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ROLPH SCARLETT (1889-1984)
Rolph Scarlett was a major exponent of geometric abstraction whose career was directly linked to the history of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (known today as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) in New York. His avoidance of recognizable subject matter in favor of refined and very rhythmic combinations of triangles, rectangles, circles and squares earned him a reputation as a “factless precisionist” and inspired one critic to write: “It is easy to go dancing on the Milky Way while looking at some of Mr. Scarlett’s paintings.” Blessed with a keen eye for form and design, Scarlett was also active as a set designer, industrial designer and maker of sculptural jewelry.
Scarlett was born in Guelph, Ontario––a mid-sized city about fifty miles from Toronto––on June 13th 1889. Encouraged to dabble with paint as a child, he received his earliest formal instruction in 1901, taking art lessons at the Loretto Academy in Guelph. After completing his public school education, he embarked on a six-year apprenticeship in his uncle’s jewelry firm, learning to design and execute settings for precious and semi-precious stones. In 1908, Scarlett moved to New York to work in the jewelry field. During the next two years, he was employed at a number of jewelry firms and took classes under William Merritt Chase, John Sloan and George Luks at the Art Students League. He returned to Guelph in 1912, after which he was involved in comic opera productions and worked at various jewelry companies. His interest in Modernism began in 1914, when he saw a reproduction of a painting by the Russian avant-garde artist, Vasily Kandinsky, whose work was becoming increasingly familiar to art audiences in North America.
Seeking to broaden his experience south of the border, Scarlett returned to New York in 1918, working as a jeweler, designing stage sets and painting in his spare time. By about 1920, he had adopted a Post-Impressionist approach, creating paintings and works on paper characterized by the use of simplified, cubist shapes, structured compositions and non-descriptive color. On a business trip to Geneva for the Omega Watch Company in 1923, he met the pioneering abstractionist Paul Klee, who, as Scarlett put it, “turned me toward non-objectivity . . . I left the world of realism completely.” Scarlett relocated to Toledo, Ohio, in 1926, displaying his paintings in local exhibitions. Two years later, he went to Los Angeles, where he designed sets for Hollywood films and exhibited his work at the Hagemeyer Studios in Pasadena (1930).
Scarlett returned to Guelph in 1932, but a year later he settled in Great Neck, Long Island, going on to support himself through stage and industrial design work, which included creating sets for Radio City Music Hall and guided missile designs for the British War Office in London. A pivotal moment in his artistic career occurred in 1938, when he met Hilla Rebay, the German-born curator who was building a collection of non-objective painting for Solomon and Irene Guggenheim. Impressed by his paintings and drawings, Rebay befriended Scarlett and introduced him to the German painter Rudolph Bauer, whose hard-edged geometric abstractions exerted a major influence on his work. Through his connection with Rebay, Scarlett was also able to see original works by Kandinsky for the first time, going on to tell an interviewer that they had a “cosmic order that made me feel at peace and at home for perhaps the first time in my life.”
Rebay became one of Scarlett’s most steadfast supporters, awarding him a Guggenheim Foundation scholarship in 1938 and eventually acquiring sixty of his works for the museum’s collection. When the Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in 1939, Scarlett was included in the inaugural show, Art of Tomorrow. A year later, he became the chief lecturer at the museum, a part-time position that he juggled with his work as a designer and fabricator for Reliance Devices Inc. (later known as the Swivelier Company, Inc.). Throughout the 1940s, he exhibited his work at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, as well as at venues such the Modern Age Art Gallery in New York and at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris.
Scarlett continued his affiliation with the Guggenheim Museum until 1946, when he resigned his lectureship position to devote more time to the Swivelier Company, where he designed lighting fixtures and mechanical devices. In the wake of Solomon R. Guggenheim’s death in 1949, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting’s name was changed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Rebay lost her job as curator and the collecting policies of the museum became more generalized, which meant that Scarlett had lost an important patron. However, he remained committed to abstraction, producing dynamic paintings, replete with rich colors and zigzagging forms, that caught the eye of many critics; on the occasion of his one-man show at the Jacques Seligmann Gallery in New York in 1949, for example, a reviewer for the New York Times noted the “originality and strength” of his art and praised the “spirited working out of line and color relationships.” From 1949 to 1953, Scarlett was a visiting lecturer and critic at the University of Illinois, and from 1952 to 1958 he spent his winters in Florida, conducting painting classes at the Edgewater artists’ colony. He also taught painting in Madeira, Portugal, during 1962-63. Scarlett moved to Shady, New York (near Woodstock) in 1955. After about 1961, this multi-talented artist spent much of his time making highly imaginative jewelry, although he continued to paint and work as a freelance designer.
Scarlett died in Kingston, New York, on August 7th 1984. Examples of his work can be found at the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh; and the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. His memoirs, The Baroness, the Mogul, and the Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum, written in collaboration with Harriet Tanin (2003), is an important source of information for Scarlett’s career and for the art world of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.
CL
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