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 associates 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 charisma 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 subsequently 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 received a Master's in Fine Art in 1950. At Iowa, she studied printmaking under Mauricio Lasansky, art history below William S. Heckscher, and painting under 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 award in her honor. She exhibited in the US and supplementary countries in several hundred juried and invitational shows, and was very with ease reviewed. Today her take effect 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 normal media of etching, wood engraving, and woodcut. She experimented in the circulate of monotype, with every second ways of harsh the plate, and gone electric tools to incise lines on zinc and copper plates.

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

Golahny’s earliest comport yourself uses a darker palette and rougher pedigree than her cutting edge work. This into the future work, such as Street Car Scene, reflects city activity in Detroit, New York City, and Chicago: people upon buses or trains, workers in factories, and children at play.

One series of works, begun in tab to 1964 following 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 on the Holocaust.

A visit to a Midwest state fair inspired an intaglio print of 1949 titled Children at the Fair: The Ride. Golahny reprised this composition of a whirligig (a central pole in the appearance of carts vacillation 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 upon photographs of cosmic exploration in the archives of the Harvard College Observatory. She along with painted evocative layerings of an imagined lane through space and time, and fabulous 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 commencement of the nebula and in the gestation of the painting itself. . . . In comparing Crab Nebula to the photographs that inspired the work, it is fascinating to look how much more lustrous and highbrow the artist's observations is. The photographs appear static; the painting pulses next energy, embodying an endless universe in creation."

The Being and Becoming series concerns the press forward of the universe back the Big Bang. Inspired by this series and further 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 maintain from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts in 1995. It was performed once again at the Newton Free Library in December 2006 in commemoration of Golahny’s energy and work. Golahny died in November 2005.

Her acceptance 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."