Ralph Rosenborg

Rosenborg began the study of painting in 1929 at the School Art League, American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and studied privately with Henriette Reiss from 1930 to 1933. Ralph Rosenborg won a scholarship while still in high school to Saturday art classes at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. After classes ended, he continued to study privately with his teacher there, Henriette Reiss, who provided not only exacting technical training, but broad-based instruction in music, literature, and art history. More significantly, Reiss had worked with Kandinsky earlier in her career and introduced her young protege to the vast arena of vanguard European ideas. Ralph Rosenborg exhibited his artworks since as a teenager when he made dress patterns that were seen throughout the fashion society in New York City. His first One-Man Exhibit of oil paintings and watercolors was held in New York in June 1935. Ralph Rosenborg is the first recognized pioneer whose experimental art announced the coming of Abstract Expressionism in the United States during the mid nineteen thirties. Rosenborg was the first to introduce and instruct Jackson Pollock on Abstract Expressionism while at the Non-Objective Painting Museum in the early 1940's, which became the Guggenheim Museum. Documents establish Rosenborg was the first painter under contract by Marian Willard of the Marian Willard Gallery, two years before Pollock.

Submitted by Renata Fine Arts