NEW HOPE, PA.- The James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown is pleased to announce the exhibition Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen on view from October 13, 2006 through January 28, 2007. Rosen was one of the most distinguished Pennsylvania Impressionist artists; he began his career as a successful landscape painter and later changed his work dramatically to a more modernist style. Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen is sponsored by Rago Arts and Auction Center located in Lambertville, New Jersey.

Rosen’s work is in more than 20 museum collections, and the exhibition features over 48 works, including major examples of both his landscape and modernist styles, as well as works on paper. Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen is curated by the Michener’s Senior Curator Brian H. Peterson. The exhibition will travel to the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York at New Platz, where it will be on view from February 21, 2007 through May 13, 2007.

For some painters a single way of working can last a lifetime. This was not Rosen’s story. He began his creative career as a highly successful landscape painter, prominently associated with the impressionist art colony centered in New Hope, Pennsylvania, in the early twentieth century. His best-known New Hope canvases are large-scale snow scenes and spring scenes, utilizing a simple but elegant compositional style sometimes reminiscent of Japanese prints. These landscapes explore many different techniques and often exhibit a stylistic restlessness.

In his late thirties and early forties, Rosen became dissatisfied with the landscape style, and under the influence of modernist ideas his work changed radically. He completely abandoned traditional landscapes in favor of a manner of working that might be described as both rhythmic and semiabstract, one that usually used man-made structures as subjects and was based on a passionate exploration of form as a living, organic phenomenon. Rosen himself described this idea as “form that radiates life” and spoke of the “effort to achieve this in paint.” In 1920 he moved to Woodstock, New York, where he taught at the Art Students League summer school. He developed close friendships with fellow Woodstock painters George Bellows and Eugene Speicher, and also taught painting in Columbus, Ohio, and San Antonio, Texas.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication that provides an in-depth examination of the life and work of Charles Rosen, studying both phases of his career and featuring paintings from major museum and private collections that demonstrate this unusual range of styles. Approx. 200 pages in length and lavishly illustrated with 183 color images, this book represents the oeuvre of an artist not only of prodigious talent and vision but also of tremendous sensitivity and imagination. Principally authored by the Michener’s Senior Curator Brian H. Peterson, the book includes an essay on Rosen’s Woodstock years by Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History at Bard College, and is co-published by the Michener Art Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Peterson has more than twenty-five years experience as a curator, critic, artist, and arts administrator in the Philadelphia area. He has been responsible for guiding the Michener’s exhibition program since 1993, and was the chief curator and project manager for the museum’s major permanent multimedia exhibition Creative Bucks County: A Celebration of Art and Artists on Bucks County artists that opened in 1996. Peterson has curated numerous historic and contemporary exhibitions with a wide range of subject matter and genres, and he is the editor and principal author of the books Pennsylvania Impressionism and The Cities, the Towns, the Crowds: The Paintings of Robert Spencer, co-published by the Michener Art Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Press.

In conjunction with the exhibition the Museum will present a number of programs including two Curator’s Gallery Talks on Rosen by Brian H. Peterson on Friday, October 20, from 2 to 3 pm, and on Wednesday, January 10, from 2 to 3 pm at Michener Art Museum in New Hope.

Brian H. Peterson will also conduct a Special Exhibition Lecture: Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen on Wednesday, November 1, from 2 to 3 pm at the Michener in New Hope in the Community Gallery at Occasions on the Courtyard Level adjacent to the Museum.

A lecture entitled A Tale of Two Colonies: Charles Rosen’s Woodstock Years by Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History at Bard College on Sunday, October 15, from 2 to 3 pm at the Michener in New Hope in the Community Gallery at Occasions on the Courtyard Level adjacent to the Museum. Wolf has written extensively about twentieth-century American art and artists, and the history of the art colony in Woodstock, New York.

The fee for all three programs is $5 for members and $10 for non-members and includes Museum admission. Advance registration is required to attend the programs. Call 215-340-9800 or visit http://michenerartmuseum.org/events to register.