Dutton presents Night Drawing, marking self-taught artist Rose deSmith Greenman’s first solo exhibition in New York of unknown works on paper and rare sketchbooks. 

The catalyst leading to a torrent of drawing began inexplicably as Greenman showed signs of cognitive decline at the age of seventy two. She fervently composed her imaginings — or elaborated-upon still-lives — as she sat in her armchair in her tiny Newton apartment, often secluded through days and nights, or at her daughter’s house. 

This presentation evokes the sense of quiet winding infinitude of working at night and is comprised of imagined drawings and depictions of dioromas within vessels using Greenman’s favored materials of everyday markers, ballpoint pen, and pencil; drawings from her later years with lively colors that push into geometric forms; and two diminutive intimate landscapes. Using scraps of paper she accumulated and versos of pieces of mail, Greenman never reflected on her making and definitively dismissed any mention of her work by inquiring family members as being “only my ‘doodles!’”, while silently rolling works up to tuck into her bedskirt and stacking bundles deep in her closet. 

Greenman’s drawings exist as sculpted form, time felt like layers of strata. Rooted in naturalism, her interior world shows an almost infinite capacity to access soaring unending freedoms in devising vessels, capturing trees, gardens, and flowers, and in creating dialogue with herself that includes moments of irony and humor. The outpouring of work is expressed vividly and directly with an underlay of intimacy and the ethereal. Intuitive botanical forms with tendrils in vessels seem to allude to a physicality of what is bound and entwined from within, bursting at the edges of themselves — while others, inversely — are unfurling and unravelling.

This unfettered drive and a willingness to take chances has an enlivened, unerring nervy confidence in every energetic mark. For every iteration of her work Greenman brings a newness into sharp focus — putting all of herself and her wonder in every one of her drawings. What is evident is that her drawings are about everything but the subject itself, forged out of an outpouring of sheer necessity. 

Drawing was a sanctuary and a journey which conjured and inquired memory and inhabited a place to experiment, interpret, and marvel. Greenman’s drawings were invariably spurred on by a neurological shift, a precedent of which can be found in late de Kooning. Alongside this, Greenman’s sensibility, unconstrained playfulness, wonder, whimsy and world-building can be seen in her contemporaries such as Calder (his flea circus), and Dubuffet, with reverberations of James Castle, skirting mark making that speaks to early Warhol. These drawings of Greenman’s are now being shown after being tucked away in obscurity, these unsung works on paper bringing a vital new voice to the fore. 

Rose deSmith Greenman (1898-1983 b. Boston, MA) had an outpouring of work late in life, at the same time that she began to suffer from Alzeihemer’s disease at seventy two. Orphaned at a young age, Greenman was severely hearing impaired having suffered a childhood illness, and lived her life in Boston and Newton, MA. Greenman married a pharmacist and had one daughter, Betty, and was a home-maker until her husband died suddenly in 1956. To make ends meet, she became a clerk at the Mass. Division of Banking and Insurance until her retirement in 1970. Over a span of the next seven years, Greenman drew obsessively, making work with increasing intensity as a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease progressed. Her drawing stopped suddenly as she received early treatments for Alzheimer’s, her last works appear as scant lines.

Sixteen years after Greenman’s death in 1983, Frank and Betty Avruch uncovered a trove of Greenman’s drawings in their attic and together set about creating an archive of Greenman’s works. This effort began after Betty saw a revelatory museum exhibition of James Castle’s soot and spit drawings and recognized striking parallels with her mother’s work. Berenberg Gallery in Boston who specialized in self-taught art had a solo exhibition of her work in 2001. From the discovery of the expansive archive after a period of obscurity, Greenman’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, and The Art Newspaper after debuting work at Outsider Art Fair, New York and Independent 20th Century, New York, and is held in several important contemporary and self-taught private collections including recent acquisitions of drawings by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia.