Andrée Ruellan (April 6, 1905 – July 15, 2006) was an American artist whose realist work has modernist overtones and commonly depicts everyday scenes in American South and New York City. Born in Manhattan of French descent, she spent her youth there and in Paris and eventually made her home near the artist colony in Woodstock, New York. Her paintings, prints, watercolors, and drawings are known for their depiction of ordinary people at work and play. They are held by many American museums and private collectors.
Early life and education
Ruellan was born in a brownstone near Washington Square Park in 1905 and was the only child of a couple who had immigrated from France a few years earlier. Her parents encouraged an early talent she showed for making realistic and fanciful drawings. Ardent socialists, they believed the visual arts could help redress the dismissive attitude with which many Americans viewed people who were both less advantaged than themselves and, as they saw it, unpleasantly alien. When she was about eight, they arranged for an amateur artist, Ben Liber, to give her informal instruction and a year later her first published work appeared in the April issue of a socialist monthly, The Masses along with an editorial on religious hypocrisy by Max Eastman. Her drawing, called April, showed an angel scattering flowers above the head of a workman. That same year Ruellan's artwork came to the attention of the Ashcan School painter Robert Henri. He arranged to include some of her watercolors and drawings in a show at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery where he and George Bellows also showed.
Over the next few years, Ruellan suffered setbacks, first when she was injured in a fire and later when her father died in an accident at work and, while still in her teens, she began selling paintings, watercolors, and drawings to help support herself and her mother. In 1920 she won a scholarship to study at the Art Students League with the painter, Maurice Sterne, and sculptor, Leo Lentelli. Two years later she followed Sterne to Rome on another art scholarship, and over the next five years she and her mother remained in Paris where she continued to work and study. During that time she obtained her first solo exhibition at the Sacre du Printemps Gallerie, and in 1928 she was given her second one-woman show at the Weyhe Gallery in New York. While in Paris, she met and fell in love with the American artist John Taylor. With Ruellan's mother, the pair returned to the United States in 1929 and settled in Shady, a village near Woodstock, New York.
Mature style
In the 1930s, Ruellan developed a style that was social-realist with modernist and abstract elements. Her sympathy for her subjects and her ability to convey a warmth in them is similar to Edward Hopper's or Howard Cook's.name="keyes" See, for example, her undated drawing, Coal Delivery, which appears to come from this period. Drawn with ink and wash on paper, it shows an African-American man carrying a heavy bag of coal on his back. He is leaning forward as he places his right foot down and begins to raise the left one. He holds the coal bag with his right hand and leaves his left arm hanging free. The sketch suggests a patient endurance. The composition gives contrasts of diagonal—from left foot to cap—and vertical—the right leg and left arm, the whole showing both the pull of gravity and the energy of forward motion. In work such as this, Ruellan was seen to present social criticism with artistic frankness and little covering up of social facts, but also with empathy and awareness of the value of each person as a specific individual and not simply a generic "type".
One of her best-known works, Crap Game of 1936,Crap Game is held by the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; it is oil on canvas . is more stylized than other compositions of the same period. As the title suggests, it shows a group of men playing craps. The industrial structures in the background provide what amounts to a stage on which the actions of the game take place. Ruellan normally worked surreptitiously, hiding her sketchbook in a newspaper, or sketching from the window of a car with the sketchbook in her lap. In doing this, she insured a high degree of spontaneity in her work, but on this occasion the formality of the composition tempers the immediacy that her work usually shows. She made the sketch while on a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, a place that, she said, was like a "whole new world" compared to New York and Paris where she had spent her youth.
She had been able to spend a month in Charleston because, despite the stock market crash and subsequent depression, Ruellan and Taylor were able to support themselves through art. The Weyhe Gallery in New York had given Ruellan a means of selling her work and Taylor took temporary jobs as art teacher at several universities. By the mid-1930s, they had enough money to permit some travel and selected Charleston as their destination in hope that it would produce the sort of down-to-earth subjects that they sought. The choice proved to be a good one as one of the paintings which resulted from that visit—Market PlaceMarket Place by Andrée Ruellan, oil on canvas, 1939, —was the first of hers to be collected by a major museum. The Metropolitan Museum purchased it in 1940.
During these years, Ruellan said her practice was to prepare a sketch in the field, develop the sketch into an intermediate form, usually gouache on paper, then create the finished product in oil on canvas. She worked on more than one painting at a time, moving on when she felt she was losing a sense of freshness in her work. When working in oils she thought out composition, balance, movement, and the tension of colors and patterns while retaining as much as possible the informality that was present in the original drawing.Her process is described in full in an article that appeared in American Artist magazine in October 1943.
