Michael Rothenstein was born in London and studied at Central School of Arts and Crafts. His studies were interrupted by illness, myzoedema, which induced a lengthy melancholia. Fully recovered he moved to Essex in 1940 and where his subject matter became the landscape, farms, farm animals and machinery around him. Rothenstein made his first print, a lithograph of 1946, for the first series of School Prints (www.merivaleeditions.com/schoolprints) published in the immediate post-war period to provide original prints for schools. He made further lithographs during the period 1948-53 including works for the Miller’s Press in Lewes, Sussex. He executed a large group of monotypes between 1948 and 1950 and, following a series of short visits to S W Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris, began making colour etchings in 1952. From this time onwards printmaking became his main field of activity and a prolific output of colour linocuts, woodcuts. Screenprints and mixed media prints followed over the next four decades. His major contribution to printmaking was the development of the relief print using found objects and materials, a subject on which he wrote three books.

Further reading:
Tessa Sidey, The Prints of Michael Rothenstein, Scolar Press, Aldershot 1993

 

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

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