Ruth Todd Abstract Expressionist Oil Painting of Still Life with Fruit c.1950

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Ruth Todd (1909-2006, American Woman Artist) one of Colorado’s most prominent avant-garde artists and played a significant role in Colorado’s … Read more Ruth Todd (1909-2006, American Woman Artist) one of Colorado’s most prominent avant-garde artists and played a significant role in Colorado’s art history. Known for painting and collage.
Still life with lemon and banana on kitchen table.
Ruth Thomas Todd was born in 1909 in Sanford, North Carolina. She arrived in New York City in the 1930s where she began her career as a fashion model supporting herself as she attended classes at the Art Students League. For reasons of health she moved to Colorado Springs to treat her condition. During her recuperation she started to draw and studied under famous American abstract painter Robert Motherwell, who was teaching at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at the time. By the 1950s, her career as an abstract expressionist painter was blooming. She was one of Colorado’s most visible and avant-garde artists. Ruth married Littleton Todd, a poet and a woodworker. In 1953, Todd traveled to Europe (Paris, France) to study art and to paint. Littleton Todd opened a design studio in Denver where he manufactured and sold modern furniture. She would incorporate sawdust and other found materials from the workshop imbued with oil paint into her abstract work to create unique topographies and patterns. She showed at numerous Gilpin County Art Exhibitions, the Denver Art Museum, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Women’s College, the University of Colorado, Boulder, the Colorado State Fair, and the Jewish Community Center. Among the Colorado Modernists that she exhibited with were Vance Kirkland, Frank Vavra, Martha Epp, Ardis Sturdy, Roland Detre, Eve Drewelowe, Rita Derjue, Beverly Rosen, Barbara Locketz, Paul K. Smith, and William Sanderson. One of her prize scrapbook clippings was an art-magazine review from one of her New York shows right next to a review of famed abstract expressionist, Joan Mitchell, succinctly describing Todd: "An inquisitive, precise, energetic and bold Coloradoan rambles through alleys of tactile excitement."
Todd also participated in group exhibitions at the New York City Center Gallery, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, Museum of New Mexico-Santa Fe, and the Denver Art Museum.
She had a solo exhibition in the late 1950's at the Morris Gallery in Greenwich Village, New York City (reviewed in Art News) and at the Bodley Gallery a prestigious Upper East Side gallery of modern art. They exhibited Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, René Magritte, Roberto Matta, Max Ernst, Larry Rivers, Yves Tanguy, and Andy Warhol amongst others.
She has been shown more recently at the Sandra Phillips Gallery, Mackey gallery and Payton Rule Gallery. She is in the permanent collection of the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art. See less