Ben Magid Rabinovitch

“Signing his work by his last name–‘Rabinovitch’–this portraitist and still life photographer became a force in New York artist circles as a pedagogue and photographic taste-maker. In his earliest work, pre 1927, Rabinovitch cultivated a pictorialist density and richness of texture, yet he possessed an aesthetic clarity of line and an instinct for the integral disposition of various pictorial elements. Rabinovitch was particularly adamant in his determination not to retouch ‘anything above the shoulders’ in a portrait at a time when wrinkle erasers and ‘eye doctors’ dominated the dark rooms; yet he would manipulate everything in other portion of the pictorial field for expressive purposes. He did theatrical work, but his interest in human appearance was broad and he would approach interesting looking people on the street in order to portray them. In the later 1920s, he became increasingly interested in objective modernism and the sharp edge/clear focus aesthetic emerging in art photography. Yet this clarity was added to what was primarily an experimental outlook to the medium. Like Man Ray, he would solarize, or abstract pictorial elements. His still lifes from the 1930s have a spare monumental simplicity admired by lovers of modernist abstraction.” © David S. Shields