In Memoriam: Susan Rothenberg

Ian Alteveer, Aaron I. Fleischman Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, May 22, 2020

With yesterday's deeply sad news of the death of painter Susan Rothenberg, my mind returned with melancholy to our galleries in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for Modern Art in The Met's main building, where her lush, remarkable work from 1992, Galisteo Creek, hangs in silence. It is a paean to the mysterious and powerful New Mexican landscape she had come to inhabit—even to love—and a monument to her remarkable practice of capturing searing impressions of her lived experience in skeins of luscious paint.

Born in Buffalo, Rothenberg was active in New York's vital downtown scene in the 1970s. Her break-out paintings of silhouetted horses from that decade resounded at a time when many thought that painting to begin with—let alone painting that was not abstract—had perhaps lost its relevance. Rothenberg's pictures heaved with the energy that still vibrated through the medium of paint, a practice whose spirit was still very much alive and propelled with particular invention by a number of talented women in downtown New York.

Rothenberg married the artist Bruce Nauman in 1989, and the following year they moved from the city to a ranch near Galisteo, New Mexico, where they remained ever since. No longer confined to the rectilinear layout of New York's gridded streetscape, Rothenberg's daily peregrinations through her striking new desert environs, often in the company of her husband and their dogs, augured an expansive shift in her subject matter, palette, and perspective.

Galisteo Creek reflects the amplification of Rothenberg's practice to accommodate her experience of the desert Southwest's ruddy-hued vastness. Capturing the harshness and splendor of this new terrain with incidental, sometimes graphic depictions of the "melodrama of nature"—her words to describe the cycles of life and death of the flora and fauna she encountered—she shifted into even more vibrant color and larger scale. Here, in a view from above of a dry creek bed she frequented, she and her canine companion cross the arroyo as a flock of crows flies by. The carcass of a calf lies to the side of the stream, a token of nature's power to both give life and reclaim it.

I yearn to stand in front of Rothenberg's larger than life vista, to revel in its flurry of unmistakable brushstrokes and vibrant color. Instead, I hold it close in my mind's eye—dreaming of that distant landscape and the remarkable painter who used to trek across it, viewing it perhaps with some trepidation, but certain in the knowledge that this strange terrain held in it the possibility to keep painting alive, sumptuous, and always present.

Susan Rothenberg (American, 1945–2020). Galisteo Creek, 1992. Oil on canvas, 111 3/4 x 147 5/8 in. (283.8 x 375 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1992 (1992.343)