This is a rare pendant, from 1954 and 1976, by Rolph Scarlett, a Canadian-born painter and jeweler as well as an industrial and stage designer, who is represented by numerous paintings in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Scarlett spent much of his life in Woodstock, New York, where, in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, he made enormous rings and pendants of silver and brightly colored semi-precious stones, reminiscent of the geometric abstraction displayed in his paintings.
Acquired from a Bloomfield, NJ Estate in the United States. (the information has been obtained from the auction house)
No Makers mark is present; It is Stamped 835 silver on the back.
Dimensions - 5.8 cm H x 5.9 cm W x 1 cm D. In excellent condition.
AUD $3500.00 + Shipping
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Rolph Scarlett:
Canadian-American, 1889–1984
Rolph Scarlett was a painter of geometric abstraction during the American avant-garde movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 1889, he left Canada at the age of 18 to go to New York City and returned to Canada during the years of World War I. However, by 1924, he had established New York City as his home. While he was beginning his career as an abstract painter, he was designing stage scenery for George Bernard Shaw's play, Man and Superman, and for the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. In 1939, while in the process of creating the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Director Hilla Rebay began to take an interest in Scarlett's work. By 1940, he had become the museum's new chief lecturer. By 1953, the Guggenheim owned nearly sixty of his paintings and monoprints. He regularly exhibited his work in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Museum, the Art Institute in Chicago, and in NY: the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Later, he became a resident of the Woodstock art colony for more than twenty-five years and showed his work in the Woodstock exhibits.
Listed in Who Was Who in American Art, American Paintings and Sculpture, and many others; museums include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Carnegie Museums (Pittsburgh), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and many others.
Rolph Scarlett was a Canadian artist known for both his abstract paintings and jewelry designs. Scarlett’s nonobjective style of painting emerged from his interest in both Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinksy. Born on June 13, 1889, in Guelph, Canada, he worked in his uncle’s jewelry store as a teenager before moving to New York in 1908. After briefly studying at the Art Students League, Scarlett relocated to Los Angeles, where he became a successful set designer for plays and films. During the 1920s, the artist traveled to Europe on business; there, he met Klee and shifted from a more traditional observational painting style to abstraction. After settling in New York in 1937, Scarlett became friends with the new curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Hilla Rebay, who introduced him to a number of avant-garde circles in the city. Throughout the remainder of his career, the artist continued to produce both jewelry and paintings. He died on August 7, 1984, in Woodstock, NY. Today, Scarlett’s works are held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
The problem is to create an organization from a few geometrical elements that is alive as to color and form, with challenging and stimulating rhythms, making full use of one’s emotional and intuitive creative programming yet keeping it under cerebral control, so that the finished work is a visual experience alive with mysticism, inner order and intrigue grown into a world of art governed by aesthetic authority.
Rolph Scarlett
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