David Rosen has been a bootblack, lifeguard, car upholsterer, fur worker, billboard artist, merchant seaman, manager of ceramic studio and painter. This background, a lot more American than apple pie if you think about it, has provided him with a deep-seated interest in the great many things. It has also equipped him with a venturesome spirit. This, in turn, enables the artist Rosen to March into areas of subject matter where other, less personally assured artists of the contemporary scene would fear to tread.
In the matter of using Shakespeare as a creative stimulus (which Rosen does quite ably with over 20 canvases based on passages from Hamlet in his current show at the Galerie de Tours, 559 Sutter), the artist is violating that time-worn and dogmatic concept that interpretation of a literary idea constitutes commercial illustration. To most “dedicated modernists” the thought of being called an illustrator is as repugnant as having a great deal of money and being socially acceptable.
If Rosen were simply illustrating Hamlet – in the acts and postures indicated by Shakespeare’s text - the stigma might be attached to his work. But Rosen’s paintings are interpretations, not illustrations. They are personal and they are art. N amount of bickering about the relative value of subject matter can change.
For six years, Rosen was employed in the Mural Division of the Pre-war Federal Arts Project and the influence of Rivers, Siquiros and Chariot is evident in the Hamlet canvases. The mural concept is there. Color is muted, monochromatic. Space, within the confines of the frame, is shallow in depth. The painting-on words and phrases from the passages of Hamlet which he is interpreting further flattens the picture plane until, in some cases, the result is almost two-dimensional design.
When viewing the work of David Rosen en masse, however, one is struck primarily with the energy of the man. He is a prolific painter and there is indication in some of the canvases of a new concept arising – a more violent, and less decorative, kind of expressionism. But, until his next one-man show exhibits that side of this nature, the present side is a quite worthwhile experience.