David Rose, 95 - Artist's Depictions of Famous Trials Were Seen by Millions Around World
aka Bob
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-rose11mar11,1,1935171.story?coll=la-news-obituaries&ctrack=1&cset=true
From the Los Angeles Times
OBITUARIES
David Rose, 95; Artist's Depictions of Famous Trials Were Seen by
Millions Around World
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart - Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 11, 2006
During a rich career as a courtroom artist, David Rose viewed himself
as a witness to history, using colored markers, pencils and ink to
share the drama and emotion of trials with an audience of millions.
The way he saw it, a camera could not have done it better.
"The camera sees everything, but captures nothing," Rose told The
Times in 1986. "It merely gets everything in the room. We learn to
leave out the nonessential and emphasize what is important."
Rose, whose varied career took him inside fine art galleries and to a
long list of famous trials, died March 4 at his home in Hollywood. He
was 95. The cause of death was thought to be complications from
pneumonia, said his daughter, Lisa Rose.
In an era that has seen the video camera transformed into a household
appliance and the creation of an array of such image-capturing gadgets
as cellphones, Rose belonged to a dying profession. He was among a
small circle of courtroom artists that seems to lose standard-bearers
with each passing year.
"He's one of the old-timers of the courtroom art world," said Steven
Grossfeld, a friend and agent. "Unfortunately, there are so few of
them left…. He was someone they emulated."
Rose's portfolio is a pictorial history of notorious defendants: Klaus
Barbie, Patty Hearst, Sirhan Sirhan, members of the Manson family.
The artist was born in Malden, Mass., on March 10, 1910, to immigrants
who had moved to this country to escape persecution under Russian
czars. The language of his home was what he once called "a spicy
Lodzer Yiddish." The sights, sounds and culture of his Boston
neighborhood found their way onto his canvas, part of what became a
lifelong devotion to Jewish themes.
In his hands, art was never a leisurely endeavor. It was reportage,
commentary, history.
Rose's formal study of art began in the 1930s. He studied in Haifa,
Israel, and at the School of Music and Fine Arts in Boston. In 1934,
he graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art.
"To put bread on the family table, I used my raw art-school skills in
the advertising agencies of Boston and New York," Rose wrote. "Then,
on to the film and television factories of Hollywood."
Over the years, Rose worked at a long list of studios: Disney, Warner
Bros., Universal Pictures, Lisa Rose said. He worked as an animator, a
layout artist, a publicity artist, an art director, an illustrator and
a designer.
During World War II, Rose was a sergeant in the Army unit that created
training and propaganda films.
The unit included Hollywood filmmakers, including Frank Capra and John
Huston, who contributed their knowledge of filmmaking to the war
effort. Theodor Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss, was
Rose's superior officer and a lifelong friend, Grossfeld said.
One night after his service in the war, Rose attended a dance in Los
Angeles and met Ida Claire Shapiro, the woman who would become his
wife.
"The story I heard was - she came up and sat on his lap," Lisa Rose
said. "He couldn't refuse. She had her eye on him."
The two married in August 1945 and spent the next decades living and
creating together. Ida Rose was an artist, known for her fiber
sculpture and long tenure teaching art at Fairfax High School. The
couple had two daughters. Rose's wife and a daughter, Marsha
Rose-Shea, died before he did. A memorial service will be held for
Rose on Sunday at noon at Mount Sinai Memorial Park, 5950 Forest Lawn
Drive, Los Angeles.
Art offered Rose a passport to travel around the world.
Before the birth of Israel, he was there on a kibbutz, drawing
sketches of people working in the field. After independence, he drew
images of the nation's early settlers.
Rose, who carried the memory of family members killed during the
Holocaust, sought "the Jewish experience worldwide," including the
sites of former concentration camps and the trail of the inquisition
in Spain and Mexico. One work depicts a scene of German Jewish
refugees being turned away at the Swiss border in 1938.
"It would be very difficult to pigeonhole him," said Lisa Rose, his
only survivor. "He did everything…. For a visual artist, I don't think
you could ask for more."
The dignity of work, the simple act of earning one's keep, was also a
recurring theme in Rose's art. He traveled to rock quarries,
swamplands, orange groves and fields to capture images of workers.
Once, he spent weeks on the high seas, sketching sailors on container
ships, then went to ports to draw longshoremen, "all still doing
proud, meaningful work in an increasingly automated society," he
wrote. In Los Angeles he sketched subway builders.
But the courtroom provided some of the most exciting and meaningful
experiences of his career. In courtrooms where judges barred cameras,
Rose and other artists were present. Rose viewed his job as that of
any other reporter, but his tools were colored pencils, sketch pads
and ink. The work required talent, speed and the ability to see beyond
the surface.
"He tried his best to capture the emotions that ran in the courtroom
and convey that, so that when it was reported on television … they
could see the tension in the courtroom or the anger," said Grossfeld,
whose Gremlin Fine Arts in Manchester Center, Vt., sells Rose's work.
Rose began his court career in 1973 with the trial of Daniel Ellsberg,
the former defense analyst who released the Pentagon Papers, regarding
the Vietnam War, to the New York Times.
During the 1984 drug trial of automaker John Z. DeLorean, Rose not
only documented the courtroom scene, he influenced the attire of one
witness, DeLorean's wife, Cristina Ferrare.
"Toward the close of one day in court, I was drawing her, and she was
wearing one of those high-style dresses with a definite pattern," Rose
told The Times in 1986. "I wasn't done with the drawing and I wouldn't
have remembered it enough to finish it. So I asked her, 'Please,
Cristina, would you wear the same dress tomorrow so I can finish my
drawing? She said yes, and she did."
Over the years, millions of viewers saw Rose's work on television news
broadcasts and in newspapers. His fine art was displayed in local
galleries. One of his last exhibited pieces depicts the sorrow of
Israeli and Palestinian mothers.
Rose was always full of energy and "was never at a loss for words,"
said friend and fellow courtroom artist Bill Robles. "He lived, ate
and breathed art … both the courtroom and the fine art."
He also was deeply concerned about the state of affairs nationally and
internationally and had asked that donations be made toward efforts to
defeat the Bush administration and its agenda, Lisa Rose said.
In December, Rose was stricken with pneumonia and never fully
recovered, his daughter said. The illness took him from the drawing
table but not from art. He would lie in bed, eyes closed, hands up as
if drawing in the air, she said. Art for him, he once said, was what
religion was for others.
Rose lived long enough to see his courtroom work viewed as art,
fetching as much as $2,000 apiece. Collectors view the original pieces
as moments of history, depicted through the eyes of someone who was
there.
"The cameras were barred," Rose wrote, "but I was witness."
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
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"aka Bob" <bobf...@surfwriter.net.not> wrote in message
>
> From the Los Angeles Times
>
> OBITUARIES
>
> David Rose, 95; Artist's Depictions of Famous Trials Were
> Seen by
> Millions Around World
http://www.thegremlin.com/davidrose3.catalog.html