Page 371 - The Legacy of Abraham Rothstein - text

Fantastic and allegorical figures

15 Drunkard *
Wood
16.75” x 4”
Inscription: OSMOSIS (on front of base)

AR himself defined this visual pun: the man in the bottle, and
the bottle in the man. The piece is immediately understood as
both humorous and fantastic: the head, shoulders, and arms of
a “society” reveler grow out of the top of a liquor bottle. As
the inscription on the octagonal base implies, bottle and man
have absorbed each other, literally as well as figuratively. The
man is clean-shaven and wears a top hat, clearly a modern
urbanite with more money and leisure time than good sense.
His arms join the side of the bottle at the hands, creating an
organic-inorganic unity with the silhouette of an amphora-like
container. In one hand is a drinking glass tilted horizontally—
empty, its contents back inside the bottle-man. The integration
of satirical word and image in “Osmosis” is ingenious, melding
social criticism and earthy folk humor.

16 Mermaid *
Wood
17.5” x 5”

The subject may be mythological, but her pose and her figure
are pure Victorian. She stands erect, her body (shaped like a
svelte dress-form) blending into the only piscine detail, a
fishtail ending like a floor-length evening gown, tapering to a
point in front and back. That final cross-section is echoed in
the base, a rhombic mound gouged out to resemble a rock (the
favored vantage-point of mermaids). Her attitude is erotic, by
nineteenth- century standards: one arm beneath her breasts, the
other on her shoulder-length hair. The aquatic siren’s come-
hither look, according to legend, is intended to lure a human
male into a disastrous liaison with her beneath the sea; given
AR’s ambivalence about women, the idea of entrapment and

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