Rosenblum, Jay

Jay Rosenblum was a native of the Bronx who studied at Bard College and the Cranbrook Academy of Fine Arts in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He also passionately studied music and was a violinist in the Seventh Army Symphony in West Germany in the mid-1950’s and taught at the School of Visual Arts. He later returned to NY and was active in Manhattan.

The artist experimented with the Visual Stipe Motif for most of his life time. He sought to correlate his big love for Chamber music sonatas with freely evolving color block in his art; both musical notes and color block transform into cohesive art forms. The vertical forms serve as vehicles for color.

Rosenblum referred to his work as Free Association Color Development, describing his vibrant and expressive color block paintings. The artist explained in his own words:

“The vertical forms in my work serve as the vehicle for color and also become a dramatic means of achieving movement and deep space. This becomes possible through a great variation in the stripe thickness and the sudden emergence or disappearance of a particular band of color when it overlaps another.”

Rosenblum was selected by the City of NY to design and execute 2 major wall murals. In 1955, he was awarded the Carlos Lopez Memorial Prize in Painting from the Detroit Institute of Art.