Roberta Eisenberg, spiritual expressionist

Roberta Eisenberg (1940-2006) spoke of her painterly abstracts as "a territory to explore." And so they are, some of them very large indeed, in "Roberta Eisenberg Retrospective" at the University of the Arts. Its subject is the work of a gifted alumna, a former scholarship student whose name lives on in the Roberta Eisenberg Scholarship Fund.

Eisenberg was born in Philadelphia to art-loving parents; her mother, Florence Treatman, helped make Cheltenham Art Center one of the region's most dynamic neighborhood centers in the 1960s. While pursuing her bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of the Arts, Eisenberg studied with Louis Finkelstein and Mercedes Matter and by her early 20s was on her way to her basic approach as a painter. She looked to such pioneers as Arshile Gorky and Philip Guston, and was not swayed by trends, perhaps because she was both intuitive and a thinker.

Her marriage, three daughters, and a time in Boston before settling permanently in California in 1978 didn't change that. Eisenberg flourished there, continuing her painterly dialogue with the canvas by showing lots of movement, veils of color, and color changes from deepest depths to lyrical and high key.

Of particular interest is the book accompanying the show, which asserts that Eisenberg's mature work places her in the tradition of expressionist painting, with emphasis on its abstract spiritual "arm." The fully illustrated 228-page book, published by University of the Arts, convincingly elaborates on why Eisenberg deserves to be known chiefly as a spiritual expressionist.

This exhibition thoughtfully adds weight and prestige to the regional art scene and encourages artists and the public to look beyond both regionalism and doctrinaire abstraction toward ways of reusing the recent past and maintaining continuity as well as embracing the new.

Mountain men