Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, and Jeweller 9780773583603

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, Jeweller
Appendix I: Plates and Photographs
Appendix II: Chronology
Appendix III: Exhibitions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
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Citation preview

ROLPH S C A R L E T T

BHB JUDITHNASBY

© McGill-Queen's University Press 2004 ISBN 0-7735-2804-0 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2004 Bibliothéque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Nasby, Judith, 1945Rolph Scarlett: painter, designer, jeweller / Judith Nasby. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-2804-0 1. Scarlett, Rolph, 1889-1984. 2. Painters—United States—Biography. 3. Designers—United States—Biography. 4. Jewellers—United States—Biography. I. Title. NX513.2982835 2004

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c2004-903147-3

This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in 10/13 Minion and Avant Garde

C O N T E N T S

Preface vii Acknowledgments ix

Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, Jeweller 3

Appendix I

Plates and Photographs 111

Appendix II

Chronology 153

Appendix III Exhibitions 157

Notes 165 Bibliography 169 Index 177

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P R E F A C E

I first met Rolph Scarlett in 1976 at his home in Shady, New York, while researching artists born in Guelph, Ontario. Scarlett had a remarkable seventy-five-year career in the United States as a painter, designer, and jeweller. He was a dedicated modernist inspired by his commitment to geometric abstraction. This publication, the first monograph on Scarlett, is the result of a research journey that included biographical investigation and the locating of works in Canada and the United States. My objective is to bring the work of this previously little-known, multi-talented artist to the attention of the public and of the museum and academic communities. Sources for the book are interviews with the artist conducted by the author in 1976,1977, and 1978; memoirs taped by Harriet Tannin in 1982; letters and 1978 interview notes in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives and the Hilla Rebay Foundation Archives; and correspondence held by the Scarlett Estate and the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. In 1997 the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre at the University of Guelph produced the first touring exhibition of his work, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry. A preview version of the exhibition was shown at the Art Gallery

of the Canadian Embassy in Washington DC where it was received as a popular and critical success by the design and academic communities. The exhibition was later shown at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, at the Kelowna Art Gallery in British Columbia, and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in spring 2003. This book includes a selection of drawings from the over eight hundred industrial designs created by Scarlett in the mid-i93os and donated by Sandra and Samuel Esses to the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It also includes photographs of jewellery from the Esses Collection, stage designs and paintings from the University of Guelph and Macdonald Stewart Art Centre collections, paintings from the Solomon R. Guggenheim collection and from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Collection, and works owned by the Rolph Scarlett Estate and private collectors.

viii

PREFACE

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

A number of individuals and organizations provided valuable assistance to me. I would particularly like to thank Keith Betteridge; Lois Betteridge; Louise Blais; Billie Bridgeman; Helen Brimmell; the late James Carroll of the Macdonald Stewart Foundation; Diane Charbonneau of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Cathy Cherbosque of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Dale Ellis; Samuel and Sandra Esses; Toni Greenbaum; William Hammond of the Hammond Radio Museum, Guelph; David Hanks of Exhibitions International, New York; Ihor Holubizky; Andrew Hunter; Diane Jaust, formerly of the Radio City Music Hall Library; Leonard Kestenbaum; Marianne Lamonaca of the Wolfsonian, Miami Beach; Stephen Long of Associated American Artists; Rejean Lussier of Lutech Translation Inc.; Ilene Magaras, formerly of the Guggenheim Museum Archives; Ted Mann of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; James Marshall of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, Toledo; Joan Metcalfe; Dean Palmer; Rosalind Pepall of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Elizabeth Pollett; Giles Rivest; Carol Rusk of the Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Whitney Museum of American Art; Harry Scarlett; Martin Schwalbe; Michael

Schwartz of Swivilier Company Inc.; Gary Snyder of Gary Snyder Fine Art, New York; Blair and Donna Stewart; Mrs Liliane Stewart, president of the Macdonald Stewart Foundation; Nancy Sullivan, Louise Averill Svendsen, formerly of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Harriet Tannin; Steve Van Dulken of the British Library; and Joan Washburn of the Washburn Gallery, New York. For their ongoing commitment, I wish to thank the staff of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, including Sorouja Williamson, Verne Harrison, Dawn Owen, Valerie Mackinnon, and Stephanie Howarth. I also thank David LeBlanc for his book design, my external reviewers, my editor Philip Cercone, my coordinating editor Joan McGilvray, my copy editor Judith Turnbull, and the staff of McGill-Queen's University Press. Thanks also to the Canada Council for the Arts for supporting scholarship by contributing to this publication, the first monograph on Rolph Scarlett.

JUDITH

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

N A S BY

ROLPH SCARLETT

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ROLPH SCARLETT PAINTER,

DESIGNER, JEWELLER

Canadian artist Rolph Scarlett had a remarkable seventy-five-year career in the United States as a painter, designer, and jeweller. A dedicated modernist, he successfully fused multiple artistic practices into a single vision. As a painter, inspired by his association with European avant-garde artists at the Museum of Non-objective Painting in New York, he explored geometric abstraction. The museum, later renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, purchased sixty of his paintings and works on paper during the 19308 and 19408. This remains one of the largest acquisitions of a Canadian artist's work by an international art museum. In the 19308 Scarlett produced beautifully executed industrial design drawings that reveal his mastery of the streamline aesthetic. He was also an innovative stage designer, working in the constructivist style in California and New York. Throughout his career, he created unique jewellery in the American modernist tradition. He translated his non-objective approach to painting into highly sculptural jewellery, making imaginative use of stones and settings. Rolph Scarlett's multi-faceted career began in his formative years in Guelph, Ontario, where he was born in 1889.

EARLY LIFE

At the end of the nineteenth century, Guelph was a relatively prosperous city of approximately ten thousand people. Located a hundred kilometres northwest of Toronto, it was known as an agricultural, mercantile, and manufacturing centre that exported such items as pianos, organs, spirits, beer, metal castings, and textiles. The city had a well-regarded education system, and many of its citizens were active in the arts, particularly amateur theatre, music societies, and painting, both oils and watercolours. As a child, Scarlett performed in various theatrical productions. He also had an early interest in art, which his grandmother encouraged by giving him a paint box and some rudimentary instructions. At age eleven, he received a certificate of merit in drawing from the Guelph Public Schools. The following year he began taking private art lessons with Sister Antoinette at Loretto Academy, a convent associated with the Catholic elementary school for girls.2 He received a good basic knowledge of drawing techniques, perspective, and colour theory through the extracurricular classes for students who showed talent in the visual arts. By age thirteen, Scarlett had completed his formal education, graduating from St George Public School in 1902. Although he wanted to become an artist, his father discouraged the idea and arranged a jewellery apprenticeship for him with his uncle's business enterprise, W. A. Clark Jewellery. The firm was located on Wyndham Street, the city's main thoroughfare, not far from the family home. During his four-year apprenticeship, he mastered jewellery design, fabrication, settings, knowledge of gems, watchmaking, and repair. Scarlett continued to develop his drawing and painting skills, teaching himself by copying old masters, a popular way to learn technique at that time. An example is the full-size copy he made around 1907 of The Vagrants by British artist Frederick Walker (Tate Collection, London). The one-metre-wide painting, copied from a magazine illustration, depicts a poverty-stricken family huddled around a camp fire in a bleak landscape. In the same year, 1907, Scarlett appeared before the Guelph City Council with the suggestion that a beautification program be undertaken for the banks of the Speed and the Eramosa, the two rivers that flow through the city. A local newspaper reported that Scarlett illustrated his ideas with his own paintings and plans.3 The city councillors, although impressed with the teenager's presentation, failed to act on his proposal. By the age of eighteen, Scarlett could see few prospects for his future if he continued living in Guelph. He and a friend, Rupert Broadfoot, needed little encouragement to purchase a ten-dollar train excursion ticket to New York City.

