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Rolph Scarlett was born in 1889, in
Guelph, Ontario, fifty miles northwest of Toronto. Like many similar towns
of the era, Guelph’s populace tried to embrace the ideals of a classical
education and appreciation of the higher arts, and this was particularly
true of the section in which Scarlett lived.
Scarlett was first introduced to
painting at age five when his grandmother showed him how to use a small
paint set. At seven he entered and won a local drawing competition. A
Catholic nun (from Loretto Academy, a local girl’s school) saw the piece and
offered to tutor Scarlett privately, which she did for several years. She
had been trained as an artist at the Roman Catholic Academy in Rome. By the
time he was twelve, the private tutoring combined with Guelph’s excellent
educational system left Scarlett well trained in the basics of academic art:
form, perspective and color. These were the foundations to which Scarlett
would return again and again.
In his fourteenth year Scarlett
announced to his father that he was going to be an artist. Instead, his
father insisted that he learn a trade and apprenticed him for four years to
his Uncle, a jewelry maker. As a young man he worked for a variety of
jewelry stores and distributors. This vocation was to serve Scarlett in
varying degrees throughout his life (Scarlett made jewelry until his death).
Scarlett's first trip to New York in
1908 started on a lark when he was 18. He and a friend saw an advertisement
for inexpensive train fares from Toronto and on the spur of the moment
decided to visit for several weeks. Four years later at the start of World
War I, he returned to Canada, with a wife and child. New York was to exerted
a powerful influence on him throughout his life.
While living in Canada, Scarlett
continued to travel to New York, although for shorter stays, probably on
jewelry related business. In 1913 while on a trip to New York when he was
24, Scarlett saw the Armory Show. It would prove to be an important event in
his artistic career and he came away fascinated with the modern and abstract
art he saw.
A decade later in 1923, Scarlett would
receive another big push toward abstraction. While working for P.W. Ellis, a
large wholesale jewelry business based in Toronto, Scarlett visited
Switzerland. At a dinner party on a large estate Scarlett noticed a man who
kept drawing on a pad throughout the evening. The man was Paul Klee. Klee
was making small abstract sketches. When Klee discovered that Scarlett was
an artist, he suggested that Scarlett try to make some of the small
abstractions. After several unsuccessful tries Scarlett realized then it was
harder than it looked. Scarlett returned to his room where he spent the rest
of the night trying to make abstract compositions. It was after this
experience that Scarlett moved away from realism in his own work and
towards abstraction.
In Toledo, in 1926, again
working for a jewelry firm, Scarlett who was then 37 purchased for the first
time, a box of French pastels. Fascinated with the brilliant colors and
without any plan in mind he began to experiment one night with them. The
next morning when he came back to his easel and saw the experiment of the
night before, he was staggered. It was a completely abstract drawing unlike
anything he had done before. He was overwhelmed and deeply impressed. At
that same time Scarlett was exhibiting in local shows and at the museums.
His pastel was accepted into the Toledo Art Museum’s Juried show and won
first prize. So radical and modern was his composition that a puzzled
curator from the museum asked Scarlett to come to the museum to explain his
abstract work. The pastel was featured on the front of the
Toledo Blade! According to
Scarlett the newspaper article generated so much curiosity that when the
show opened three policemen had to help control the flow of people into the
exhibition.
The most important influence on Rolph Scarlett’s art came
when he was in his forties through the Museum of Non-Objective Painting,
(which was founded in 1936 and later renamed the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).
While Scarlett was traveling abroad, his wife learned of the
Museum’s interest in seeing the work of American artists who were painting
in an abstract style. She took some of his canvases to the Museum and was
met with instant acceptance. Upon his return to New York, Scarlett met with
and became a close friend and confidant of the founding director Hilla
Rebay.
Rebay thought one of the most
important functions of the museum was to educate the public as well as other
artists. As part of her quest to educate people on the importance of
non-objective painting (Rebay’s term for abstraction) she would bring in
groups and have people such as Scarlett at the museum to explain the
paintings. Scarlett became her main spokesman and spoke at the museum on
weekends. Rebay employed a number of artists as a way to keep them
interested and painting in a non-objective style. Scarlett, for example,
received scholarships for four years from the museum and was employed for 15
years; other artists similarly employed included Jackson Pollack, John
Sennhauser and Jean Xceron.
Rebay would introduce him as “Rolph
Scarlett, my great find.’ So considerable was her enthusiasm for Scarlett,
that she and Solomon Guggenheim bought over sixty of his paintings and
monotypes for the museum. After Kandinsky and Bauer, more of Scarlett’s work
was in the collection than any other artist’s. Rebay also helped Scarlett in
his painting by offering constant encouragement and occasional suggestions
on the painting of individual works. It was she who encouraged Scarlett to
create small works on paper before executing the composition on canvas.
