Leonard Rosenfeld
Space Gent, 1965, oil on canvas, 12.5 x 12.125 in, 31.75 x 30.7975 cm
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Astronauts  In the 1960s, Rosenfeld moved on to what he always called his most challenging medium—oil paint on canvas—creating sometimes large works, especially on the subject of astronauts, rockets and spacecraft. In his often prescient way he anticipated the race to space that occupied much of that decade with this subject, even to the point of depicting African American and female astronauts, as in Black Astronaut and Green Space Girl with a Black and Pink Hat. While Rosenfeld was always focused on “the material,” and not “subject matter” (the mantra of the true “Expressionist”), if anything he was a narrative artist through and through, throughout his entire life. These works were no exception, as, sadly, in Goodbye Columbia, painted in 1965.

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