Page 303 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Catalogue raisonné

Also omitted from these listings are two manufactured brass
ashtrays, now in the possession of his granddaughter Judith, on
which AR etched some sketchy inscriptions. One, in Hebrew and
English, reads “He whoso keepeth his mouth and tongue keepeth his
soul from troubles. Prov. XXI.” The other, in Hebrew only, makes
its point less subtly: “Like vinegar to the teeth, like smoke to the eyes,
so is the smoker.” It seems AR was ahead of his time in posting
warning messages on the paraphernalia of smoking.
While the works come in many sizes, formats, and media, they
may best be appreciated within certain broad categories of form and
iconography. This organization yielded much of the preceding
analysis of recurring themes and concerns in AR’s work, by the
simple method of observing the relative frequency of those motifs.
In all but a very works it is impossible to establish a date of
execution, but in general the cruder works are earlier, and it appears
he worked less in stone as he began to lose his strength—and to
appreciate the reliability and malleability of wood. Were the dates for
most of the pieces known with any precision, it would be possible to
chart changes in his subject matter, materials, and technique; and
since they are not, the interval occurring between repetitions of the
same image also remains a matter of conjecture. We can only assume
such repeated figures had a particularly powerful meaning for AR, as
is argued above. At any rate, similar pieces are listed together here as
often as possible to illustrate the impression their number conveys.
The carved inscriptions were executed all in majuscules, despite
their conventionalized presentation in the entries with upper- and
lower-case letters. The given dimensions, unless otherwise noted, are
height by width. The catalogue numbers, at the time of cataloguing,
were affixed to the bottom of the pieces on small self-adhesive
stickers; their absence, at any point in the future, will not, of course,
indicate pieces unaccounted for in these listings. The numbers were
assigned serially, as the collections in various locations were identified
and analyzed. [Note, 2019: over the past thirty years, the pieces have
changed hands within the family more than once with the passing of
the older generation and the emergence of the younger.]
Within the catalogue, the pieces appear in their respective
categories in groupings and in sequences determined by subject
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