Scarlett was profoundly affected by
the Rudolf Bauer’s that he saw at the museum, more so than by any other
artist’s work. While he was at the museum he had constant exposure to
Bauer’s work and wrote about Bauer extensively in his memoirs, while making
scarce mention of Vasily Kandinsky whose work was extensively featured at
the museum. After Bauer moved to the United States, Scarlett would take his
studies and show them to Bauer. Bauer would then make suggestions about how
to change the compositions often with only the most minor of adjustments. In
his memoirs Scarlett wrote,
He took his time with each piece
and exercised great care in appraising my work. He would look at them..
‘move that square over there and make it black, and it will all come
together:’ and it would. He never hinted at any change that would alter the
spirit of the study...
When Rebay suggested changes in a
composition, she would chalk them onto the painting, but Scarlett would wipe
off the chalk and re-submit them in a few weeks. With Bauer, he was always
very appreciative of the insight and subtlety of his suggestions.
Although Rebay was Scarlett’s great
supporter, he did not subscribe fully to her beliefs. For Rebay the
creation of a work of art was divinely inspired. She was mystically inclined
and felt non-objective art was done with the hand of God directing the
artist. Scarlett played along with this notion but kept one foot firmly
anchored in his ear her training in esthetics.
The problem is to create an
organization that is alive as to color, and form, with challenging and
stimulating rhythms, making full use of one’s emotional and intuitive
creative programming and keeping it under cerebral control so that when it
is finished it is a visual experience that is alive with a mysticism, inner
order and intrigue and has grown into a new world of art governed by
esthetic authority.
While he cedes to Rebay the intuitive
(mystical) component, he maintains in his work a strong underlying reliance
on esthetic foundations.
When Solomon Guggenheim died, Rebay
and the artists she supported and championed were forced out of the museum
and their paintings no longer displayed. This was a great tragedy for
Scarlett’s artistic career and for non-objective art in general. As Scarlett
said in his memoirs:
Through the years Mr. Guggenheim
had bought about sixty of my paintings. He told me these were for the
permanent collection. I considered them my life's best work, and I was proud
to have them in this wonderful collection. However, after the death of Mr.
Guggenheim, my pictures, Bauer’s and Kandinsky’s were all deliberately put
in storage... This caused me great financial hardship, loss of prestige and
loss of artistic recognition.
Deeply affected by the loss of
patronage and encouragement from the Museum, Scarlett looked around himself
and saw the great successes of Abstract Expressionism. Despite Rebay’s
insistence that Scarlett adhere strictly to non-objective painting, Scarlett
began to experiment with more expressionistic forms in the 1940s. For
Scarlett it was in many ways similar to the work he had been doing before he
became so deeply involved with the Guggenheim foundation.
In 1951, when Scarlett was 62, he was
called by a curator from the Whitney Museum asking if he wanted to have a
painting in their annual exhibition and if they could come to his studio to
make a selection. The painting the curator selected had been done by
puncturing holes in the bottoms of paint cans and letting the paint drip
onto the canvas. When the curator came from the Whitney, he selected the
drip painting over the other paintings which were in Scarlett’s more usual
geometric style. Scarlett labeled these paintings “Lyrical,” Today these
would be labeled as Abstract Expressionist.. Scarlett’s painting was
featured in the Times and other newspapers in articles about the
Whitney annual. Motivated by the response Scarlett continued in a “Lyrical”
style for a decade.
In the early 1960s Scarlett moved to
Woodstock, New York, where he would remain until the end of his life. By
this time he had returned to geometric abstraction and left the more
expressionistic “Lyrical” style. When he returned to these more geometric
works) he brought to them a greatly brightened palette and a denser
composition. He was greatly influenced by Op-Art works.
Rolph Scarlett’s artistic career
embraced over 90 years. Scarlett was remarkably adaptable and able to
assimilate the best from many different sources, including his own earlier
work. Scarlett’s boldest experiments were often recognized by the critics
and newspapers, as in the pastel reproduced on the front page of the
Toledo Blade and the piece chosen for the Whitney Annual and reproduced
in the Times. Events of this kind encouraged him to continue in his
explorations and produced broad changes in his work. Scarlett saw wide
swings in his stature as an artist, from the adulation that Hilla Rebay and
Solomon Guggenheim gave him in the late 1930s and 40s to the virtual
anonymity of the late 1950s. He felt that a great wrong had been done to
Rebay, the intent of Guggenheim, and non-objective painting in general.
Despite everything, Scarlett never wavered in his commitment to abstraction
and continued to explore it until his death in 1984.
Keith Struve
Chicago 1990, 2002
Rolph Scarlett
images
It makes a good case
for Rolph Scarlett's unfair fall from fame.
A very positive review of
Scarlett's work from the New York Times
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E01E4D6103FF93AA15754C0A9639C8B63 |