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While Broadfoot returned to Guelph on schedule, Scarlett stayed on for four years, working in the jewellery business while pursuing his love of painting. He was no doubt inspired by the example set by Edward Johnson, a fellow Guelphite who ten years earlier had embarked on a singing career in New York. Scarlett developed a lifelong friendship with Johnson, who became a leading tenor with the Metropolitan Opera and then its longest and most successful general manager, serving from 1935 until 1950. Both men traced their initial interest in the arts to the amateur circles that put on musical and theatrical productions in Guelph's churches and schools. In 1912 Scarlett returned to Guelph with his wife, Ruth, and their son, and two years later the city's residents were caught up in the war effort. Still, the cultural life of Guelph remained vibrant, with vaudeville performances and silent movies showing on Wyndham Street and an ongoing series of theatrical events and concerts at Griffin's Opera House. Scarlett renewed his childhood friendship with Bruce Metcalfe, and the two decided to form a theatrical company that would produce and tour musical comedies throughout Southern Ontario. Their first production, a Gilbert and Sullivan-style comic opera titled The Gay Pierrots and featuring sixty performers, premiered on 16 February 1914 at Griffin's Opera House. The production parodied the life of British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who lectured on sex education and moral purity, and American business woman Lydia Pinkham, a suffragette who created remedies for feminine ills. In addition to being the director, Scarlett wrote twenty songs and designed the sets, costumes, and choreography. Metcalfe was responsible for writing the musical score and conducting the orchestra. The critic for the Guelph Evening Mercury and Advertiser praised the professionalism of the production, its "pointed and pithy" songs, "the finished and lithesome dance," and the sets, one of which featured a suffragette ship named the Lemonade Spankhurst. This reviewer did, however, criticize the "frankness" of the love scenes.4 Scarlett's set designs were in the naturalistic style of the time. While living in New York, he had studied briefly in 1908 and 1909 at the Art Students League, where he acquired a natural feeling for colour under instructor William Merritt Chase and expressive graphic skills under teachers John Sloan and George Luks. In his early works, such as Pine Trees, c. 1914 (Plate i), Scarlett used art nouveau tracery, a popular style in the first decade of the twentieth century. The rounded forms in Pine Trees are reminiscent of paintings by William Zorach, such as Woods in Autumn^ 1913 (Whitney Museum of American Art), and its smudged colours and pastel tones bring to mind works by

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Pine Trees, c. 1914

Oil monoprint on paper

the well-known American artist John Marin. Marin advocated a spontaneous, loose handling of paint. In 1910, Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Gallery held the first of its annual exhibitions of Marines watercolours.5 In addition to showing photography, the New York gallery created a fertile environment for American artists to exhibit their own work and to view the latest European art. While living in Guelph during World War I, Scarlett did essential war work for the Massey-Harris Company, employed in the manufacture of shells and other armaments. He was rejected for military service because of flat feet and having to wear eyeglasses. He continued to work on his painting technique, and by the early 19208, he had begun to explore the architectural structure of a painting's composition. In Gordon Street Bridge, Guelph, c. 1920 (Plate 2), for example, he simplified the sky into flat planes, creating a tension with the more realistically depicted stone bridge, buildings, Victorian porch post, and tree in the foreground. This painting is similar to the work of a number of American artists who were employing cubism as an abstracting methodology. One such artist is Oscar Bluemner, who painted a series of New Jersey village scenes from the mid-teens to the mid-i92os. Bluemner's Space Motive, a New Jersey Valley, c. 1917-18 (Plate 3), for example, depicts stacked houses beside a river leading to a bridge, a composition much like Scarlett's painting of Guelph. At the end of World War I, Scarlett returned to New York City, where he produced drawings such as City scape, c. 1920 (Plate 4) and Buildings with Bridge, c. 1920 (Plate 5), that emphasize geometric structure and cubist influences. He was not the only artist who saw Manhattan's bridges and skyscrapers as potent subjects. Italian-born American artist Joseph Stella adopted the futurists' emphasis on dynamism and speed in works that celebrated the machine as a symbol of progress. A favourite subject for Stella was the Brooklyn Bridge — see The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Bridge, 1920-22 (Plate 6) - which became a powerful icon of American culture. In 1919 Scarlett was hired by the Omega Watch Company in a position that gave him an opportunity to travel. During a trip to Geneva in 1923, he met the famous Swiss modernist artist Paul Klee at a dinner hosted by the president of the Moser Watch Company. After the meal Klee was occupying himself by making small abstract sketches. When he learned that Scarlett was an artist, he encouraged him to try making some small spontaneous abstractions. Klee expressed his belief that by observing the smallest interrelationship of forms, one could draw conclusions about the nature of the universe. He also spoke of his interest in the fusing of art and science, an artistic concept that appealed to Scarlett, and he encouraged Scarlett to explore modernism.

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Gordon Street Bridge, Guelph, c. 1920 Oil on canvas

This chance encounter with Klee helped to solidify Scarlett's ambition to move beyond the cubist approach of simplifying realistic subjects. In this same period, he was beginning to become interested in the abstract design possibilities in precision machinery. In the linocut Face, c. 1925 (Plate 7), Scarlett simplifies the human face into lines suggesting a musical note on a staff. Although Scarlett was employed full time in the New York jewellery trade, he continued to be active in stage design. He had abandoned the naturalistic theatrical sets of his early Guelph productions and adopted a more contemporary style to express the fast-paced jazz age of the 19205. Geometric structure, vibrant colours, and a collage of images were featured in stage designs like Hoboken Blues, 1925 (Plate 8). The playHoboken Blues was a comedy-satire produced in New York, and Scarlett's design for it includes images of skyscrapers, exotic cultural references in the African mask and carving, cogs and wheels suggesting machines, and lightning bolts signifying the importance of electricity. The symbol of a spiral over a music staff indicates the powerful voice of radio, just beginning to be broadcast into the living rooms of America. The inclusion of text suggests the high spirits of flappers and speakeasies, and the huge money symbols warn of capitalist greed, foreshadowing the imminent collapse of the economy. Skyscraper and machine images were considered hallmarks of 19208 American art. During the art deco "age of the skyscrapers," there was widespread belief that the machine would establish a new structure for society.6

3 OSCAR BLUEMNER

Space Motive, a New Jersey Valley, c. 1917-18 Oil on canvas

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Cityscape, c. 1920

Oil pastel and pencil on paper 5

Buildings with Bridge, c. 1920 Charcoal and pastel on paper

6 J O S E P H STELLA

The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Bridge, 1920-22 Oil and tempera on canvas

