Bruno, Surrealist Composition with Dolls

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From the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Collection The Ruttenbergs are longtime art lovers who have collected abstract expressionist paintings, … Read more From the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Collection The Ruttenbergs are longtime art lovers who have collected abstract expressionist paintings, African art, sculpture, graphics, old watches and photographs-lots and lots of photographs. They started collecting them in the 1960s when the medium was still the stepchild of the arts. They kept collecting until they had more than 3,000 prints, 99 of which are in the Art Institute exhibit, ``The Intuitive Eye: Photographs from the Collection of David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg.`` The show encompasses the entire history of photography with black-and-white and color prints from every genre, It includes street photography by Walker Evans and Garry Winogrand, glamour shots by Edward Steichen and Richard Avedon, nudes by Robert Mapplethorpe and Nicholas Muray, painted photographs by Ellen Carey and Holly Roberts, social documentary by Margaret Bourke-White and Lewis Hine, an architectural study by Ansel Adams, portraits by Irving Penn and Arnold Newman and works by dozens of other photographers. Patty Carroll » Henri Cartier-Bresson » Louis Faurer » Ralph Gibson » Luis González Palma » Joseph Jachna » Annie Leibovitz » Irving Penn » Herb Ritts » Sebastião Salgado » Aaron Siskind » Sandy Skoglund » Jerry N. Uelsmann » Roman Vishniac » Andy Warhol » Weegee » William Wegman & others The exhibit and its title reflect retired attorney David Ruttenberg`s style of collecting-spontaneous, compulsive and straight from the heart. He bought what he liked, new artists along with name artists, choosing on intuition rather than investment potential. ``If I saw that Chuck Close, I would look at it and come back in a few days and look at it again and go home and decide just where it would look best,`` says Sarajean Ruttenberg, nodding at the Close triptych. He has given large supplies of time and prints to public photography collections, including those of the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. He chairs the acquisitions committee for the Art Institute`s photography department. He is a member of the acquisitions committee at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and of the chancellor`s committee at the University of California, Riverside, which organized an exhibit from his collection last year. He started his photography collection in 1965 when a client and former student of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy gave him one of Moholy`s famous photomontages, which Ruttenberg hung in his office. . ``None of our friends had bought the abstract expressionists when we came home with the Jackson Pollock in 1951. Our friends said, `Are you crazy?` `` The painting by Pollock, then an unknown, was one of the first pieces in their collection. As David Ruttenberg pursued photographs, his collection remained on the cutting edge of the art world with purchases of innovative conceptual and postmodern work along with classic prints. The only possible things missing are those cosmic Western landscapes. ``I never had a feeling for the landscape,`` David Ruttenberg says. He and Sarajean did, of course, attend Ansel Adams` black-tie 80th birthday party in Carmel, Calif., in 1982. See less