Ernest Rosenthal (’55 Fine Arts)
Imagine riding the Los Angeles Metro to a political rally and spotting a small, elderly man wearing a placard of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” around his neck. You both get off at the same stop and start walking toward the same rally.
This is how gallery owner and curator Ilona Berger first encountered Ernest Rosenthal ’55—Holocaust refugee, World War II veteran, artist, former Otis student, art instructor, poet and peace activist. It was 2014, and they met at a Palestinian solidarity rally during the Gaza War. He was 95 at the time.
“I told him that I ran a gallery, and he told me he was an artist and had recently published a book of poetry,” Ilona says. “Not long after, I visited his home, studio and sprawling hillside garden in Laurel Canyon, and Ernest showed me some prints and around his studio.”
Ilona says it took a while to understand the breadth of Ernest’s work, but after years of friendship and absorbing the paintings and drawings on the walls, her gallery hosted "Retro/Introspective" at Tin Flats Gallery in Los Angeles. The show featured over seven decades of Ernest’s paintings, sculptures and drawings—250 works in all.
“Ernest’s work is a tour de force of 20th-century European, Abstract Expressionist experiments in minimalism and space and light and an intimate autobiographical fusion and remixing of it all in his last prints. It’s absolutely extraordinary,” Ilona says. “So many people have come through the show, from fans of mid-century art and Abstract Expressionism—who recognize Ernest’s influences—to people who don’t have a deep knowledge of art history and yet respond to the beauty and power of the work as well as Ernest’s story. I’ve never sold art to people who walk in off the street until this show. [The fact] that we have prints and drawings starting at $250 makes the work accessible to people.”
While Ernest jokes that he ‘has one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel,’ he had the ambition and vigor to direct the installation and design of his expansive show, choosing the placement of every piece and designing how the prints and drawings hang from Tin Flat’s sky-high ceiling in five columns, a display that Ilona describes as “architectural.”
“I hope that through this exhibition Ernest starts getting his due,” she says. “I know that he’s concerned with his archive and legacy, so I hope that he gets a higher-profile gallery show and museum opportunities in his lifetime.”
Planned gifts help us enable graduates like Ernest to make a lasting mark on the world. To learn how you can support our mission today and in the future, please contact Allison Graff-Weisner at (310) 658-6995 or agraffweisner@otis.edu.