Painter Andree Ruellan, who painted some of her most memorable work from visits to the southern United States during the Depression era, has died in Kingston. She was 101.
A friend, Daniel Gelfand, confirmed that Ruellan died on July 15. She lived for many years in Shady, New York, near Woodstock.
”People are never just spots of colour,” she told American Artist magazine in 1943. ”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.”
Ruellan’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and other museums.
Ruellan, whose parents had emigrated from France, was born in Manhattan on April 6 1905.
She first exhibited her work at the age of nine. In later years, her work drew on what she saw in everyday life, both in New York and on her travels.
Ruellan started selling her work to support herself and her mother after her father was killed in an accident. She then won a scholarship to the Art Students League of New York.
She lived in Paris in the 1920s and then married and moved to upstate New York, where she and her husband, the painter John Taylor, joined the Woodstock artists colony.
Ruellan’s visits to the US South during the Great Depression in the 1930s resulted in paintings showing black Americans in their everyday lives. One, Crap Game in 1936, which depicts a group of men playing a game of dice, became one of her best-known works.
In later years, Ruellan’s work was more influenced by surrealism and abstract expressionism, but she remained a Realist whose art showed real, flesh-and-blood people.
She continued her work into her 80s.
Last year, a retrospective of her work in honour of her 100th birthday was organised by the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georiga. It is currently on view until August 27 at the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia.
Ruellan, whose husband died in 1983, leaves no immediate survivors. — Sapa-AP