Art: Carpets to Joy

On Black Thursday, 1929, the day the stock market collapsed, Wall Street was a scene of chaos, and many a suddenly paupered stockholder felt that the end of the world had come. One among them had a different thought; he dashed off to a friend's studio to make a lithograph of the disastrous scene: the great, gloomy canyon, the dashing crowds and distraught faces. That lithograph is now in the Philadelphia Museum, and other pictures by James N. Rosenberg hang in no fewer than 20 U.S. museums. Yet Rosenberg has always remained an amateur in spirit. He paints for the sheer joy of it in a highly emotional style, blandly ignoring the arrows of sophisticates who find his art old-fashioned and crude.

Rosenberg's latest museum exhibition at Washington's Corcoran Gallery last week once again proved his own happy confession: "I have never been able to lock the world out of my studio." Rosenberg avoids flashy technique and fashionable abstraction. Instead, he paints loose, free and colorful impressions of the things he loves: flowers, fields, streams and especially the Adirondack Mountains.

After losing his first fortune (earned as a reorganization lawyer) in the crash, Rosenberg made a second fortune from law, then turned to philanthropy. Now an 84-year-old gentleman-of-action, Rosenberg still sings out loud and clear for good causes of all kinds. Passionately devoted to his people, he has worked especially hard for displaced Jews and for Israel.

In his recently published Painter's Self-Portrait (Crown; $12.50), Rosenberg pays tribute to Cezanne, who shows nature's "very heart and skeleton; it has been these depths that I have sought, and seek, to penetrate." Yet he does not confuse himself with the master. Of his own pictures, says Rosenberg: "Whatever their fate, I am content. My landscapes are magic carpets on which I have flown from a world embittered by fear, hate and greed to regions of peace, joy and beauty. For which I humbly give thanks."