Untitled

 

Ruth A. Wall

  1917 - 2009 (biography)

1952  

two-color lithograph 

18 x 14 1/8" image 

unsigned 

2 of 4  

pencil editioned 

Carlevaro 1020, variant illustrated on page 89 in "Love of Stone: Ruth A. Wall: Abstract Expressionist Prints 1952" 

ivory Warren's Olde Style wove 

 

artist 

MASC133 

$900.00 

1952 was a seminal year for Ruth Wall, a former WWII Women's Army Corps engineer and ferrier pilot who had arrived to the art world later in life. Born in 1917, she had come from a homesteading family and began teaching high school the year after graduating from Brigham Young University in 1938.

It was the G.I. Bill that enabled her to enroll in the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA; now the San Francisco Art Institute). She moved to San Francisco in 1949 and the following year began courses in drawing, painting, and printmaking under James Budd Dixon and Robert McChesney. In 1952, she discovered lithography.

As seen in this untitled two-color piece, Wall's style was backed by strength combined the rare abandonment of caution, which until the advent of Abstract Expressionism was rarely seen in the mainstream. She chose earth tones and jagged lines that also challenged the mid-20th century ideals of feminine expression. She wields the litho crayon with force and aplomb, uninterested in wan romanticism.

The bulk of her printmaking work came about in this single year. At the end of i1952, she left for Paris and studied painting, showing her work at the Museé des Beaux-Arts and the Salon des Realities Nouvelles. When she returned to the CSFA in 1955 it was only briefly, before the travel bug took hold and she devoted several decades to seeing the world, only doing art when there was time.

We are lucky, then to have been given the opportunity to show Wall's ambitious and powerful work today: each piece a brief window into a rareified life, that of a woman who created what she wanted to create, when she wanted, and fearlessly.