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PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF ROSE CHORON

On February 25, 2017, Stair Galleries will include a selection of rare Coptic textiles from the Estate of Rose Choron.

Rose Choron was an artist, a writer and a psychologist as well as a collector. She was warm and charming, cultured and talented. Rose divided her time between her house in Switzerland, surrounded by vineyards on the shores of Lake Geneva and her grand apartment on Central Park West in New York. In both of these locations she created a salon where she entertained some of the most interesting minds of her generation.

She was the oldest of the five children of Zelig and Freida Josefowitz. Zelig was a prominent businessman and Frieda the daughter of the eminent Rabbi, Eliahu Dov Shur. Born in the Ukraine, Rose followed her family from the Ukraine to Lithuania, Berlin, Lausanne, Geneva and finally to the United States in 1939. She was predeceased by her husband, Jacques Choron, a philosopher and professor at the New School for Social Research.

Rose studied painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Boston and with Hans Hoffman at the Art Students League in New York. In 1970 she won a Knickerbocker Artists award. She also studied with the Israeli artist Mordecai Ardon. She graduated with an M.A. from Radcliffe in Russian History in 1945. She studied psychology at Columbia University and later in Zurich at the Institute fur Angewandte Psychologie.

She was the author of Family Stories: Travels Beyond the Shtetel, Pangloss Press, 1988; Vignettes: Between Tears and Laughter, Pangloss Press, 1996 as well as a translation of Scenes de la Vie Juive en Alsace, a 19th Century work by Daniel Stauben. Her poetry was published in British and American journals.

She collected broadly, but the best known was her collection of Coptic textiles. In 1980 a portion of her collection was included in the exhibition Textiles from Egypt 4th – 13th Centuries C.E. at the L.A. Mayer Memorial Institute for Islamic Art in Jerusalem. Almost fifty years after she started collecting, the entire collection was the subject of the exhibition: The Rich Life of the Dance: Weavings from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Egypt. This exhibition was shown at the Krannert Art Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Fogg Museum in Cambridge. The exhibition was curated by Eunice Dauterman Maguire and documented in a beautiful catalogue.

In the exhibition catalogue, she talks about her collection…

“It all began in the mid fifties while I was studying in Zurich. One day, while strolling through the old city, I spotted the abstract pattern of an antique piece of textile in the window of a junk shop. The dealer didn’t know what it was. Nor did I. But I liked it, and for the equivalent of two dollars it was mine. The following year I showed it to Meyer Shapiro in New York and he immediately identified it as a fragment of a fourth century Coptic Tunic. I discovered a fascinating new world, amazingly well preserved and whimsical, cheerful and bursting with color, movement and diversity. I fell in love… “

For inquiries regarding the items in this sale please contact us at 518-751-1000 or info@stairgalleries.com.

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