April 19: Canadian Jewish Studies Forum: Jewish Themes in the Art of Berta Rosenbaum Golahny

The next meeting of the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies Forum will take place on Friday morning, April 19, at 10:00 AM in the Religion Department Seminar Room (2060 McKay St., room 103).

The presenter will be Emily Kopley. She will speak on "Jewish Themes in the Art of Berta Rosenbaum Golahny".

Abstract

Berta Rosenbaum Golahny (1925-2005) was a serious and prolific painter and printmaker. Born in Detroit to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Eastern Europe, Golahny's early interest in art was encouraged by her father, who sculpted ornamental ironwork, and her mother, who founded women's Yiddish reading circles. Golahny studied painting at Cass Technical High School, then studied sculpture under Ossip Zadkine at the Art Students League of New York City. She received her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, and her MA in printmaking from the University of Iowa, where she studied with Mauricio Lasansky. On graduating from Iowa, she moved to Newton, Massachusetts, where she spent the rest of her life.

Golahny's several hundred works are united by a dominant concern: creation. Equally fascinated by the biblical account of the creation of the world (Genesis/Bereshit), the scientific account (the Big Bang), the human and animal life-cycle, and the fertile human imagination, Golahny depicted many originary moments. Blending abstract and representational approaches, often in the same work, Golahny created series including Genesis, The Cosmos, Children at the Fair, and Being and Becoming.

Much of Golahny's work reflects her concern for Judaism and the Jewish people. In addition to representing the seven days of creation in the Genesis series, Golahny created prints and paintings concerning the Hebrew Psalms, Mount Sinai, Israel, the Shoah, messianism, and major Jewish figures such as Aaron Copland and Albert Einstein. This slideshow-lecture will focus on the Jewish themes in Golahny's art, while calling attention to her social and familial ties to Canada.

Emily Kopley

Emily Kopley, Golahny's granddaughter, received her BA in English at Yale University and is now a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. She lives in Montreal, where she is finishing her dissertation on Virginia Woolf's attitude towards poetry. Independent of her dissertation, Emily has published on Jewish-American novelist and theologian Arthur A. Cohen and on Nathan Englander. She recently helped to curate an exhibition of Golahny's work in central Pennsylvania and helped to organize the Stanford conference "The Future of Jewish Storytelling."