ABSTRACT
Michael Rothenstein's early years were lived in a generally supportive and indulgent environment, apparently lacking in the traumatic familial or educational circumstances which many other young artists have had to surmount. The collection of his consistently vigorous and evocative drawings from those years is extensive. When Michael was about six years of age, he and his sisters captured newts, minnows and sticklebacks from the canal and local ponds with their fishing nets and set up an aquarium at home in a glass tank. They studied these fascinating little creatures and drew them frequently, often from memory. Michael's early drawings, full of cleaving swords, detached limbs and blood, are nonetheless superbly comic, as if to say that all is a charade anyway. The lines which so economically stand for arms and limbs contribute to the panoply of forms and actions in which the detail of the assault then appears as more ludicrous than serious.