In the Hobohen Blues stage design, Scarlett synthesized the subjects favoured by the "precisionists" (a term used to describe certain American artists of the 19208 and 19308) - the skyscraper, industry, and transportation. A leading practitioner of this style was Charles Sheeler, who combined industrial images with hard-edge design, though he never moved into abstraction the way Scarlett did. Modern trends were also beginning to appear in high-end furniture through innovative art deco designers. Paul T. FrankTs Skyscraper Bookcase of 1925-30 was a signature piece consisting of a tower of cubes made of exotic veneer with ebonizing. The art deco emphasis on planes, horizontal and vertical lines, and contrasts between black and silver appeared in coffee pot designs by Kem Weber in the mid-i92os. The most prominent example of the use of geometric ornamentation was perhaps the Chrysler Building. These were some of the precedents that Scarlett built on a decade later in his career as an industrial designer. Scarlett's Hoboken Blues design also shows the influence of Liubov Popova, the Russian constructivist artist who transformed traditional notions of set and costume design in the 1922 Moscow production of Vsevolod MeierhokTs The Magnanimous Cuckold. Popova used volume and recession to create subtle

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combinations of real form and real space. She incorporated text into her designs as Scarlett did in the Hoboken Blues set. Scarlett built his design from a complexity of overlapping planes and bright colours indicative of the constructivist style. In 1926 Scarlett left New York and moved to Toledo, Ohio. There, he worked in the jewellery trade and continued his painting practice and involvement in theatre design. In 1926 he submitted a pastel work titled Static to the annual juried exhibition of the Federation of Art Societies held at the Toledo Museum of Art. A newspaper critic described Static as "an attempt in primary pastels to describe ocularly the blasting torments of the electrical interference which regularly assails the ears of radio enthusiasts."7 The critic noted that Scarlett's work was the first "futurist" canvas the federation had ever accepted for one of its shows. According to his report, even though the jurors said they had never seen an abstract work before, they awarded it first prize. Scarlett would later say that because of the controversy generated by the newspaper review, people lined up to see his painting. The painting, which now exists only as a newspaper reproduction, shows a highly agitated geometric composition dominated by a sweeping fan-shaped curve. Jagged lines and forms breaking apart suggest the staccato effect of interrupted radio transmission. In Static, Scarlett adopted a modernist abstract style to depict the sound of technology and cosmic forces. Scarlett described the origin of the painting Static as serendipitous. He had bought a box of French pastels and became enamoured with the beauty of the vibrant colours. He worked late into the night without any particular subject in mind, freely applying the colours. The next morning, examining the paintings, he found that he had created completely abstract compositions. He then selected Static for submission to the annual juried exhibition. Scarlett was also turning to music for inspiration, a passion he shared with other artists. Canadian Bertram Brooker's first series of abstractions, done in the late 19208, for example, were highly personal interpretations of music, attempts to express the transcendent quality of music. Like Scarlett, the Torontobased Brooker was also interested in theatrical productions. He was a dramatist at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto.8 In 1928 Scarlett had a solo exhibition of 150 paintings and works on paper at Columbia House in Toledo. He used titles like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Industrial Interior, and Vibrations of Lead to indicate his attempt to explore painting's potential for expressing music and physical principles. The Toledo Sunday Times critic Arthur Peterson described Scarlett's paintings as "perilously close to being representational and yet escaping that reactionary

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Face, c. 1925 Linocut

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Stage Design for Hoboken Blues, 1925 Gouache on board

A review in the Toledo Blade reported that Scarlett won an award at the 1926 Toledo Museum of Art annual exhibition for his pastel Static.

classification by virtue of a few distorted machine belts and wheels." Peterson quoted Scarlett as saying, "The picture has provoked thought, and that is just what we modernists are striving for. Derision means nothing to the modernist. If a futuristic picture brings the casual gallery patron to an abrupt stop and forces him to spend five minutes in an attempt to discover what it is all about, the ends of modernism have been served."^ At the time, critics used the term "futurism" loosely to describe a style of hard-edge geometric abstraction that had machine imagery.

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The 1928 exhibition included a satirical painting titled The Nativity, 1926 (University of Guelph Collection), which Scarlett described as his attempt to depict an atheist's view of the Madonna. Scarlett completed The Nativity prior to finishing Static. The inclusion of expressionistic figurative work in the exhibition indicates that Scarlett was working through issues of representation while exploring abstraction. He viewed himself as a committed modernist who was attempting to depict technology, cosmic forces, and music. Scarlett was essentially a self-taught artist who found his own route to becoming an abstract painter prior to his involvement with the Museum of Non-objective Painting. Scarlett was one of a number of North American artists - Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram in the United States, for example, and Bertram Brooker and Lowrie Warrener in Canada - who became interested in the theories of the prominent Russian avant-garde artist Vasily Kandinsky. Kandinsky's work was first shown in New York in 1912 at Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Gallery, and it was featured prominently at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. The Armory Show introduced leading European modernists such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Henri Matisse to the American art world. It also included Canadian David Milne among the North American artists selected to exhibit. Looking back, Scarlett regretted that his return to Guelph meant that he had missed seeing the Armory Show. However, KandinskyJs writings were available to him in English by 1914 through the translation of Uber das Geistige in der Kunst under the English title as The Art of Spiritual Harmony. Kandinsky's ideas also were accessible to artists living outside major centres through excerpts that appeared in Camera Work, a magazine published by Alfred Stieglitz10 and through the widely distributed book Cubists and PostImpressionism, written in 1914 by Arthur Jerome Eddy, a Chicago collector who had purchased several Kandinsky paintings at the Armory Show. Eddy included in his book laudatory comments on Kandinsky's work made by British critic Roger Fry in his review for The Nation of the July 1913 Allied Artists of America exhibition at Albert Hall, London: By far the best pictures there seemed to me to be the three works by Kandinsky. They are of peculiar interest, because one is a landscape in which the disposition of the forms is clearly prompted by a thing seen, while the other two are improvisations. In these the forms and colors have no possible justification, except the Tightness of their relations. This, of course, is really true of all art, but where representation of natural form comes in, the senses are apt to

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be tricked into acquiescence by the intelligence. In these improvisations, therefore, the form has to stand the test without any adventitious aids. It seemed to me that they did this, and established their right to be what they were. In fact, these seemed to me the most complete pictures in the exhibition, to be those which had the most definite and coherent expressive power ... The improvisations become more definite, more logical and more closely knit in structure, more surprisingly beautiful in their color oppositions, more exact in their equilibrium. They are pure visual music.11 Writers Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz point out that the importance of Eddy's book in introducing modern art to an American audience cannot be underestimated. "One could, in 1914, learn of Kandinsky's ideas simply by reading the newspaper - mere introduction to be sure, but perhaps an enticement to learn more by reading Eddy's book or, more directly, Kandinsky's The Art of Spiritual Harmony''12 Scarlett first became interested in modernism around 1914 when he saw a black and white photograph of a Kandinsky painting. He was living in Guelph at the time. It is not certain when he actually read Kandinsky's books.

