E. Benezit’s dictionary provides no birth year for Rose Golub, a twentieth century naturalized American artist, born in Vilna [Wilno], Poland [ Ukraine today], who chose to settle in Paris in 1946. Known mostly as an artist of landscapes and flowers, Rose Golub priviledged pastels. She studied art at the Art Students’ League in New York with S.W. Hayter in 1944 and 1945. After she had settled in Paris in 1946 she took art courses at the Academie Julian until 1948. Her first expositions took place in Paris in 1951, and another one in 1957 in New York. The Galerie Katia Granoff, Place Beauvau, Paris 8e, exhibited her paintings from October 19 to November 8, 1966. On that occasion, Gabrielle Vienne, the honorary curator of national museums in France, wrote the following brief comment of Golub’s art:
Il faut voir ces fleurs de Rose Golub pour saisir jusqu’où l’invention poétique peut entraiîner l’artiste dans son [travail] d’alchimiste qui, d’un œillet robuste fera une création de rêve, d’un souci desséché une petite lueur qui s’envole et de ces grandes fleurs dont j’ignore le nom de jets d’eau irisés par la lumière ou de ces colliers de perles aux transparences opalines.
Il ne peut être question devant ces œuvres ni de composition ni de formes, ni de bien d’autres choses qu’on essaie généralement à définir quand on parle d’une œuvre, Rose Golub s’en souci si peu. Elle vit son rêve en écrasant ses pastels sur le papier, loin du bruit et du monde dans son lumineux atelier où elle livre sans trêve de douloureux combats, car ce n’est pas sans la quête harrassante qu’on arrive à saisir la réalité dans sa plus grande fluidité.
(Galerie Katia Granoff, Exposition announcement.
The Frick Art Reference Library in New York)
Using pastels, Rose Golub created canvases with an almost fleeting, elusive and evanescent quality. According to the entry in Benezit, her work reflects cleverness, skill and cunning, it is quite habile [265].
Memory being one of the most fragile gifts, it suffers the greatest atrition with the passage of time. With a retrospective of thirty years, I cannot remember where and how I met Rose Golub. I met her perhaps near the rue Richelieu, in Paris where she lived in 1977. We may have met at a performance at the Comédie française, near “Place Royale;” or perhaps in the enclosure of the green space that faces the main entrance to the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris located in the rue Richelieu. I used to sit there and munch on a baguette at noon looking at a nearby fountain. Its four goddesses represented the major rivers of France. Sometimes I engaged in conversation with someone sitting next to me. She may have been that special someone. Or we may have accidentally met in one of the small shops in the rue Richelieu. We may have talked about L’Incroyable, an affordable restaurant still serving today quality food to Parisians living in the quartier. Somehow, for a very brief moment our destinies crossed in Paris in August of 1977. They created fireworks and then vanished in smoke with the passage of time.
She was a tiny and frail looking gentle woman already advanced in her years and grey haired. Even though I never saw her again after that sabbatical in Paris, and although she probably no longer remembers me if she is still living, I remember her well. She might be surprised to learn the part she has played in my life in moments of darkness or optimism that fill a human life.
The more I think about our brief acquaintance, the more I become convinced that we must have met at the Comédie française during an intermission of a performance that I may have attended with some friends. Did we exchange some thoughts on the coincidence that we were both naturalized Americans of Polish descent? We must have made a good impession, my friends and I, for she invited us for dinner in her apartment, located on the first floor [second floor in America], 30 rue de Richelieu, Paris 1er, in a 19th century building facing the statue of Molière, a Parisian landmark. We set a date for dinner: Tuesday, August 12, 1977.
Rose Golub occupied a rather spacious apartment, sparingly furnished, very clean, in the most central [and once aristocratic] location of Paris. We spent Tuesday evening with the artist, at a round table on which she served fish on a large platter. The enormous size of the fish still remains imbedded in my memory, blocking out all other details except Rose Golub’s gentle presence and conviviality. The guests also included Elizabeth du Boislouveau, Marie-Hélène, a student at the Academie des Beaux Arts. Rose Golub first served a «consommé de tomate» Swiss. Next came the fish, a dorade with potatoes and peas, and some blinis for desert. The conversation touched on many things, but mostly on the Académie des Beaux Arts and the Centre Beaubourg. We took a photo to remember the occasion. At ten everyone went home. We must have brought some flowers and a bottle of wine, or chocolates. Rose Golub’s name appears four or five times in my notes that summer, without any other details, except those describing the festive evening when we had dinner at her place.
Was it then or perhaps during another visit that she and I looked at her paintings? She may have shown me some landscapes or flowers, but the one tableau that stands out in my memory was a tall and narrow [vertical and rectangular] canvas representing human faces, arranged one above the other, in delightful pastels of light pink and yellowish shades, gentle faces, with an evanescent and elusive look filled with a pervasive sadness. According to Rose Golub, her pastels sold [in 1977] for seven or eight hundred dollars in the United States, a sum of money that represented about a third of my Paris budget for a prolonged stay of several months, a frugal trip, though rich in cultural encounters. Her pastels were out of reach for my means. Yet it seemed important to seal the memory of our acquaintance. On her table was a painting that caught my eye because of its strong Jewish flavor and its haunting and gripping quality. It was a finished piece of art. I chose instead a more modest rendering of the same picture in an unfinished state, most likely an earlier version of the final work of art. I offered sixty francs and asked her to sign and date it. Her signature made the modest art work more special with every year that passed, imbedding Rose Golub more deeply in my memory.