In 1941, Ruellan traveled to Savannah with her husband and her mother in order to spend several weeks observing and sketching. The painting she called Savannah dates from this period. Although Savannah is a city, there is no urban bustle and the painting has an almost pastoral appeal. The few figures shown are unhurried. The viewer sees what is clearly a real place at a specific moment of time, but is also aware of an emotionally evocative content: warehouses that are shut up, a man slumped in a doorway. Those who are not burdened by the necessity of manual labor (children, a white man with a cane, loiterers on the dock) contrast with one who is, an African-American pushing a handcart of lumber up the ramp.
A second painting from the trip to Savannah, Savannah Landscape, The City Market, is similar to the harbor view. The light is warm and bright and the colors are warm and muted. The tone is placid and there's a suggestion of timeless continuity, yet the scene is clearly a specific moment in time. Once again, there is a distinction between those who perform manual labor, shown at right, and those who do not, including a man in military uniform.
A third painting from the trip to Savannah, The Wind-Up,The Wind-Up by Andrée Ruellan, oil on canvas, n.d., was shown at the Whitney Museum in 1941 and purchased by the Phillips Collection later that year. Showing a sandlot ball game near a gas storage tank and some low-income housing, it depicts players and spectators enjoying weekend downtime. The painting fulfills Ruellan's intention to make works that are both well executed in a technical sense and also have emotional content. In an interview conducted in 1943, she said, "People are never just spots of color. What moves me most is that in spite of poverty and the constant struggle for existence, so much kindness and sturdy courage remain. Naturally I want to paint well-designed pictures—but I also wish to convey these warmer human emotions."She added: "No ivory tower—I feel strongly that the artist is an important member of society, and should do his part to build a world where war and poverty, as well as racial discrimination are impossible. I want as good a technic as possible, but only for the purpose of expressing clearly, yet with subtlety, what I feel about life."
In 1941–42, Ruellan made two murals for the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the U.S. Treasury Department, one entitled A Country Saw Mill for the post office in Emporia, Virginia, and the other, called Spring in Georgia, for the post office in Lawrenceville, Georgia.Spring in Georgia is currently located in the R. G. Stephens Federal Building in Athens, Georgia. Created during the early stages of the U.S. participation in World War II, they conformed, broadly, to the we-can-do-it attitude fostered by the government and widely accepted within the country. A Country Saw Mill shows a small steam-driven mill. At right, a worker moves logs into position for sawing while a man with a notebook supervises. At center, men can be seen observing the sawing within the mill and finished lumber is stacked. At far left a man drives a team of horses pulling more logs from the forest that can be seen in the distance. The seven workers in view are African-American while the two supervisors are white. Ruellan prepared sketches on-site, as was her usual practice, and painted the mural in her studio retaining much of the freshness of the scene she had drawn.
Spring in Georgia shows ordinary people in a rural setting: a woman and a girl tilling a flower garden, a mother with a young boy and infant, and a man with a team of mules. The painting conveys a sense of purpose and resourcefulness. It has four roughly equal segments. At left is the flower garden with cozy homestead in the background. Next appears the woman standing with her two children on a strip of grass before a large conifer. The man with his mules, standing on turned earth, drinks a glass of milk or water. At right is a hillside orchard and a stand of trees with two turkeys in the foreground. Ruellan made sketches for the painting in Lawrenceville but it is clear that she did not make the painting from a single drawing but rather constructed it, frieze-like, out of a number of scenes she viewed. The composite nature of the composition draws attention to the painting's symbolic import. Of this symbolism, one critic said "the whole has the patchwork quality of abiding memories and not the spontaneity and vitality of an actual scene."
Ruellan was represented by Maynard Walker Galleries, New York, from 1936 until 1941 when she switched to the Kraushaar Galleries where she continued for the rest of her life. Her reason for leaving the Walker Galleries had to do with an unwanted association. That gallery was known for showing the work of the leading American Scene paintersThe painters handled by the Walker Galleries included Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood Although there were similarities in subject matter, Ruellan did not see herself as a genre painter of this type. She insisted that her subjects be actual people not just representatives of a class of people, a race, or residents of a geographic region. She was also more modernist in her approach and her work showed influences of the French avant-garde not present in theirs.