When Philip Rosenfeld was 14 years old, he got a job in the cutting room of a clothing manufacturer.
He got the job because he lied on the application, where next to age, he wrote “15.” Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been hired. Labor laws protecting workers, including children, had been put in place years earlier.
Decades later, in his 80s, Rosenfeld began to learn about the individuals — many of them Jewish women — whose leadership set in motion the labor laws from which he benefited as a child.
Their stories inspired him to paint.
The result was a series of oil-on-canvas portraits of female labor leaders such as Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman (who led the Uprising of 20,000, a massive strike of shirtwaist factory workers in New York’s garment industry in 1909).
The portraits are now on display in Congregation Emanu-El’s Elizabeth S. and Alvin I. Fine Museum in San Francisco.
“These women made an extraordinary contribution to the betterment of society and humanity by bringing about social change and they hardly got recognized,” said Rosenfeld, who lives in Fairfax. “So what I’m doing is honoring these women.”
“From the Bronx to the Bay” features Rosenfeld’s portraits of American labor movement leaders and workers. The exhibit also includes some of the artist’s abstracts and landscapes.
“We saw the portraits and thought, ‘Wow,’” said Michelle Ackerman, co-chairman of the synagogue’s museum committee. “And the abstracts and landscapes were a nice surprise.”
Seth Rosenfeld, Philip’s son and a longtime newspaper reporter, helped his father research the labor movement. Together, they delved into university archives via the Internet and read books about the era, including “Growing Up Jewish in America,” “World of Our Fathers” and “Triangle.”
Each portrait was painted based on photographs they found while conducting research.
The portraits “are powerful,” said Seth. “There’s a documentary quality to his paintings that adds to a sense of history you can touch.”
Rosenfeld was born in 1925 in the Bronx to immigrant parents from Romania and Russia. His father was a carpenter.
His mother wanted Rosenfeld to be a rabbi. He wanted to be an artist. “She called it being a shmearer,” he recalled.
He earned a scholarship to the Arts Student League on 57th Street in Manhattan and for several years worked on his painting skills.
But once he got married and had children, he needed a more stable job and more or less abandoned his art. He found work as a salesman, selling specialty foods to delis and markets. It was taxing — out by 5 a.m., back home by dark — and left little time for painting.
“I was busy taking care of my family, buying a TV, a car, a house. I was plugged into the American Dream.”
Rosenfeld moved to California in the 1970s after a divorce, and once again began to paint.
“Did California inspire me to paint? That sounds so romantic and poetic, but it’s not real,” he said. “I get up in the morning and I paint every day. It fulfills the spirit. I look around at people my age and it’s pathetic. They look lost.
“I am not lost. I have direction. I have a force. I paint pictures.”
His home is cluttered with brushes, oil paints, completed and in-progress canvases.
Often, the self-taught artist paints quickly. But occasionally a piece will stump him, and he will simply look at it until a solution appears.
“Sometimes when I call him up and ask what he’s up to, he’ll say, ‘I’m staring,’” said Seth. “But when he gets it right, there’s a divine fire in his work, a magic to it.”
Seth and Philip Rosenfeld will speak about “From the Bronx to the Bay” at 6:30 p.m. Friday, June 5 and 1:30 p.m. July 15 at Congregation Emanu-El, 2 Lake St., San Francisco. To register for the tea and guided tour July 15, call (415) 751-2535. The exhibit runs through Aug. 29.