The picture represents a group of fifteen people, mostly women except for four male figures. They stand divided into groups of two, three and five around an open mass grave from which human remains have been excavated and scattered on the ground. There are heads of different sizes, some with eyes closed, others with open eyes that seem to look hauntingly at the onlooker, asking an enigmatic: “Why?” Two small bodies lye on the ground with no signs of dismemberment. The women who have gathered around the grave wear ample black capes that envelop their entire body from head to toe; the men are barely sketched with black lines that convey the idea of an unfinished work. A scrap of sky in the upper left corner and another small area surrounding the open grave appear in greyish and bluish colors. White fills the empty spaces separating the various groups of witnesses, or perhaps family members of the victims. The artist offers no other details than minimal facial contours filled with a pervading sadness. This is Rose Golub’s artistic rendering of the Holocaust plight that the Jews suffered in the twentieth century, the century of fear to quote Albert Camus (In Combat 1946). When I asked her why she painted it, she simply replied that she had to (had to express what she felt inside). The scene is not bleak. On the contrary, it elicits a feeling of mourning and immense sadness.
Even in its unfinished state, her painting deserves to be displayed in a place where it can be shared with others.
Her treatment of the human loss that the Jewish people once endured made me think that there may have been deeper ties to, and a special understanding of the suffering of the Jews, not unlike the depth of feeling expressed in E.M. Cioran’s insightful analysis of the Jews in “A People of Solitaries,” “Un peuple de solitaires” in La Chute dans le temps, pp. 64-97.
Rose Golub’s haunting picture has had and still has a salutary effect on me. It brings a kind of equilibrium into my life. In moments of hardship, despair, and suffering, I tell myself that things are not as bleak as they once were in the concentration camps of WWII. Their suffering alleviates the pain of the moment and inspires courage. At other times, when things look rosy and the spirit soars high reaching dangerous levels of optimism, I try to remain calm, and store the extra optimism as nourishment for the soul for use at a later time, in moments of darkness to come, which will require an extra dose of strength.
Rose Golub’s very special treatment of a painful subject should find a place in a public forum other than my home, a museum for instance, where others can see, remember and reflect.
Copyright by Aleksandra Gruzinska, April 4, 2006.
Arizona State University
Bibliographic References
Commanducci Dizionario Universale delle Belle Arti. [commanducci@commanducci.it] has a 300 character fiche available for 25 Euros. E-mail dated April 21, 2005. I did not take advantage of this offer.
Bénézit, E. Dictionnaire critique et documentaire de peintres sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays par un groupe d’écrivains specialistes français et étrangers. Nouvelle édition entièrement refondue sous la direction de Jacques Busse. T. 6.Paris: Gründ, 1999: 265.
“Golub, Rose. Née à Vilna. XXe siècle. Active et naturalisée aux Etats-Unis et depuis 1946 en France. Polonaise. Peintre de paysages, fleurs, pastelliste.
Elle fut élève de l’Art Students League à New York avec S.W. Hayter en 1944 et 1945. En 1946, elle s’installe définitivement à Paris, où elle suit l’enseignement de l’Académie Jullian, jusqu’en 1948. Ses premières expositions ont eu lieu à Paris en 1951, et en 1957 à New York. Elle utilise le pastel et dépeint ses sujets d’une manière presque insaisissable, évanescente et, somme toute, assez habile˝ (Bénézit vol. 6, p. 265)
Cioran, E.M. «Un peuple de solitaires.» In La Chute dans le temps. Les Essais LXXXII. Paris: Gallimard, 1956. Translated by Richard Howard as The Fall into Time.
Cioran, E.M. Fall into Time. Translated by [Pulitzer Prise winning poet ] Richard Howard.
Galerie Katia Granoff, Place Beauvau – Paris 8 e, R o s e G o l u b , du 19 octobre au 8 novembre 1966. Vernissage le mercredi 19 octobre de 17 h. à 20 h. An exposition announcement that may be consulted at the Frick Art Reference Library in New York.
On Katia Granoff see: http://www.france-ukraine.com/article.php3?id_article=340
Galeries Katia Larock Granoff see: http://www.larockgranoff.com/contact.html
Grove Dictionary of Art
http://www.artnet.com/library [not able to locate among artists Rose Golub]
Hayter, S(tanley) W(illiam)
Born in London, 27 Dec. 1901; died in Paris, 4 May 1988. English printmaker, draughtsman and painter, active in France and the USA. In 1926 he settled in Paris and attended the Academy Julian. At one point he collaborated with Samuel Beckett. There is a Surrealist period in Hayter’s career.
Summer 1977 in Paris France. Notes on Rose Golub.
A list of things to do and people to see contains the name of Rose Golub.
On a 3 x 5 card – her name appears twice including a note to call Rose Golub.
Notes for the week of jeudi 28 (probably 28 June, 1977)
Mardi 1 or 2 août – Day reserved for Rose Golub
Vendredi le 12 août
Le soir dîner chez Rose Golub. Invitées: Elizabeth du Boislouveau, Marie-Hélène et moi. Rose sert une sorte de “consommé de tomate” suisse, une dorade avec des pommes de terre, des petits pois, des blinis. On parle un peu de tout, surtout de l’Académie des beaux arts et de Beaubourg. Marie Hélène est une étudiante aux Beaux Arts. Photo. A 10 heures on s’en va. Promenade avec Elizabeth jusqu’à la place de la Concorde.
Rose Golub’s name comes up again twice, as reference to the Friday dinner. In another note she is included among friends that I have seen that particular week.
Another reference to Rose.
Le 2 août – mardi – 1977 Chez Rose Golub.
These are all the notes I have on Rose Golub.
There must be a photo somewhere – since I took one during the dinner.
Possible telephones for Rose Golub in 1977: 296-27-94 ; 242-94-95 ; 742-94-95. [Updated 4/4/06]