Louis Ritman

Louis Ritman (b. Russia, 1889-1963)

Louis Ritman was born in Russia and emigrated to the United States with his family about 1900. His father got a job in Chicago as a designer and tailor of men's suits. The position was not well paid and, as the eldest son, Louis was expected to help support the family. Ritman worked as a sign painter during the day then diligently attended night classes--at Hull House, at the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In 1907 he won a scholarship for full-time tuition at the academy and the following year won a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in Philadelphia. He remained at the Pennsylvania Academy only a few months, studying under William Merritt Chase, before deciding to go abroad at the suggestion of Lawton Parker, a Chicago painter who moved easily in the French art world. In fall 1909 Ritman and his friend Norbert Heerman left for Paris. Ritman promptly enrolled in the Académie Julian and soon passed the entrance examination for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. At night the pair frequented the Café du Dôme, where they met the Midwestern painters Frederick Carl Frieseke, Richard E. Miller, and Morgan Russell. Their circle of acquaintances also included Gertrude and Leo Stein, Walter Pach, Patrick Henry Bruce, and Max Weber.

In 1911 Ritman spent the first of many summers working in Giverny, the home of Claude Monet. Also working in the village were a number of American painters, including Frieseke, Miller, and Parker, who all painted in a mode of "decorative Impressionism" developed by Frieseke. During his years in Giverny, Ritman developed a close friendship with Frieseke, who allowed the young painter to work in his garden, house, and studio. Following a style popularized by Frank Benson, Robert Reid, Edmund Tarbell, and other figural painters of the time, Ritman and his Giverny compatriots executed “intimist” pictures-private scenes of beautiful women encased in the color and sunlight of richly decorative interiors or gardens, seen passively reading, sipping tea, or musing.

Beginning in the teens, Ritman exhibited often, particularly at the Paris Salon, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was given one-man shows at the Art Institute in 1915, 1920, and 1923; at Macbeth Galleries, New York, in 1919 and 1925; and at Milch Galleries, New York, in 1924 and 1929. He worked in France until 1929, making frequent trips to the United States. In 1929 he accepted a teaching position at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he remained for over thirty years, often exhibiting in major group shows and winning a number of prizes. He remained committed to figure painting, though his style gradually changed from an Impressionist to a more realist one. In the 1950s he devoted himself to landscape painting.

“Woman before a Mirror”, 1918

Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 36 1/4in. (92.1 x 92.1cm)

Signed and dated (lower right): L. RITMAN / 1918.

Gift of Miss Frances Whittlesey's Estate (1972.31)

Executed during Ritman's "high Impressionist" period of the late teens, the New Britain painting is typical of his best Giverny canvases. (1) The subject, seated and facing the viewer, is partially reflected in a large mirror, which reflects a simple but comfortable interior. Ritman has aligned the compositional elements parallel to the picture plain to emphasize the painting's flatness and decorative qualities, created by the jumble of colors and patterns in the model's clothing and a variety of square, elongated, and flecked brushstrokes. No surface remains smooth--even the olive wallpaper is flecked with periwinkle blue dots and the paint itself reveals a slightly rough texture.

Ritman's style changed during the Giverny years, from more finished fluid evocations of young womanhood to a preoccupation with light, texture, palette, and decorative surfaces. As contemporary critics noted, Ritman's canvases reveal the influence of Frieseke, who wove a colorful tapestry of light and color in his evocations of women in flower gardens dotted with dappled sunlight. Yet many of Ritman's paintings, especially this one, go beyond Monet's and Frieseke's elaborate tapestry of color, recalling the decorative interiors of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and Edouard Vuillard and the patchy brushwork of Paul Cézanne.

While Ritman's style varied over the years, his subjects remained remarkably consistent. “Woman before a Mirror”, painted at the end of his Giverny period, is a variation on “Pink and Blue” (1913; Private collection), in which the same model sits moodily, with crossed arms, next to a window. The woman may be Gaby, a favorite model whom Ritman painted many times. Throughout his paintings of the teens she often appears in the same settings, wearing the same ruffled, dotted, and blue-trimmed summer frock, either sewing, reading, walking in the garden, rowing on the pond, or dressing in the boudoir.

MAS

Bibliography:

C. H. Waterman, "Louis Ritman," “International Studio 67” (April 1919): lxii-lxiv; Nicole DeFleur, Louis Ritman, 1892-1963: “American Painter” (Random Lake, Wisc.: Times Publishing, 1967); “The Paintings of Louis Ritman” (1889-1964) (Chicago: Signature Galleries, 1975); Richard H. Love, “Louis Ritman, from Chicago to Giverny: How Louis Ritman Was Influenced by Lawton Parker and Other Midwestern Impressionists” (Chicago: Haase-Mumm Publishing, 1989); William H. Gerdts, “Monet's Giverny: An American Impressionist Colony” (New York: Abbeville Press, 1993).

Notes:

1. Ritman’s high Impressionist period is defined in Love, “Louis Ritman”, pp. 223-29.