Anne Ryan (1889–1954) was an American

Abstract Expressionist Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of th ...

artist associated with the New York School. Her first contact with the

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretica ...

came in 1941 when she joined the Atelier 17, a famous printmaking workshop that the British artist Stanley William Hayter had established in Paris in the 1930s and then brought to New York when France fell to the

Nazis Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in N ...

. The great turning point in Ryan's development occurred after the war, in 1948. She was 57 years old when she saw the collages of

Kurt Schwitters Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, paint ...

at the Rose Fried Gallery, in New York City, in 1948. She right away dedicated herself to this newly discovered medium. Since Anne Ryan was a poet, according to Deborah Solomon, in Kurt Schwitters’s collages “she recognized the visual equivalent of her sonnets – discrete images packed together in an extremely compressed space.” When six years later Ryan died, her work in this medium numbered over 400 pieces.

Biography

Anne Ryan was born in

Hoboken Hoboken ( ; Unami: ') is a city in Hudson County in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the city's population was 60,417. The Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program calculated that the city's population was 58,69 ...

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delawa ...

in 1889. Both her parents died when Ryan was in her early teens, and she attended the

Academy of Saint Elizabeth The Academy of Saint Elizabeth is a private college preparatory secondary school for young women located in Convent Station, New Jersey, United States. Established in 1860, the academy is the oldest secondary school for women in New Jersey. T ...

convent for both high school and early college. She left the school her junior year to marry attorney William McFadden; they separated in 1923. During this time she frequented art and literary circles in

Greenwich Village Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...

neighborhood, and published a novel, ''Raquel'', as well as a volume of poetry, ''Lost Hills''. In 1931 and 1932 she lived in

Majorca Mallorca, or Majorca, is the largest island in the Balearic Islands, which are part of Spain and located in the Mediterranean. The capital of the island, Palma, is also the capital of the autonomous community of the Balearic Islands. The Bale ...

and then

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. Si ...

. When she returned to the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

and settled on West Fourth Street in

, the cultural community there was rapidly galvanizing, attracting artists and writers of all backgrounds through the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

and generating new styles that challenged the Regionalism and Social Realism for which the U.S. was known. She began to paint in 1938 and had her first solo exhibition in 1941 at The Pinacoteca on Lexington Avenue. After seeing

' collages shown at the Rose Fried Gallery in 1948, she was struck by "the abstract form and tactile quality, at how much power and complexity there could be on so small a scale." She seized on the idea of debris and made her first collage from paper and fabric scraps that very evening, continuing mostly in this mode until her death in 1954 in Morristown,

. She was interred at

Gate of Heaven Cemetery Gate of Heaven Cemetery, approximately 25 miles (40 km) north of New York City, was established in 1917 at 10 West Stevens Ave. in Hawthorne, Westchester County, New York, as a Roman Catholic burial site. Among its famous residents i ...

in East Hanover, New Jersey. Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

Artistic and literary work

For Ryan, the relationship between artmaking and writing was very permeable, though she favored the latter for most of her life. She wrote a series of

poems Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings ...

in the late 1930s and 40s called ''Lines to a Young Painter'', and her circle of friends included artists and writers of all kinds. Her artistic work first took the form of

printmaking Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed techniqu ...

—she made prints with Stanley William Hayter at

Atelier 17 Atelier 17 was an art school and studio that was influential in the teaching and promotion of printmaking in the 20th century. Originally located in Paris, the studio relocated to New York during the years surrounding World War II. It moved back t ...

, a hub for the American and European

—followed by

oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest ...

, and by the mid-1940s she was designing

costume Costume is the distinctive style of dress or cosmetic of an individual or group that reflects class, gender, profession, ethnicity, nationality, activity or epoch. In short costume is a cultural visual of the people. The term also was tradition ...

s and backdrops for ballet performances. It was in

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an Assemblage (art), assemblage of different forms, thus creat ...

, though, that Ryan found her primary voice. She incorporated all kinds of

paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distribu ...

s and

textile Textile is an Hyponymy and hypernymy, umbrella term that includes various Fiber, fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, Staple (textiles)#Filament fiber, filaments, Thread (yarn), threads, different #Fabric, fabric types, etc. At f ...

s into her

compositions, including

silk Silk is a natural protein fiber, some forms of which can be woven into textiles. The protein fiber of silk is composed mainly of fibroin and is produced by certain insect larvae to form cocoons. The best-known silk is obtained from th ...

, netting, handmade rag paper, and Japanese

rice paper "Rice paper" has many varieties such as rice paper made from tree bark to make drawing and writing paper or from rice flour and tapioca flour and then mixed with salt and water to produce a thin rice cake and dried to become harder and paper-like ...

