Andrée Ruellan
American, 1905 - 2006
Andrée Ruellan was born in New York City in 1905 to recently immigrated French-born parents to the United States. (1) Ruellan began to draw in pencil and charcoal when she was very young and studied with Ben Liber, a physician and amateur artist, for two years. She was forced to stop her study when she was injured seriously in a fire at the age of 10.
In 1920, Ruellan accepted a scholarship to the Arts Students League where she studied with A. Stirling Calder and Maurice Sterne. That same decade she studied in Rome and later Paris, where she had her first one-person exhibition in 1925. In 1929, Ruellan met and married John Taylor, an American painter also living in Paris. The next year they returned to the United States and settled in Woodstock, New York, home to a renowned artists’ colony.
By the middle of the 1930s, Ruellan’s paintings indicate her increasing influence of the American regionalist aesthetic, particularly the work of Thomas Hart Benton. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, she and Taylor visited Charleston and Savannah, where she developed a particular interest in the representation of African-Americans engaged in leisure activities.
In the early 1940s, her paintings were acquired by several important private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Phillips Collection. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1950. Ruellan was deeply affected by World War II. After 1945, her style changed dramatically, influenced by Surrealism and the work of her friend Yasuo Kuniyoshi. A dark palette, bleak subject matter, abstracted compositions, confined or undefined space and figures that are more like characters rather than real people characterize her style from 1945 to 1954. (2)
Because of a visit to Arles in 1954, her palette again brightened and she leaned towards greater abstraction in her work. Ruellan participated in exhibitions through the 1990s, and her work was the subject of a lifetime retrospective exhibition at the Woodstock Artists Association in 2000.
Sources include:
1. Biographical material has been taken from Donald Keyes, Andrée Ruellan (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, Georgia Museum of Art, 1993) and Polly Kline, Andrée Ruellan: Retrospective.
2. Keyes, 30 and 35.
Submitted by Staff, Columbus Museum
Person TypeIndividual
American, 1871 - 1927
