Andrée Ruellan

Andrée Ruellan was born in New York City to French immigrant parents. Ruellan proved to be a child prodigy and her works were exhibited at the early age of nine years old. In 1922, she went to Rome, and lived in Paris from 1923-1929. After marrying the painter John W. Taylor in 1929, she returned to the United States and settled near Woodstock, New York. Ruellan's strongest works were the Social Realist pieces that came out of the 30s and 40s. Deceptively simple, her work penetrates the essence of the age. Ruellan's oeuvre is also unusual in that it shows the side of society, such as the Deep South, usually ignored by her contemporaries. Ruellan looked at the world with optimism and warmth for her fellow man; she was a true humanist. She said: "People are never just spots of color. What moves me most is that in spite of the poverty and the constant struggle for existence, so much kindness and sturdy courage remain."

EXTENDED BIO

Andrée Ruellan (April 6, 1905 – July 15, 2006) was an American painter, known for her depictions of everyday scenes in New York and the American South.

Ruellan was born in New York City. She was a child prodigy who first exhibited her work at age 9, when the Ashcan School painter Robert Henri included her work in a group show in the East Village. At age 15, Ruellan's father was killed in an accident, and she began selling paintings to support herself and her mother.

During the Depression, she traveled to the South, and painted numerous works of African Americans going about their everyday lives. Her best-known painting from that period is Crap Game (1936). She worked for the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the U.S. Treasury Department, executing at least one post office mural, in Emporia, Virginia.[1]

Ruellan's works are included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum. In 2005, the Georgia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of her art in honor of her 100th birthday.

Ruellan married fellow painter John W. Taylor in 1929. They had no children. She lived in Shady, New York for many years before her death in Kingston, New York in 2006.

REFERENCES

Park, Marlene and Gerald E. Markowitz, ‘’Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art in the New Deal’’, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1984 p. 88

Fox, Margalit (2006-08-06). "Andrée Ruellan, 101, a Painter of Her Century, Dies". New York Times. Retrieved 2006-08-09.