. Most were small in scale, averaging roughly eight by six inches. Many of the works were mounted on handmade paper by Douglas Morse Howell, who frequently collaborated with New York artists in the 1950s and 60s and often made paper from re-purposed textile fibers like blue jeans, or from

flax Flax, also known as common flax or linseed, is a flowering plant, ''Linum usitatissimum'', in the family Linaceae. It is cultivated as a food and fiber crop in regions of the world with temperate climates. Textiles made from flax are known in ...

grown in his backyard. Ryan's collages distilled and expanded upon this sensibility by juxtaposing small squares of different materials against one another to highlight the distinct textures and densities of each. Their small scale and her use of pastel colors provoked varying critical responses in the early 1950s; many writers commented on the works' "

feminine Femininity (also called womanliness) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls. Femininity can be understood as socially constructed, and there is also some evidence that some behaviors considered fe ...

" qualities. Ryan had three exhibitions of her work at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1950s that solidified her reputation in the art world. Parsons was well known for showing abstract artists like

Barnett Newman Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense o ...

and

Agnes Martin Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004), was an American abstract painter. Her work has been defined as an "essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence". Although she is often considered or referred to as a minimalist, Mart ...

. After her death in 1954, an exhibition of her collage was shown at the

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Cro ...

and traveled to the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, DC; the Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; and the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. Her daughter Elizabeth McFadden is also an artist. Selected solo exhibitions: * 1941: The Pinacotheca, NY (paintings); Marquie Gallery, NY (prints) * 1942: New York School for Social Research, NY (prints) * 1946: The Philadelphia Art Alliance, PA (prints) * 1947:

Cranbrook Academy of Art The Cranbrook Educational Community is an education, research, and public museum complex in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. This National Historic Landmark was founded in the early 20th century by newspaper mogul George Gough Booth. It consists of C ...

, Bloomfield, MI (prints) * 1948: Gallery Denise Severin, Paris (first European exhibition of prints) * 1950, 1954, 1970: Betty Parsons Gallery, NYC (collages) * 1955: Betty Parsons Gallery, NYC (Memorial exhibition, paintings and collages) * 1957: Kraushaar Gallery, NYC (Memorial exhibition, prints) * 1974: Marlborough Gallery, NYC * 1991: ''Anne Ryan. Collages from Three Museums,'' Washburn Gallery, NYC * 1962-1963: New England preparatory schools and the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) - Boston, MA (circulating exhibition) * 1974: circ. exhibition

, NY and

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds ...

, Washington, D.C. (collages) * 1974, 1977: Marlborough Gallery, NY (collages) * 1979

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, to ...

Minneapolis, Minnesota Minneapolis () is the largest city in Minnesota, United States, and the county seat of Hennepin County. The city is abundant in water, with thirteen lakes, wetlands, the Mississippi River, creeks and waterfalls. Minneapolis has its origi ...

(collages) * 1979, 1981:

André Emmerich André Emmerich (October 11, 1924 – September 25, 2007) was a German-born American gallerist who specialized in the color field school and pre-Columbian art while also taking on artists such as David Hockney and John D. Graham. Early life and ...

Gallery, NY (collages) * 1979-1080:

Yale University Art Gallery The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is the oldest university art museum in the Western Hemisphere. It houses a major encyclopedic collection of art in several interconnected buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. ...

New Haven New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134,023 ...

, CT (collages) * 1980:

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), is an art museum located in the Houston Museum District of Houston, Texas. With the recent completion of an eight-year campus redevelopment project, including the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Buil ...

, TX (collages) * 1985, 1989, 1991: Washburn Gallery, NY Selected group exhibitions: * 1944: ''Hayter & Atelier XVII,''

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of t ...

(MoMA), NY * 1945: ''National Exhibition of Prints, 1945,''

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The libra ...

, Washington, D.C. * 1947-1953: Brooklyn Museum of Art Print Annuals, NY * 1947: ''45th Annual Watercolor and Print Exhibition,''

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Pennsylvania (; (Pennsylvania Dutch language, Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appa ...

, PA * 1950: ''John Stephan/Anne Ryan (collages),'' Betty Parsons Gallery, NYC * 1951: ''Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America,'' Museum of Modern Art, NYC; ''Some American Prints, 1945–1959,'' Museum of Modern Art, NYC and The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC * 1951,

Ninth Street Show The 9th Street Art Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture is the official title artist Franz Kline hand-lettered onto the poster he designed for the Ninth Street Show (May 21-June 10, 1951).

* 1951, 1953, 1954: The

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...