EXPLORING ABSTRACTION IN STAGE DESIGN

While living in Toledo, Scarlett joined the Stage Club, an amateur theatrical group that was part of an artists' society known as the Art Klan Club. In 1928 he designed the sets for three plays, Tristan, The Lady of the Weeping Willow, and Christopher Morley's East of Eden. The Toledo Sunday Times reviewer described the sets as "remarkably sculpturesque, remarkably beautiful." ^ Scarlett used the word "constructivism" in describing his set designs, "which means the suggestion of form by flat surfaces diametrically opposed, dependent on light for the quality of depth. It is all symbolic."1* The lighting and the geometry of the stage were intended to heighten emotions and focus attention on the proper character at the appropriate time. Toledo's Stage Club was part of a new modernism in American theatre design that emerged in the 19208 and 19308 both in New York and in progressive regional theatres. Many theatrical productions of the 19208 glowed with pictorial overtones of Freud, machine worship, and futuristic art.^ Ideas developed in European theatre were introduced to the United States by visiting troupes - like Max Reinhardt's - that also brought their own sets. Scarlett first became aware of these new concepts during his 1923 trip to Geneva, a city that

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was at the forefront of the modernist theatre movement. Adolphe Appia, a leading Swiss designer, called for "the auditorium of the theater to be as a cathedral of the future, a vast, free, and transformable space which could dramatize the diverse manifestations of our social and artistic life and which would be the place par excellence for dramatic art to flourish."16 Scarlett drew designs for current and classical productions to build a portfolio of drawings that he intended to submit to theatrical producers as a freelance designer. His 1928 designs for King Lear show the influence of Adolphe Appia's approach. In one set design (Plate 9), an intense beam of light illuminates tiny figures positioned around a dias within a vast cathedral space. In another (Plate 10), a dramatic shaft of light bisects the stage, revealing a phalanx of soldiers marching under a giant gallows. The King Lear designs also reveal Scarlett's familiarity with the theories of Edward Gordon Craig, one of the greatest innovators of the stage in the twentieth century. Craig promoted the concept of the architectural stage, a stage stripped of decorative elements so that it could express the idea of the play and serve the acting and the movement. He favoured huge curtains painted with light to suggest time and place and massive architectural shapes that were meant to almost annihilate the human figures. For Craig, the essence of the art was symbolic movement.17 Scarlett also designed, on a freelance basis, four sets for Eugene O'Neill's 1926 play Lazarus Laughed (Plates 11,12).l8 His designs were executed two months prior to the play's world premier on 9 April 1928 at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in California. Scarlett was deeply moved by O'Neill's play, and he believed it was important to create set designs before he actually saw a production of the play in order not to be influenced by another designer's work. The genesis of the play is the biblical story of Lazarus, the man who was raised from the dead by Jesus. Theatre historian Virginia Floyd notes that in his work of the mid-i92os, O'Neill was obsessed with the idea of rebirth or resurrection preceded by suffering.^ Scarlett interpreted the charged emotional content of the play in symbolic and abstract designs created by layering jutting shapes and dramatic sculptural forms. The lighting plan relied on intense spot-lighting to highlight the action and to create deep shadows that would complete the geometry of the stage. For the Lazarus s House from the 9-10

Stage Designs for King Lear, 1928 Gouache on paper

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Outside set, 1928-32 (Plate 11), Scarlett used a massive domed structure with brightly lit windows. Lazarus's house was known as the house of laughter, and in this scene, angry mobs of Jesus' followers and hostile orthodox believers shout their rage at Lazarus. Even more expressionistic is the House in Judea set, 1928-32 (Plate 12). Here, strange surreal forms advance upward and across the stage. Some of the elements were constructed on hydraulic lifts that could be manipulated to change the design of the set. The properties in the House of Judea set are stone-like megalithic monuments that suggest divinity in juxtaposition to the human figure - an appropriate symbol for the Lazarus play. Craig saw "the kinetic stage and the screens as a canvas for the imagination."20 Craig also advocated the use of masks and manipulated figures as stand-ins for actors, a device Scarlett later used in the 1929 Man and Superman production. Unfortunately, the Lazarus Laughed designs were never put into production, although in 1932 Scarlett did propose to the Pasadena Playhouse that they be used in a projected work. In 1928 Scarlett also made an expressionist painting titled Lazarus (Plate 13) that depicts Jesus beckoning Lazarus to rise from the tomb. The figures in the painting are gaunt and extenuated. Jesus stands over the open tomb containing Lazarus's skeleton, and, Lazarus's wailing sisters, Martha and Mary, and other family members press forward like the chorus in a Greek play. A draped corpse lies in the foreground. The painting is a conceptualization of the staging for the play, executed in sombre blues and greys. Scarlett worked in the expressionist style for other works that were satirical in intent, such as The Nativity, 1926, which he described as his "atheist's view of the Madonna," and Bath Tub Gin Party in Toledo, 1926 (private collection), which depicts prostitutes in a speakeasy. While in Toledo, Scarlett met his second wife, Emily Pollet. After they were married, they moved to California in 1929 with Emily's daughters, Barbara and Elizabeth. Scarlett found work in Hollywood with Pathe and other film studios,

ii Lazarus's House from the Outside, 1928-32 (Lazarus Laughed stage design) Gouache on board 12 House in Judea, 1928-32 (Lazarus Laughed stage design) Gouache on board PAINTER,

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Lazarus, 1928 Oil on canvas

designing naturalistic film sets. His first major contract was to design sets for D.W. Griffith's films. He also became involved with the Pasadena Community Playhouse, which hired him as guest art director for their 1929 production of George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman starring Harrison Ford (Sr) as Jack Tanner. Given broad scope for this theatre-in-the-round, Scarlett was able to interpret the work experimentally in abstract constructivist sets. The play Man and Superman^ as described on the Bartleby.com website, "contains an explicit articulation of a major Shavian theme: man is the spiritual creator, whereas woman is the biological clife force' that must always triumph over him."21 The play also contains the famous play-within-a-play dream sequence, Don Juan in Hell, in which the Don (Jack Tanner) has a debate with the Devil and a talkative statue. In the finale of the play, Jack Tanner capitulates reluctantly to the superiority of the female protagonist, Ana. The Hell scene is seldom produced because of its length and complexity. In the introduction to the playbill, which Scarlett had been invited to write, he explained that the modern stage designer, after thorough study of the play, can extend the visual presentation by introducing lights, music, ballet, masks, and mechanical mechanisms that were not part of the playwright's original plan for the work. The purpose of these interventions is to intensify the theme and the audience's emotional reaction. Scarlett describes Man and Superman as a "symphony of life with one tremendous gripping theme, the urge of the life force which uses any characters at any period of time and space, to carry out its relentless purpose."22 Bob Young, critic for the Pasadena Star News, had high praise for Scarlett's abstract constructionist sets, describing the Playhouse's presentation as a "brilliantly provocative experimental production" in which "both players and audience, as the play progressed found stimulation and dramatic shading in the dynamic collaboration of light, line, and movement."23 The play involved thirty changes of scenery over three acts, with each set becoming increasingly abstract as the play progressed towards the final scene. Each set was designed to show the human struggle for self-assertion and enlightenment in a world increasingly dominated by technology. Scarlett used large, flat, and open-grid geometric properties to symbolize the urban landscape in the set for the opening scene, 1929 (Plate 14). The properties were shifted and punctuated by a series of red-light spikes that created a dynamic, emotionally charged space. The sets were fully mechanized; in one of them (Plate 15), for example, a car catapulted across the stage. The orchestration was enhanced by electric motors and flashing lights timed to the music and by the

