"Samuel Rothbort's watercolors have an incandescent, almost combustive visionary energy."- Ken Johnson, art critic, The New York Times

"There were only a handful of 'naIve' painters who achieved Rothbort's level of recognition while alive. Indeed, he belongs in a class with his contemporaries, 'Grandma' Moses, John Kane and Morris Hirshfield," - Norman L. Kleeblatt, Curator, The Jewish Museum, New York

The Exhibition can be viewed in the Temple Foyer,
Martin Meyer Reception, and Chapel Corridor
March 7 - June 2, 2008

Opening reception:
Friday March 7, 6:30 - 7:30 pm
following 5:30 pm Shabbat Services
in the Main Sanctuary

Samuel Rothbort (1882- 1971), sculptor and painter, came to America in 1904 at the age of 22 and won acclaim as a painter of raw talent. Much admired by critics such as Hamilton Easter Field, Rothbort achieved success in a wide range of genres: landscapes, portraits, and Judaica. He was born in Wolkovisk, Byelorussia, into a family of a scholar father and a breadwinner mother who ran a flour shop. He began making art as a child, and by the time he immigrated to the United States, he was a self-taught artist of noticeable talent, painting in his own impressionistic style, which helped him in New York to find employment as a muralist. While he often had to take odd jobs, he never stopped creating, working in oil, watercolor, and pen and ink. In the years of the depression when he could not afford paint or canvas, Rothbort began carving wood and stone using found materials like driftwood, rails, and old fence posts. At that time the press called it "Fencepost Art".

During the 1920s and early 1930s, Samuel Rothbort was regularly represented in exhibitions organized by The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Through the 1930s his watercolors and sculptures were shown at Grant Studios in Brooklyn. In 1940 he began a 28-year relationship with the Barzansky Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York, exhibiting oils, watercolors, and sculpture in individual and group shows. Famous collectors of his work included Mrs. William Randolph Hearst Jr., Rosalind Russell, Mayor La Guardia, Somerset Maugham, and George Blumenthal (while president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

In the late 1930s Rothbort began painting "Memory Paintings" based on his childhood experiences of life in the ghettos and surrounding woodlands of Polesie, in Byelorussia.

"...The ghetto life in my Wolkovisk shtetl differed a little from the big city ghettos where the influence of the outside culture on a Jewish child was very strong. Big city shtetl children dreamed of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. In the small town shtetl, most of the children had been raised around grandmother's vegetable garden, grandfather's horse, mother's milking goat... and the buta medruchim (synagogue)... The word Zion to the Jewish child was the most sentimental word. Ehritz Yisroel was his dream. L'shona haabor Jerusaleum (to be in Jerusalem the following year) was his hope ... The nearby little river was his Jordan... surrounding hills were the ahra Yahuda (the hills of Judea). The beautiful synagogue with its cupolas, the Bas ah Migdush the Holy Temple. His war with the neighboring kids was war with the Plishtim Philistines.," wrote Rothbort in his artistic statement "The Jew as an Artist".

A prize winning documentary, "Memories of The Shtetl" The Ghetto Pillow, produced by Harriet Semegram, used several hundred of Samuel Rothbort's watercolors, which also became a major visual resource for Jerome Robbins' film and play, Fiddler On The Roof. Another award-winning documentary, The Lost Wooden Synagogues of Eastern Europe, produced by Albert Barry and Florida Atlantic University and shown at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and on public television, used many of Rothbort's paintings to illustrate life in pre-war Eastern Europe.

Samuel Rothbort died in 1971, leaving behind an impressive collection of paintings and sculpture included in permanent collections from the Smithsonian to the Federal Reserve Board, The Heckscher Museum, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. "We hope the Jewish artist who is fortunate to create today in his own homeland will fulfill his mission, key me tse yehn tey Sey Torah," wrote Samuel Rothbort. He certainly fulfilled his.