Gatja Helgart Rothe Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

In 2000, after some tiresome lawsuits had finally been settled, Rothe decided to move to Geneva, Switzerland, fulfilling a desire to return to Europe. Here, she lived off the sale of her house in Carmel. In Geneva Rothe painted mountain landscapes, massive horse paintings, portraits, and other scenes inspired by her surroundings. In 2003 Rothe was diagnosed with breast cancer, but it was a heart problem that led to her death on August 3, 2007.

In 1987 Peter sold Rothe’s art business to Paul Zueger from American Design. A year after in 1986, her brother opened Riedel Art Gallery to represent her work in Germany, and Rothe moved her New York studio from Manhattan to Brooklyn in order to have more space. She began exploring large pastel paintings and creating frescoes at her own home. Later, after a drawn-out lawsuit with Zueger, Rothe finalized her contract with them and opened her own gallery in Carmel in 1991. In 1988 and 1992 she was nominated to represent the United States as an artist at the Olympic Games in Seoul and Barcelona.

Completed in 1987 but never shown during her lifetime, Rothe’s tempera works are depictions of sex and intimacy between aging couples, revealing Rothe’s typical layering of paint. Rothe’s son Peter discovered these erotic scenes with geriatric bodies (“gerotica”) paintings and other artworks years after her death. In November 2015 the gerotica became the center for the exhibition Seven Drawings at the Walter and McBean Galleries of the San Francisco Art Institute.

The open and rural California landscapes influenced her new mezzotints, in which she included mountains, horses and other scenes. In 1982 her son Peter bought her contract from Hammer Galleries, which no longer wanted to carry prints. The scandal caused by Salvador Dalí’s pre-signed papers had adversely affected the entire graphics industry, devaluing the worth of copies in editions. Rothe survived this issue because not only did she limit her editions to 150, but also each print was unique, since she mixed all the colors on the plate by hand. Peter became the mediator between Rothe and the art market, giving her the space to further develop her technique.

Throughout most of the 1980s and 90s, Rothe had about ten large shows each year in different US cities, and Peter regularly showed her work at the Basel Art Fair. Every month or two, she created a new edition for galleries to buy. She made all of her work with the help of one assistant. Rothe also did paintings for private commissions, but she rarely kept track of these sales. Sylvester Stallone and Clint Eastwood, who were her neighbors in Carmel, both own some of her paintings. She painted a large outdoor mural in the Hog’s Breath Inn, Clint Eastwood’s former restaurant in Carmel.

In 1978 Rothe traveled to Los Angeles to visit her lover Maurie Symonds, who owned several galleries in California showing her work. Rothe became fascinated with Carmel-by-the-Sea, California and decided to move there, buying a house by in Carmel-by-the-Sea, although she kept a storage space and a studio in New York.

In 1973 her husband died and her son Peter moved in with her. At the time she was designing jewelry for Tiffany’s and other jewelers. In 1976 Rothe signed a contract with Hammer Galleries in New York. She worked in a studio at 193 Second Avenue in Lower Manhattan. In 1978 she was listed in both Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who in America.

A gallery owner and friend suggested that, if she wanted to earn a living from her artwork, it might be more efficient to create prints than paintings. As she delved into different printmaking techniques, Rothe became intrigued by mezzotint, which, while requiring a high level of skill and patience working by hand directly on the copper, permits the nuance of every line and detail to be seen. Combining the knowledge from her studies in anatomy, art history, goldsmithing, and drawing, she arrived at an original process that allowed her to achieve detailed transparencies with mezzotint. Another innovation was a method of applying and hand-wiping all colors on the same plate. Her first mezzotints with transparencies were completed in 1972 and soon garnered a lot of attention.

Rothe left Montevideo in 1971, following advice of an artist friend who suggested she move to New York City. Rothe began painting landscapes and skylines, and kept exploring her interest in bodies. In her early paintings in New York she began her explorations with layering, creating compositional narratives out of her experiences in the city. She started attending the ballet and expanded her interest in the body into studies of dancers in movement.

Rothe was interested in the graffiti on boarded-up windows and doors she saw in New York City while she lived there in the 1970s and during her visits to her studio in Manhattan and later in Brooklyn. She sometimes negotiated with the owners to take the boards and replace them with new ones. She then intervened on these boards with painting and gold leaf. Most of these pieces went unsold. She shipped the graffiti works to Carmel for an exhibition, and eventually they were sent to Germany for an exhibition at the Riedel Art Gallery, where they have remained.

In 1968 she was awarded the Villa Romana Prize for emerging German artists and traveled with her son to Florence. For the next year, she was provided with all the materials she needed, allowing her to develop her technique and artistic language, as well as her professional independence.

Riedel became increasingly interested in this bohemian counterculture and in the estate’s atmosphere of freedom. In 1958 Riedel married Rothe, with an agreement that she could continue to pursue her career as an artist. Their son Peter was born in 1959. While caring for her child and the estate, she developed a body of work that explored the intimacies of bodies and what she called “anatomy landscapes.” She received her first solo show in 1967, exhibiting paintings of eccentric humanoid forms depicted inside boxes.

In 1956, at age twenty-one, Riedel hitchhiked to southern Germany, where her brother was studying design at the art academy in Pforzheim. She enrolled in painting and drawing classes there and met her future husband, Curt Rothe, a painting professor and post-impressionist artist.

Gatja Helgart Rothe (also known as G.H. Rothe; (née Helgart Riedel) (March 15, 1935 – August 3, 2007), was a German-American artist known for her printmaking, especially mezzotint. She was also a draftswoman and painter. After living and working in Europe, she briefly traveled through South America before moving to New York City in the 1970s and later, California. Her commercial success was primarily based on mezzotints and paintings commissioned and handled by galleries, dealers, and private collectors in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Helgart Riedel was born in 1935 to Elizabeth and Harry Riedel in Beuthen, in German Silesia, which was ceded to Poland at the end of World War II. During the War her father served in the German army, while her mother left Beuthen with Riedel and her four brothers trying to find a way into West Germany. After more than a year of constant movement they finally settled in Wiedenbrück in 1947. These early years as a war refugee would have a profound impact on her artwork.