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projection of an interpretive ballet on a screen behind the actors. Scarlett wrote the music for bassoon, oboe, and flute and created the choreography for the female dancers. In the Don Juan in Hell scene (Plate 16), the Devil declares that "the power that governs the earth is not the power of life but the power of death." Actor Harrison Ford (Sr), in the role of Don Juan, is the sole protagonist in this scene. Lighted masks, one above the other in a triptych of portrait-like panels, indicated the presence of the Devil, the statue, and Ana. Off-stage voices served to identify these parts. Scarlett employed to full advantage the Craigian idea of using a mask to replace an actor in this highly dramatic, yet sparse staging of the Hell scene. The set also reveals the constructivist underpinnings of Scarlett's design by having the Don enclosed in a version of Vladimir Tatlin's famous tower design of 1921. The final scene (Plate 17) is a stark cityscape devoid of people. The critic for the Los Angeles California Record enthused that the Don Juan scene was "one of the most difficult examples of modern stage symbolism I have ever seen exe-

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cuted" and the entire production "the most significant and stimulating ever staged by the Pasadena Playhouse."24 Scarlett said that his Man and Superman designs moved him "further into the non-objective world," but he didn't "realize it at the time."25 Scarlett's Man and Superman sets were photographed by Johan Hagemeyer, a prominent California photographer whose own work in the 19205 was known for combining soft-focus shadows with a geometric formalism. Hagemeyer regularly exhibited the work of other artists at his Pasadena studio. In 1930 he invited Scarlett to exhibit a large number of oil paintings and watercolours in two adjoining galleries. Los Angeles Times critic Arthur Millier described Scarlett's abstract paintings as "bewilderingly brilliant designs ... warm and moving and infinitely varied." Millier praised Scarlett's modernist approach and interpreted the images in the painting Abstraction, 1929 (Plate 18), as deriving from machine parts, corrugated metal, springs, and brass strips.26 This painting was reproduced in the Los Angeles Times of 9 February 1930; regrettably, its present location is unknown.

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18

Abstraction, 1929 Oil on canvas

WEST COAST

MODERNISM

According to writers Gail Levin and Marianne Lopez, who have made a study of the Los Angeles art scene in the 19205, modernist works were not shown in the city until the late 19205. The mild response to modernism on the West Coast in most cases "masked a benumbed indifference." When Hollywood's Braxton Gallery exhibited Kandinsky's work in 1930, one critic described it as "tainted with the puritan curse which denies the senses."27 Merle Armitage, art editor of the Hollywood weekly Topics of the Town, however, favourably reviewed the Kandinsky works show. His wife, Elise Cavanna Armitage, was one of the few artists, like Scarlett, who pursued a modernist approach in Los Angeles at this time. Her abstractions were inspired by natural forms expressed as curved lines in graceful compositions. Another artist interested in non-objective art was Knud Merrild, who made painted wood constructions of overlapping planes. Scarlett's experience of the Pacific coast inspired paintings such as Regatta, c. 1930 (Plate 19), a rhythmic abstraction of sailboats and waves. The light-filled sails in Regatta express speed, vitality, and transcendence. A number of artists from the western United States, such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Canadian-born

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Henrietta Shore, were also exploring transcendency in abstraction derived from natural subjects. Edward Weston's photographs of shells and peppers were exhibited at the Braxton Gallery concurrently with Scarlett's exhibition at Hagemeyer's studio. The critic Arthur Millier covered both shows in the same newspaper review, commenting that one artist was using abstraction and the other realism to achieve a modern expression of pure form. Scarlett also made silver jewellery while he lived in California. Three silver repousse brooches that he crafted c. 1928 (Plate 20) have stylized machine-like forms similar to his abstract paintings. The brooches also have stylistic similarities to Navajo silver jewellery, which was available through such outlets as the Harvey Company. Scarlett's residency in California lasted until early 1932. The Depression had crippled both the film industry and the theatre, greatly reducing the work available for stage and set designers. Scarlett had to abandon - temporarily his promising career in theatre design. He would never resume it again under

19

Regatta, c. 1930 Oil on Masonite

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Three Brooches, c. 1928 Silver (chasing and repousse)

his own imprimatur for serious theatre, such as the Man and Superman production. He returned to Guelph, where he lived for about two years, concentrating on his painting.

INDUSTRIAL AND

SET DESIGN

IN NEW YORK

In 1933 Scarlett moved to New York City, and by 1935 he had established himself as a freelance designer. He joined a group of artists in a partnership called Design Associates Inc. The head was Leon Loeb, and one of the founders was Beauregard Dayvan, a friend of Scarlett's. The group had offices at 3 East 5ist Street and accepted contracts for a wide range of design work. One of its members was Albert Johnson, a stage designer who from 1935 to 1937 designed sets for the Ziegfeld Follies' Vaudeville acts and Radio City Music Hall's musical reviews. Although the contract were in Johnson's name, Scarlett worked on many of the set designs for Radio City Music Hall. In one example, Design for Proscenium Arch and Stage Curtain for Parcel Post, c. 1935-37 (Plate 21), the backdrop explodes with colour in a sweeping fan shape. The proscenium arch is decorated with smaller fan shapes on a dotted background, creating a lively setting for the high-kicking Rockett chorus line. His design for Cyrano, c. 1935-37 (Plate 22), makes use of a huge mask, while that for Vollmoeller and Humperdinck's production Miracle, c. 1935-37 (Plate 23), takes a more sombre approach, giving emphasis to the statue of Madonna within an abstracted church facade. A church in the style of early Christian or adobe architecture appears in the set design Church and Apple Tree, c. 1935-37 (Plate 24). An extenuated apple tree is placed centre stage, and a woman appears in a doorway on the right. The constructivist designs emphasize lively colour harmonies and overlapping geometric planes. Scarlett had a contract in his own name to design sets for the 1939 New York World's Fair Amusement Center, which staged a wide range of vaudeville shows. His theatrical designs extended to costumes, the suit for his futuristic female astronaut (Plate 25) being a noted example. The black and silver suit features flanged leggings and cuffs and includes a winged top hat. This drawing is reminiscent of Popova's constructivist costume designs from the early 19208, a style that had infiltrated popular culture and inspired the clothing worn by the characters who populated the Flash Gordon comic strip. Scarlett's theatre designs also show the influence of stage designer Oskar Schlemmer and others associated with the Bauhaus School in Germany.

