Jack Rabinowitz

Rabinowitz earned a reputation for being a painter's painter.
He spent hours discussing the issues and ideas surrounding
and advancing the new American Art with his painter friends;
Mary Abbott, Earl Kerkam and Ed Clarke, the famed abstract
expressionist Franz Kline, and a diversity of acquaintances
from nights at Greenwich Village's Cedar Tavern. Rabinowitz's
work is owned by some of the most reknowned collections in
the world; Guggenheim, Nelson Rockefeller, and the high
profile Ciba-Geigy collection.

Rabinowitz's work evolved over his career to where in the late
60's and early 70's he honed in on the style that was to become
his trademark; the evocation, idealization, manipulation,
and ultimately, Matisse-vintage adoration of the female form,
indeed, the female phenomenon. At the outset, Rabinowitz's
nudes were upfront and simple and disarmingly erotic salutes to
the ladies, heavily outline in black on an often neutral ground
"the negative space" which had as much raw power as the
figurative. One young woman might be crouched over another
woman seated, the first leaning on the back of a second.
In another of these basic black nude duos, a young woman is
seen, again, from the back, hand reaching down behind her,
with a friend strolling, and not a little sexily, to the right.

The checkerboard form of a photographic contact sheet is
apparent in his subdivided canvases of smallish squares containing black, line drawings of pieces of the female form; upper back with breast
and arm, one torso with leg crouching, prone figure with arm raised, bent leg, knee and foot, even a touch of hair and head against a shoulder,
that were all tantalizingly recognizable as pared down anatomies and hieroglyphic looking abstract symbols. The final result, resembled an
alphabet table, the letters of which, horizontally, vertically, and serially arranged, constituted a literal sort of "body language", the ultimate
import of which remained as mysterious as the femina eterna herself.

Rabinowitz strongly and instinctively felt these later works represented his talent at an approaching zenith in which came a series of canvases from
the last year of his life. As with the "body language" work, a canvas would be serially subdivided; unlike the others, the female anatomy had been
transformed into free-form, numeral-like letters, hinting, in shifting tones of umber, or sage, clay red, mustard, and cobalt blue against a nuetral
background, at a new, universal language that had no form that was not material, and no meaning that was not transcendent. The viewer needn't
specifically understand the symbols to "read" their aesthetic importance, their roots possibly ancient, perhaps pre-verbal, cultures, their sturdy aura
of communication of the incommunicable.

Rabinowitz had a achieved a mastery of a purely artistic sort, when at age 49, his life was cut short by an acute attack of asthma, from which he
had suffered since boyhood. Artists of the passion, energy, imagination and dedication of Jack Rabinowtiz are sadly at a premium and are
immediately missed the moment they live this earth. The artwork Jack Rabinwitz created is the purest example of the man and the artist,
complicated and erotic; and the Abstract Expressionistic movement of the Manhattan art scene will always flowing with excitement and
imagination in the artworks created by Jack Rabinowitz.