, Annuals and Biennials, NYC * 1954: ''New York Painting and Sculpture Annual,'' Stable Gallery, NYC * 1954-1955: ''International Color Woodcuts,''

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

* 1961-1962: ''The Art of Assemblage,'' The Museum of Modern Art, NYC circ. * 1965-1967: ''American Collages,'' The Museum of Modern Art, NYC circ. * 1974:

, NY * 1975: ''Group Show: Collage,'' Betty Parsons Gallery, NYC * 1976: ''30th Anniversary Show,'' Betty Parsons Gallery, NYC

Public collections

Addison Gallery of American Art The Addison Gallery of American Art is an academic museum dedicated to collecting American art, organized as a department of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. History Directors of the gallery include Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr. (1940– ...

, Andover, Mass. *

Brooklyn Museum of Art The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Cro ...

, New York * College Art Gallery, State University College, New Paltz, N.Y. *

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was desig ...

, Washington, D.C. * Lamont Gallery,

Phillips Exeter Academy (not for oneself) la, Finis Origine Pendet (The End Depends Upon the Beginning) gr, Χάριτι Θεοῦ (By the Grace of God) , location = 20 Main Street , city = Exeter, New Hampshire , zipcode ...

, Exeter, N.H. *

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, New York *

Minneapolis Institute of Art The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is an arts museum located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Home to more than 90,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, Mia is one of the largest art museums in the United State ...

Montclair Art Museum The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) is located in Montclair, New Jersey, United States, a few miles west of New York City. Since it opened in 1914 as the first museum in New Jersey that granted access to the public and the first dedicated solely to a ...

, New Jersey *

, Texas *

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of ch ...

, Washington, D.C. *

Newark Museum The Newark Museum of Art (formerly known as the Newark Museum), in Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, United States, is the state's largest museum. It holds major collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, A ...

, New Jersey * New Jersey State Museum, Trenton *

Palmer Museum of Art The Palmer Museum of Art is the art museum of Pennsylvania State University, located on the University Park, Pennsylvania, University Park campus in State College, Pennsylvania. Collections The museum has an increasing permanent collection of mo ...

, State College, P.A. *

Rhode Island School of Design Museum The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD Museum) is an art museum integrated with the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, US. The museum was co-founded with the school in 1877, and still shares multiple build ...

, Providence, R.I. *

Wadsworth Atheneum The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School lands ...

, Hartford, Conn. *

, Minneapolis *

, New York *

Williams College Museum of Art The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) is a college-affiliated art museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It is located on the campus of Williams College, and is close to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and the Clark Ar ...

- Williamstown, Mass. *

, New Haven, Conn. *

Museum of Modern Art, New York The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one o ...

References

Bibliography

* Stuart Preston, ''Artists of Personal Vision,'' ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', April 10, 1955 Section 2, p. 11 * Fairfield Porter, "Reviews and Previews," Art News, vol. 56, Dec. 1957, p. 11 - Anne Ryan, ''Darkest Leaf,'' Boteghe Oscure, vol. 22, 1958 (story published posthumously). * Donald Windham, ''A note on Anne Ryan,'' Boteghe Oscure, vol. 22, 1958, pp. 267–271. * Hilton Kramer, ''Anne Ryan: Bigness on a Small Scale,'' New York Times, February 3, 1968, p. 25, ills. * John Ashberry, ''A Place for Everything,'' Art News, vol.69, March 1970, p. 32 * Carter Ratcliff, ''New York,'' Art International, vol.14, Summer 1970, p. 141 *

Piri Halasz Piri Halasz is an American art critic, educator and writer. Biography The daughter of diet-book author Ruth West, she attended Barnard College, where she majored in English and served as the features editor of the ''Barnard Bulletin''. She then we ...

, "Trenton Exhibit Celebrates the Wonders of Collage," ''The New York Times'', Nov 17, 1974, p. 33, B&W of Ryan

Books

* Marika Herskovic
''New York School Abstract Expressionists Artists Choice by Artists,''
(New York School Press, 2000.) . p. 18; p. 38; p. 318-321

External links

Anne Ryan papers, 1922-1968.
Smithsonian Institution Research Information System; Archival, Manuscript and Photographic Collections.
Anne Ryan at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

Anne Ryan at the Collection of Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ryan, Anne 1889 births 1954 deaths Abstract expressionist artists American women painters Modern painters Artists from New York (state) Artists from Hoboken, New Jersey 20th-century American painters 20th-century American women artists American women printmakers 20th-century American printmakers Atelier 17 alumni Burials at Gate of Heaven Cemetery (East Hanover, New Jersey)