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21

Design for Proscenium Arch and Stage Curtain for Parcel Post, c. 1935-37 Gouache and pencil on paper 22

Stage Design for Cyrano* c. 1935-37 Gouache on paper

23 Stage Design for Miracle, c. 1935-37 Gouache on paper 24 Church and Apple Tree, c. 1935-37 Gouache on paper

25

Costume Design, c. 1935-37 Gouache and silver pencil on paper

Scarlett would have been familiar with the Bauhaus as a significant influence on industrial design, architecture, and graphic arts. The design institute was established by Walter Gropius at Weiner, Germany, in 1919. Students were taught to apply art to technology in designing everyday objects for the betterment of society. New materials in metal, plastics, and glass were explored together with innovative manufacturing processes. Under Gropius's leadership, the institute spawned an atmosphere of creative freedom that encouraged interdisciplinarity among artists; artisans; industrial, graphic, and stage designers; and architects like Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Vasily Kandinsky was appointed a master at this experimental school in 1922, and the Bauhaus policies and practices greatly influenced the development of his painting. In this fertile environment, he furthered his concept of the non-objective style, using geometric

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forms - triangles, squares, and circles - and their derivatives. The Bauhaus artists were socially oriented and saw advancements in technology and functional design as a means for creating a Utopian future.28 Famous painters like Josef Albers were directly involved in the production of bent-wood armchairs and metal fruit bowls. Oskar Schlemmer's designs ranged from theatrical sets to clocks. In 1925 the Bauhaus School moved to Dessau, where it thrived until a suspicious and intolerant Nazi regime forced its closure in 1933. Nevertheless, Bauhaus theories and practices were brought to the United States in 1937 when Moholy-Nagy assumed the directorship of a design school in Chicago. This school became known as the New Bauhaus (now Chicago Institute of Design). Scarlett worked as a freelance industrial designer in New York from 1934 to 1939. He recalled, "I designed everything from sofas to refrigerators working for clients like Macy's, other department stores, and various manufacturers."29 He created designs for salt and pepper shakers, cruet sets, covered containers, silverware, barware, poker chip containers, bird cages, bathroom scales, kitchen ranges, refrigerators, sofas, suites of furniture, carpets, tablecloths, built-in units, storefronts, game boards, amusement rides, electric-light fixtures, and numerous mechanical devices. These beautifully rendered images were created either as speculative designs Scarlett prepared for presentation to prospective clients or they were designs clients decided not to use and returned to Scarlett. Drawings that were purchased by clients became the client's property and were seldom returned to the designer. Scarlett's industrial designs epitomize the style of the 19308, capturing the decade's societal aspirations as expressed through consumer goods. The 19305 became the era of the industrial designer, a period during which American corporations gradually become convinced that improved product appearance would spur economic recovery from the Depression. Raymond Loewy, one of the leading industrial designers in America, wrote: In 1933, the new president bucked-up the nation: Franklin D. Roosevelt uttered his famous phrase over the radio: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." America, with the rest of the world, began its long struggle out of depression. A lack of imaginative products and advanced manufacturing was a form of fear that had contributed to the general economic decline. The problems all over the world were, of course, much larger, but one of the solutions was to create consumer demand. Eventually, a few industrial design pioneers were able to make some business leaders aware that this lack of

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vision and industrial timidity was foreign to the spirit of adventure that had made America a leading nation. And could again. Success finally came when we were able to convince some creative men that good appearance was a salable commodity, that it often cut costs, enhanced a product's prestige, raised corporate profits, benefitted the customer, and increased employment. The worst was far from over when World War II started but things had improved from the dark days of the early thirties.30 In his remarkable gouache and silver pencil drawings, Scarlett demonstrated his skill at rendering and, as a colourist, enhancing his modernist ideas for household objects and furnishings. The new look of the 19305 emphasized functionality, architectonic styling, a devotion to the principles of aerodynamic engineering, and avoidance of applied decoration. This popular style was used in the design of ocean liners, automobiles, and airplanes and was applied as well to domestic decoration and household objects. The streamlined modern style was associated with efficiency, science, and progress. Three of Scarlett's salt and pepper shaker designs (Plates 26, 27, 28), when placed side by side, have the architectural presence of lighthouses. Another salt and pepper shaker design looks like a miniature spaceship (Plate 29). Parallel horizontal lines and rounded corners were the quintessential hallmarks of the streamlined modern style that pervaded American decorative arts from 1935 to 1940. Another characteristic of the style was machine imagery symbolizing efficiency and precision. Scarlett's slick designs for cruet sets resemble strippeddown machine parts. His globe-shaped coffee pot (Plate 30), with its sweeping, red Bakelite handle, is similar to designs by Harry Bertoia and Jean Puiforcat, who also used spherical shapes to suggest speed and modernity. Coffee service sets (Plates 30, 31) were popular among the women whose newly acquired leisure time, thanks to the newly mechanized home, allowed them to host coffee parties. Scarlett's chromed metal coffee pot designs (Plates 32, 33) rely on simple massing of form and absence of decoration to create an elegant statement. Three-decker aluminum dripolator coffee pots (Plates 34, 35) feature coloured Bakelite handles. Among his barware designs are torpedo-shaped cocktail shakers and goblets (Plate 36) whose aerodynamic lines epitomize the sophistication and machine aesthetic of the streamlined modern style. Manufacturers employed industrial designers to produce a wide range of barware in response to the renewed popularity of cocktail lounges following the repeal in 1933 of the Volstead

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26-29

Salt and Pepper Shakers, c. 1935 26-27 Pencil, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper 2 8 Pencil, gouache, silver ink, and Conte crayon on paper 29 Silver ink, pencil, and Conte crayon on paper

30-31

Coffee Services, c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper

32-33 Coffee Pots, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper

34

Coffee Poty c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper

35 Coffee Pot, c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper glued on cardboard

Act prohibiting alcohol. During Prohibition, however, the family recreation room had emerged as a new feature of the American home. With its built-in bar and casual furniture, it was the place where the family would relax and socialize with friends. The popularity of home cocktail parties created the desire for barware products (Plate 37). Scarlett produced patented designs for such devices as electric ice crushers and game boards. He designed hors d'oeuvre trays (Plate 38), ice buckets (Plate 39), novelty corkscrews (Plate 40), poker-chip containers (Plate 41), bar carts (Plate 42), and hand-blown wine glasses (Plate 43), some with complicated twist stems reminiscent of eighteenthcentury English designs. He also produced designs for cast and cut-glass stemware (Plates 44,45). During the early 19308 new manufacturing materials were developed. These included metal alloys and plastics such as Bakelite, Celluloid, Plexiglass, and Lucite. Scarlett designed with these materials in mind, particularly Bakelite, chromed metal, aluminum, and electro-plated silver. Scarlett's Toiletry Set (Plate 46) mimics functionalist skyscrapers, and his Bathroom Scale (Plate 47) displays radiating streaks of electricity. The streamlined modern style was especially popular in the kitchen. Scarlett's design for a

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Serving Dish, c. 1935 Pencil and Conte crayon on paper

39

Ice Bucket, Corkscrew and Tongs, c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper

39

40 Corkscrew, c. 1935 Pencil, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper

41

Poker-Chip Container, c. 1935 Pencil, gold ink, gouache, and black ink on paper 42 Cart, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper

43-45 Glasses, c. 1935 Pencil on paper

refrigerator (Plate 48) has a sleek, rounded appearance similar to locomotive designs by Raymond Loewy. There was a growing demand for machines for the home. Clothes washers and dryers were introduced to the market, as well as refrigerators that made ice for the requisite cocktails and highballs. And as eating habits became more diversified, Scarlett designed stoves with built-in grills and rotisseries. The elegant design of radio cabinets (Plates 49, 50, 51) indicates the growing importance of recreational space in the family home. Floor-model radios were costly at $350 to $400, and television, introduced later in the decade, was an even costlier and more desirable item. Scarlett also produced designs for furniture. His sofas (Plates 52,53,54,55), with chromed-metal legs and arms, are in the high style of the period. Marcel Breuer was one of the pioneers of tubular furniture at the Bauhaus. Derivations of his 1925 tubular steel and leather armchair continue to be made today. According to Breuer's pared-down approach, "metal furniture is ...

