Browne, Rosalind Bengelsdorf (1916–1979)

American artist and founding member of the American Abstract Artists. Name variations: Rosalind Bengelsdorf. Born Rosalind Bengelsdorf in 1916 in New York, New York; died in 1979 in New York; studied art at the Art Students League, the Annot School, and with Hans Hofmann at his newly established school on 57th Street, New York; married Byron Browne (an abstract artist), 1940.

A founding member of the American Abstract Artists, Rosalind Browne devoted a lifetime

to the advancement of the abstract art movement. She began her own career studying with realist teachers at the Art Students League and was unimpressed by the first painting of Pablo Picasso she viewed at the Museum of Modern Art. Browne was more formally introduced to abstract art at the Annot School and later was influenced by Hans Hofmann, a leader in the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Advocating the use of colored spaces to provide balance, movement, and tension, Hofmann taught that, through color, forms can be submerged or brought forward from the background of the canvas.

Browne not only integrated Hofmann's ideas into her own abstract compositions but set out to win acceptance for the controversial movement. She contributed her time and talent to the American Abstract Artists, helping the fledgling organization raise money to pay for its first exhibition in 1937; one of her lithographs was included in a printed folio the artists sold to raise money. In the statement of intent that she wrote for the organization in 1938, Browne argued that abstraction was a new way of looking at spatial relationships, not just an escape from reality. That same year, she was one of a handful of abstract artists to win funding from the Federal Art Project, for a mural for the Central Nurses Home. Although the mural was eventually destroyed, the preliminary oil-on-canvas, Study for Mural for Central Nurses Home (1937–38), became part of the collection of the University Art Museum at the University of New Mexico. After her marriage to fellow abstract artist Byron Browne in 1940, Rosalind Bengelsdorf Browne cut back on her painting but continued as a critic, teacher, and writer until her death in 1979.