Andrée Ruellan

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. 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". 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. —was the first of hers to be collected by a major museum. The Metropolitan Museum purchased it in 1940.

Andrée Ruellan, Savannah, c. 1942, oil on canvas, , Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, Museum purchase, 1998.8 © Daniel B. Gelfand 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. was shown at the Whitney Museum in 1941 and purchased by the Phillips Collection later that year.

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. 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. 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. of 1949 is one of her best-known works of this period. It shows four children wearing carnival masks and costumes. Their pose suggests an attempt to mimic decadent adult behavior that is associated with Mardi Gras. Behind them, four uncostumed children peer through a grating on the top of a wall and another is seen through a metal-wire barrier. while clearly revealing its subject, nonetheless shows sympathy the art of the Abstract Expressionists and is both brighter and freer than her work in the post-war period. In these paintings the panels of color are elements of design as much as objects in nature.

Personal information Ruellan's father, André (also known as Andrew), worked in the aviation industry as a pilot and mechanic. He had hoped to become a sculptor, but found he could not support his family by that means. Her mother was Lucette Lambert (also called Louise). Both parents were born and raised in France. In about 1900, their socialist politics and pacifist beliefs led them to migrate to New York so that André would not be drafted into the French army. Ruellan was born in a brownstone building in New York's Greenwich Village on April 6, 1905. She was an only child. French was the language spoken at home and thus was her first language. She died July 15, 2006, at the age of 101 at an extended care facility in Kingston, New York.

Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Michele & Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts Michelson Museum of Art, Marshall, Texas Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Kansas City, Philadelphia Museum of Art Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California Springville Museum of Art, Springville, Utah Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Exhibitions

This is a selected list. Unless otherwise noted, the source is the "Calendar of Art Exhibitions" section of in various issues of Parnassus magazine.

1914 St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, New York