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46

Toiletry Set, c. 1935 Pencil, watercolour, silver ink, and gouache on paper 47

Bathroom Scale, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, watercolour, and gouache on paper

48

Refrigerator, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, and watercolour on paper

nothing but a necessary apparatus for contemporary life."3i Scarlett took a less extreme position in his sofas, relegating the tubular structure to the legs and arm supports. His sofa designs rely more on the comfort and texture of the upholstery than do Breuer's, since Scarlett was interested in creating a stylish product that would have broad appeal. His designs were similar to the work of other artist/craftspeople of the day who wanted to see their work into production. Scarlett's desks (Plate 56) contained hidden swing-away liquor cabinets. He also designed wooden kitchen sets that could be mass-produced and sold at low prices and vanities with fold-away stools and bins, for use in confined spaces. Designing everyday wooden furniture that was sturdy, devoid of ornamentation, efficient, and inexpensive served the Bauhaus ideal of providing quality products for the masses.

49-51 Radio Cabinets, c. 1935 49 & 51 Pencil, silver ink, and gouache on paper 50 Pencil, silver ink, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper

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52-55 Sofas, c. 1935 Pencil, silver pencil, and gouache on paper

The design of store interiors is an example of the custom work done by many architects. Depending on the client's budget, items from door knobs to coffee services would be designed as part of the overall building program. Scarlett's store interiors (Plate 57) feature mirrors, slick built-in units in exotic veneers, and reflective metal panelling. These deluxe art deco environments were sophisticated marketing vehicles for high-end trade, executed in the manner of architects like Kem Weber who were designing the interiors of America's flagship department stores. The geometric reductivism of Scarlett's storefronts and interiors were precursors to the non-objective paintings he would make later in the decade. Storefronts for firms like the Lerner Shops (Plates 58,59) featured wraparound windows and raised-metal signage, de rigueur for signifying sophistication and quality service. The elevated entrance framed by pilasters suggests Egyptian or Assyrian temples, and the frieze of beam ends mimics early temple forms. Scarlett's use of large monochromatic zones of colour was another precursor to his abstract paintings. The industrial designers of the 19308 were self-taught, as there were not yet any apprenticeship programs.32 Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes, like Scarlett, had backgrounds in stage design, which gave them an extra flare for

56 Desk, c. 1935 Pencil, watercolour, silver ink, and gouache on paper glued on cardboard

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57

Store Interior (Elevation), c. 1935 Pencil, silver pencil, and watercolour on paper

presentation and impact. The Bauhaus model was the opposite of the late twentieth-century concept of the specialist in that designers were expected to be competent in many fields.

THE NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR

Scarlett's most significant industrial design project was the one he created for the New York World's Fair, which opened on 30 April 1939. The fair, whose theme was "Building the World of Tomorrow," was the era's most ambitious embodiment of a Utopian vision of the future. Leading industrial designers like Loewy, Dreyfuss, and Bel Geddes were hired to plan the exhibits. A souvenir brochure boasted that the streamlined architecture and displays were intended to show "the best industrial techniques, social ideas and services, the most advanced scientific discoveries."33 Scarlett was hired to design the Bakelite Corporation display in the Industrial Science Building. Bakelite, introduced in 1932, was an ideal product for the era's streamlined style because its manufacture involved a casting process using rounded moulds. Bakelite's wide range of bright colours also enhanced the

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58

59

Pencil, silver ink, watercolour, gouache, and Conte crayon on cardboard

Pencil, silver ink, watercolour, and Conte crayon on cardboard

Storefront, c. 1935

Storefront, c. 1935

attractiveness of consumer goods. In a twenty-metres-long mural for the Industrial Science Building facade, Scarlett illustrated twelve uses of Bakelite as a way of introducing the visitor to the main display inside. For the corporation's display in the great hall, he drew upon his background as a stage designer to create a dramatic interactive experience for the fair goer. His display cabinet design (Plate 60), with its emphasis on parallel lines and rows of cylinders, has the appearance of a non-objective sculpture. The overall Bakelite presentation was described and illustrated in one of the fair's souvenir brochures: THE D R A M A T I C S T O R Y of the development of an idea into a material, and the development of a material into a great American industry, is vividly presented in the Hall of Industrial Science by the Bakelite Corporation.

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Through the medium of animated exhibits, lectures, sound motion pictures, and dramatic demonstrations, the Bakelite plastics exhibit describes the genesis of the modern plastics industry, the profound effect of one marts discovery on the lives of millions, the interrelations between plastics and other industries, the stimulation to commerce as these new materials of the chemical laboratory find their way into thousands of places in the home, the factory, the office, and the arts. The growth of plastics is entertainingly presented by a series of animated and dramatic exhibits indicating where plastics play a part in modern living. Among them are the uses of plastics in aviation, household appliances, building, business machines, abrasives, home furnishings, photography and optics, packaging, radio, machinery, fashions, automobiles, paints and varnishes, communications, amusements, music, and the health of humanity.34 Scarlett also worked as a designer for the company that produced sets for the fair's stage shows and amusement rides. The Amusement Center, covering 280 acres of the grounds, was an important revenue generator for the fair. The rides Scarlett designed had imaginative names - Hair Raiser, for example - that emphasized speed and the marvel of technology. In the Sky Fighting, 1939 (Plate 61) ride, participants sat in fighter plane cockpits positioned around the perimeter of a building thirty metres in diametre. During a two-minute session that

60 Bakelite Display for New York World's Fair, c. 1939 Pencil, silver ink, and gouache on cardboard

This illustration from the New York World's Fair souvenir booklet shows Scarlett's designs for the exterior signage and for the Bakelite Corporation's great hall display.

cost ten cents, the "gunners" would fire at enemy planes rotating on cables above. Scarlett also designed buildings to enclose the rides, preparing the specifications, construction schedules, and operating budgets. His exotic designs were meant to capture the attention and pocketbooks of the fair goers. For an octagonal structure (Plate 62), he used an Arabian nights theme, interspersing vibrant red and green panels with golden fluted columns capped with red balls. The design for the building enclosure for the Dipsy-Doodle, 1939 (Plate 63), is reminiscent of New York architect Joseph Urban's art deco theatres, which featured skyscraper-like towers. The thrusting spire in Scarlett's Dipsy-Doodle facade served as a prominent symbol of the new Utopian architecture for the "age of progress." The facade's blue parallel horizontal lines suggest motion, and the red vertical parallel lines the passing windows of a speeding train. The sphere-shaped car in the Dipsy-Doodle ride accommodated ten passengers. Because it was mounted on three sets of wheels, it could rotate completely as it rolled down its roller coaster track. The Peek-a-Boo, 1939 (Plate 64), was a submarine version of the bumper car. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that any of the rides that Scarlett designed were actually built. Scarlett's involvement with the fair extended to the design of souvenir plates for the Abraham & Strauss store. The dinner-size porcelain plates depict six different scenes, including World's Fair buildings and the Amusement Center. The plates were made by Spode pottery in England.35 Scarlett's industrial designs are similar to those created by American designers like Walter Dorwin Teague, Ruth Reeves, and Paul T. Frankl, who were all

