Michael Rothernstein

1908-1993

Michael Rothernstein is primarily a painter of both figurative and abstract figures in oils, watercolours, collage and mixed media, a printmaker and art writer. The younger son of painter draughtmaker and lithographer William Rothernstein.

He studied at Chelsea School of Art in 1923 and at the Central School from 1924-27 under Meninsky and Hatrick. It was in 1946, after an early career as a watercolorist that he turned his attention to printmaking, and experimented with lithographs, monotypes, etchings and woodcuts.

He started exhibiting as early as 1930 and thereafter showed regularly in around London, in the provinces and abroad. He showed in the RA from 1932 and represented in public collections including the Tate Gallery.

He was greatly influenced by Hayter and in the 1960's produced many mixed media prints using abstract symbols. His direct, dramatic painting in powerful colour ranged from the intense depiction of everyday scenes to the portrayal of certain symbolic images.

Rothernstein was enormously prolific during his half-century career, and earned a deserved reputation as one of the most exciting British printmakers of the twentieth century.

Rothernstein was elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1977 and a Royal Academician (RA) in 1984. Near the end of his life there was a retrospective of his work at the Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery (1989).