Artists biography
- Name
- Michael Rothenstein
- Lived
- 1908 - 1993
- Qualifications
- RA
With a distinguished artistic background (his father was Sir William Rothenstein, and his brother became Director of the Tate Gallery) Rothenstein's work up until the late 1950s often had neo-romantic influences, and farm machinery with cockerels was a constant theme throughout his life. In the fifties he worked with William Hayter in Paris, and returned with a different style, becoming the most avant garde of the artists living in Bardfield, and the most determined to work on the international scene. His innovative contribution is in printmaking. He used a variety of objects - metal, plaster, fabric - anything that could be coated in ink, and from this went on to introduce an early interplay of photographic images in prints.
Artwork Description
- Artist
- Michael Rothenstein
- Title
- Turkey and Farm Machine III
- Size
- 558 x 860 mm
- Date
- 1959
- Technique
- Linocut
- Cat. No.
- 31
This work incorporates two of Rothenstein's recurrent themes of farm birds and farm machinery, where the machine can convey a conflict with the environment. Here, the close-up of the heavily-cropped image unites the natural and the constructed elements into a semi-abstract composition. There are two earlier linocut treatments of this subject from 1954: Turkey and Farm Machine I and II. Number I does not survive, but II won the first prize in the Giles Bequest Competition for Relief Printing in Colour that year.