educated at Detroit’s Cass Technical High School and next in 1943-4 the Art Students League of New York, having conventional a National Scholarship. There, George Grosz encouraged her drawing and French artiste Ossip Zadkine introduced her to sculpture.

Golahny continued her studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. After receiving her Bachelor's in Fine Art from the Art Institute in 1947, Golahny completed her studies at the University of Iowa, from which she customary a Master's in Fine Art in 1950. At Iowa, she studied printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky, art history below William S. Heckscher, and painting below Eugene Ludins. Her thesis painting, The Resurrection, was awarded the Painting Prize by juror Ben Shahn. In 1951, she was awarded a fellowship from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. While at Iowa, she married Yehuda Golahny, an engineering student in Detroit. When Yehuda began to pursue a Master’s of Science in Electrical Engineering at MIT (class of 1954), the couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. After two years, they moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where they settled.

From 1959 to 2001, she taught at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. The Center now gives an annual honor in her honor. She exhibited in the US and further countries in several hundred juried and invitational shows, and was very with ease reviewed. Today her function is held in private collections in America, France, and Israel, and in museums including the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Wichita Art Museum, the Williams College Art Museum, the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the E. J. Pratt Library at the University of Toronto.

Golahny used the acknowledged media of etching, wood engraving, and woodcut. She experimented afterward monotype, with substitute ways of biting the plate, and next electric tools to incise lines upon zinc and copper plates.

Artists subsequently whom Golahny found affinity enlarge Max Beckmann, Paul Cézanne, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and Nicolas de Staël.

Golahny’s earliest act out uses a darker palette and rougher parentage than her forward-looking work. This in front work, such as Street Car Scene, reflects city energy in Detroit, New York City, and Chicago: people on buses or trains, workers in factories, and children at play.

One series of works, begun vis-а-vis 1964 later a multi-block color woodcut, was titled Landscape of Man in the Nuclear Age. The series continued in intaglio, painting, wood engraving, and copper engraving, and was completed in 1988. Golahny repeatedly portrayed human suffering, as in a series of works upon the Holocaust.

A visit to a Midwest declare fair inspired an intaglio print of 1949 titled Children at the Fair: The Ride. Golahny reprised this composition of a whirligig (a central pole considering carts swinging from it) in a 1987 woodcut and in several subsequent large paintings.

Inspired by publications on nebulae and black holes, Golahny began the Space series in 1980. In dozens of paintings she modeled her images on photographs of cosmic exploration in the history of the Harvard College Observatory. She afterward painted evocative layerings of an imagined passage through aerate and time, and astonishing semi-formed creatures. Art historian Alicia Faxon wrote of one of Golahny's paintings of the Crab Nebula, "Golahny's Crab Nebula . . . capture the process of creation, a process that takes place both in the foundation of the nebula and in the gestation of the painting itself. . . . In comparing Crab Nebula to the photographs that inspired the work, it is Interesting to look how much more radiant and profound the artist's explanation is. The photographs appear static; the painting pulses considering energy, embodying an endless universe in creation."

The Being and Becoming series concerns the momentum of the universe previously the enormous Bang. Inspired by this series and extra paintings, Boston-based musicians Paul and Rosalie DiCrescenzo wrote a four-movement score to accompany a slide-show of the images, titled The Watchers and the Watched. This was performed with retain from the Massachusetts Council upon the Arts in 1995. It was performed over at the Newton Free Library in December 2006 in commemoration of Golahny’s vivaciousness and work. Golahny died in November 2005.

Her greeting to the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001 was to paint two large canvases in a series called The Striving.

In Spring 2018, Lycoming College (Williamsport, PA) hosted a large exhibition of her work, titled "Berta Golahny: The Human Abstract."