The artist Amalie Rothschild lived and worked her entire life in Baltimore, Maryland. During her six and half decade career she made significant contributions to the cultural and artistic environment of the city and local area. She is best known as a painter and sculptor working in a variety of materials including Plexiglas, aluminum, bronze, bark, hand-made cast paper, and particle board, as well as oil, acrylic, and watercolor. Her oeuvre encompasses the dramatic range of style, media and message that characterized the questing spirit of the best of 20th century art. Her work also explores the challenges faced by a creative woman in an era of major social change. Her output, despite its often abstract geometric appearance, was frequently self-referential and regularly dealt with the issues of balancing the duties of wife and mother with the strivings of the artist, while at the same time paying homage to the historical themes. During the 1960’s Rothschild broke out from her often hard-edged geometric paintings into sculpture and created more than 375 works, from large outdoor and sometimes monumental pieces, to elegant, table-top scale spatial explorations, to linear pieces that have been described as “drawing in space.” Beginning in the feminist 1970’s Amalie Rothschild created her most innovative work, a series she referred to as Vestments. Constructed of sculptural materials, including aluminum and transparent colored Plexiglas, cord and handmade chain links, the non-wearable forms are designed to hang and be seen from front and back, more in the manner of textiles than sculptures. Throughout her life she created over 1500 fully realized works in all media, some 340 of which are in museums and private collections. This publication is a catalog of those works.
