Cityscape with Figures

Jeanette Muriel Halpert-Ryden

Jean Halpter-Ryden's artistic themes often revolve around everyday environments that eloquently combine manmade and organic elements. The modernist style of “Cityscape” explores the intimate spatial dynamic of two figures - possibly a parent and child - walking within a quiet cityscape. Jean Halpert-Ryden’s graphic work often portrayed San Francisco with an affection for the awkward angularity of its place in a hilly, tumbling landscape: it pokes and knocks about, jutting upward or sideways, but always with a sense of organized chaos.

Painter and printmaker Jean Halpert-Ryden was born in New York City in 1919. A mostly independent student of art, Halpert-Ryden studied at Brooklyn College. She went on to study with a collective under painter and stage designer Moi Solotaroff, and participated in her first show at the Norlyst Gallery (Manhattan, 1946), before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1949.

She met and married artist and designer Edward Ryder in Boulder, Colorado, in 1947. Two years later they moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where both artists continued to study and exhibit, and in 1971 they traveled to Israel. In 1985 they took up residence there, where they helped found a community in the Galilee Hills. Both artists continued their artistic endeavors, until their return to California in 2002. Halpert-Ryden's art is included in both private and public collections throughout the U.S.