Greenbaum, Dorothea Schwarcz (1893–1986)

views updated

Greenbaum, Dorothea Schwarcz (1893–1986)

American sculptor and activist for artists' rights and opportunities. Born Dorothea Schwarcz in Brooklyn, New York, on June 17, 1893; died in 1986; daughter of Maximilian Schwarcz (an importer); attended New York School of Design for Women and the Art Students League; married Edward Greenbaum (a lawyer), in 1926; children: two sons.

Dorothea Greenbaum, the daughter of a well-to-do New York importer who died in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, started out as a painter, a member of Kenneth Hayes Miller's class at the Art Students League during the 1920s. Greenbaum (who was known as "Dots") became one of the Fourteenth Street School painters along with Alexander Brook, Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop , and Peggy Bacon , with whom she shared a Union Square studio. Following her marriage to lawyer Edward Greenbaum and the birth of her two sons, Greenbaum abandoned painting and took up sculpture. Beginning with clay modeling, she gradually expanded to stone carving and, finally, hammered lead, the medium she found most alive and responsive. Some of her work carries political undertones. Fascist (c. 1938), an enormous, brutallooking head, conveys her attitude toward the movement founded by Mussolini in 1919. Other works, however, like Girl With Fawn (1936) and Drowned Girl (1950), evoke a sense of peacefulness. The latter work, carved from Tennessee marble, is marked by a play of textures: the smooth contours of the face are contrasted by the roughly textured hair. In a catalogue commemorating a two-person exhibit with Isabel Bishop in 1970, Greenbaum was called a "romantic realist" whose works "radiate serenity."

Although financially secure herself, Greenbaum worked throughout her career to help her fellow artists. In 1938, she aligned herself with the Sculptors Guild, an avant-garde group founded in opposition to the traditional National Sculpture Society. The group was so non-conformist that it could hardly agree on its own policies. In a 1940 interview with the (Martha's) Vineyard Gazette, Greenbaum joked about her role as secretary and peacemaker and described the Guild as "an organization so radical… that it even refuses to have a president. That means I'm the boss." After World War II, a particularly lean period for many artists, Greenbaum helped found Artist's Equity, an organization concerned with improving rights and economic opportunities for artists. She and her husband also came to the aid of sculptor William Zorach (husband of Marguerite Zorach ), when he was threatened with deportation during the McCarthy era.

Greenbaum's sculpture Sleeping Girl (1928) had been in the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, and her first one-woman exhibition had been held at the Weyhe Gallery in Manhattan. Later, during the war, she held a solo show in Washington D.C., where her husband, then a brigadier general, was stationed. The Washington Post's announcement of the exhibit was typical of the 1940s: "General's Wife To Have One Man Art Exhibit." In 1947, Greenbaum was honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with a $1,000 grant "in recognition of sculpture of a high order replete with a warm and sensitive appreciation of the human spirit." Dorothea Greenbaum died in 1986, age 93.