Sylvia Rutkoff | "The Cowboy" | Mixed Media Figurative | Oil, Sand & Gesso on Masonite | New York Postwar Avant-Garde

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Description

Sylvia Rutkoff (1919–2011)

"The Cowboy"
c. 1950s · Oil, sand, gesso, and grout on masonite · Period wood frame

About … Read more Sylvia Rutkoff (1919–2011)

"The Cowboy"
c. 1950s · Oil, sand, gesso, and grout on masonite · Period wood frame

About this work

Few paintings in the Rutkoff estate cache reveal her range as vividly as Figure with Horse. Where her more purely abstract works surrender to texture and field, this composition holds a dramatic narrative tension: a solitary figure in a blazing red hat occupies the left, face rendered as a broad mask of white impasto outlined in fluid black, archaic, totemic, unmistakably human. To the right, a large horse materializes from the warm sienna ground, its form suggested rather than stated, built up in dragged blue-grey pigment and scored incisions that barely separate creature from earth.

The burning sienna masonite ground, left exposed across the breadth of the canvas, is itself a chromatic event, shifting between amber, copper, and raw umber as the light rakes across the surface. Rutkoff works it as Cézanne worked his grounds: not as absence, but as presence. The composition culminates in a vivid lower foreground of deep forest green, into which Rutkoff has scratched a dense web of sgraffito lines, grass, perhaps, or pure energy released, exposing gold and yellow beneath in a display of technical virtuosity that rewards close looking.

"A happy wedding of the natural image to the violent immediacy of the expressionist idiom."
Arts Magazine
This is Rutkoff at her most elemental: figure, animal, earth, and sky collapsed into a single charged surface. The red hat — the one act of pure declarative color — anchors the entire composition with the confidence of an artist who knows exactly what she is doing.

Signed on reverse - Sylvia Rutkoff
Pencil on masonite reverse · Acquired directly from the artist's great nephew

Critical reception
-Gregory Battock, Art Critic: "Highly sophisticated textures that speak firmly and imaginatively… one thinks of a gay and colorful Dubuffet."
-New York Times:Recognized Rutkoff as an "outstanding colorist" a judgment amply confirmed by the fiery palette of this very work.
-New York Herald Tribune: Called her work "vital" a word that captures the raw, unmediated force of Figure with Horse's surface and subject.

About the artist

Born in Wisconsin in 1919, Sylvia Weinreb Rutkoff trained at Hunter College (MA, Painting and Art History, 1939) and the Art Students League (1958), establishing herself as a forceful presence in New York's postwar avant-garde. She taught summers at Lehigh University and directed the Art Workshop in the Graduate School at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

A member of The Vectors — alongside Abstract Expressionists Ben Wilson, Frances Manacher, and Rhoda Sklar — Rutkoff pursued a singular path that married Art Brut materiality with the lyrical immediacy of the New York School. Her non-objective works in oil, sand, gesso, and grout were made, as contemporaries noted, with both intensity and simplicity.

Exhibition history (selected)

Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
Philadelphia
Brooklyn Museum
New York
Butler Institute of American Art
Youngstown, Ohio
Hudson River Museum
Yonkers, New York
International Young Artists Exhibition
Tokyo, 1962
Osaka University Art Gallery
Japan
Caravan Gallery (two solo shows)
New York, 1961 & 1963
Key Gallery, SoHo
New York
Loeb Gallery, New York University
New York
Capricorn Gallery
New York
Edward Williams Gallery
Fairleigh Dickinson University, NJ
The Riverside Museum
New York See less