Word: rosee
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Christ & Picasso. The show centered on nine paintings of the Crucifixion, done in oils on thin paper. Rose had long been regarded as a decorative, eclectic artist with a low emotional octane rating: overnight his new pictures established him as a force in British painting. Said London's Art News & Review: "This remarkable series of paintings is not romantic or expressionist, as are most Crucifixions, but may rather be described as liturgical, ritualistic, learned and arcane . . . executed with great resource and command of the medium." Describing Rose as "an artist who believes in both Christ and Picasso," the Catholic...
Despite the critics' praises, few gallery-goers were likely to see beyond the main quality of Rose's Crucifixion: its ghastliness. Rose had clothed the figure of Christ in writhing ribbons of green flesh outlined with black and lavender, dripping streamer-like gouts of purplish blood. The painting swarmed dizzyingly with abstruse symbols, many of them phallic. Christ's brow, overhanging the foreground, was an electric lamp...
...Rose's chalk and ink drawing of the making of the death mask of Christian Berard was far less cluttered and, for all its quiet horror, easier to take. It showed the smiling corpse of the Paris fashion arbiter elaborately bibbed in preparation for the mold maker, who sat, dabbling in a bowl of plaster, by the deathbed...
...Games. From such macabre work, one might imagine Rose to be a hollow-eyed ascetic; actually he is a gay little blade whose 39 years have been a brilliant whirligig of international fun and games with such friends as Stein, Berard, Cecil Beaton, Louis Bromfield and the Wellington Koos. Rose spent five years studying Chinese art and poetry in China, hurried home to join the R.A.F. in 1939. Married to British Novelist Dorothy Carrington, he now sticks reasonably close to his Chelsea studio...
...perfect seriousness, Rose speaks of creating a "new medium of artistic expression." Half abstract and half symbolic, his new medium requires a highly sophisticated audience, appeals more to the mind than to the eye. He uses light bulbs in his religious paintings, Rose explains, "to represent the eternal light of Jesus Christ by something which people think of when they think of light. I wanted to get away from the historical representation of the Crucifixion to emphasize that it is something still happening...