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Sky Fighting, 1939 Pencil, gouache, gold ink, and red pencil on paper

62 Facade for an Amusement Park Ride, 1939 Pencil, gouache, and silver ink on paper

63

Building to House "Dipsy Doodle" Amusement Park Ride, 1939 Pencil, gold ink, and gouache on paper

64

Peek-a-Boo, 1939 Pencil and red pencil on paper

working in the 19308. His painter's intuitive eye for colour lent his designs their unique characteristics. Whether it is the stunning art deco combination of silver and black of his coffee pots or the brilliant hues of his amusement park rides, Scarlett's colour harmonies are edgy and dominant. His choices of shape, colour, and material were made together to arrive at the overall concept of the object, and his emphasis on balanced geometric forms can be linked to his painterly interest in abstraction.

SCARLETT'S GUIDED

MISSILE

Scarlett's interest in engineering and precision machinery, together with his knowledge of watchmaking and his experience working in shell production during World War I, took him in an unexpected direction. When he learned of the tragic bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, he conceived of an idea for a guided missile. He refined his initial design and submitted a proposal to the British War Office in London. Officials in the War Office promptly invited Scarlett to London to work on his proposal for three months during the fall of 1937. Scarlett accepted the invitation and produced detailed drawings, with written specifications, for guided missiles. In December 1937, he submitted his completed plans: "I submit the idea that an especially designed shell can be fired from an anti aircraft gun at an attacking plane and at a certain predetermined point, the shell can release a torpedo, or rocket torpedo, which is self-propelled and so designed and constructed that one of the animated forces of the plane will attract the rocket to it. In other words, within certain limits the rocket will follow the plane."36 The British patent office in London assigned a conditional patent number to Scarlett on 7 lanuary 1938; however, the final patent was not granted before the conditional number was abandoned. This occurred either because Scarlett decided not to proceed or because the invention was not considered innovative. Unfortunately, correspondence concerning the conditional patent has been destroyed.37 Design drawings with specification details were returned to the artist's estate by the British Patent Office. One of these drawings, titled Rocket Torpedo Dia 15,1937 (Plate 65), shows cross-sections of a projectile with a number key for identifying parts. Scarlett was very disappointed that his early work in this important armament field was never acknowledged. At one point he hired a lawyer in an attempt to obtain documents from the British government to prove his design contribution in the 19305 to this sophisticated weaponry that only became viable in the next decade.

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65 Rocket Torpedo Dia 15, c. 1937 Ink and coloured pencil on paper

EMPLOYMENT WITH SWIVELIER

Knowledge of mechanical devices led Scarlett to work as a designer of electric light fixtures. From 1941 to 1962 he worked for Swivelier Company Inc., a manufacturer of swivel-mounted electric light fixtures for stores, offices, and the transportation and aviation industry. The company was originally located on Irving Place in New York. Scarlett was allowed to use a section of the building for a studio, and in exchange he gave free Saturday art classes to the employees. The company later opened a branch plant in Nanuet, New Jersey, and Scarlett had a studio in one of the company's buildings there during the 19508. Scarlett produced thousands of designs for light fixtures and related mechanical devices for the Swivelier Company. The company did not retain any of its design drawings, except for two by Raymond Loewy, whom it hired occasionally, and generally did not identify the designers of its products. Bali Desk Lampy 1959 (Plate 66), identified by company president Michael Schwartz as designed by Scarlett, is one of only a few existing manufactured objects that can be attributed to him.38 Prototype photographs taken by Schwartz of the Bali Desk Lamp (Plates 67, 68) reveal that Scarlett worked in a serial manner, making slight adjustments in shape and colour. Bali Desk Lamp epitomizes the Bauhausian concept of form following function in an affordable product made of standard durable materials. David A. Hanks and Anne Hoy discuss this Bauhaus concept as it applied to good taste in the 19508: "'Good Design' was an essential concept in the 19508, one that suited the perennial American desire to reform and improve oneself, and also the lives of other people. Advocates of Good Design believed that objects created according to universal and rational principles were imbued with an identifiable character that could be recognized, defined, and admired. The origins of these precepts were not hard to find: they descended from the teaching of the Bauhaus. The utilization of modern technology and materials, and the rejection of ornament were among these Modernist tenets. A well-designed object was to be admired for its classic, understated beauty and its fitness to purpose."39 In addition to designing light fixtures, Scarlett made thousands of metal prototypes of mechanical designs, some of which he patented under his own name. While working for the Swivelier Company, he used the name Bill Scarlett - a practical way to avoid the perennial misspellings of his first name. He also conveniently reduced his age by ten years, which allowed him to continue with the company until he was well into his seventies. Later in life Scarlett rarely spoke of his career as a stage and industrial designer, for he saw his major artistic accomplishment as having been in the

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66 Bali Desk Lamp, 1959 Painted aluminum and brass

67-68 Bali Desk Lamps (prototypes), 1959

field of painting. Yet the disciplines clearly interacted in his work. His paintings from the mid-i93os resembled his industrial designs in their use of geometric forms, parallel horizontal and vertical lines, concentric circles, structural balance, and inventive colours. An example is Sailboats, 1934 (Plate 69), a watercolour painted in Gloucester City, New Jersey. In this work he engages in a playful abstraction of the rigging. He also produced some satirical abstracted figurative works in 1934 that were similar to his constructionist costume designs.

69

Sailboats, 1934 Watercolour on paper

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Geometric I and Geometric II, 1935 (Plates 70, 71), are gouache and ink works on paper that are in the constructivist style. Their dynamic compositions of circles, squares, diamonds, checkerboards, and intersecting diagonals suggest the inner-workings of a watch or an engineer's drawing made with drafting instruments. Geometric I contains a pencilled grid pattern, a method he used to enlarge an image for an oil painting. Scarlett was working as a freelance stage and industrial designer at the same time that he was pushing his art towards full geometric abstraction.

THE

MUSEUM

During the fall of 1937, when Scarlett was in London working on guided missile designs, his wife, Emily, submitted a portfolio of his paintings and drawings to Hilla Rebay, the art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, in response to Rebay's call for abstract artists. Rebay reacted positively to Scarlett's work and in 1938 offered him a Guggenheim Foundation scholarship. Scarlett wrote Rebay in reply: "The time has arrived for a renewal of my contract with the Designer's Group. I do not need to tell you that it is the last thing in the world I want to do, especially after the new lease on life you have so marvelously held out to me."40 The stipend was sufficient to allow Scarlett to paint full time. At Rebay's first meeting with Scarlett, she showed him a number of Kandinsky paintings from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection that were then on display in a suite at the Park Plaza Hotel. Scarlett later said that up to that time he had seen only black and white reproductions of Kandinsky's paintings, although he was familiar with the artist's seminal work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (a publication originally titled The Art of Spiritual Harmony), and his theoretical text, Point and Line to Plane. In 1982 Scarlett wrote: "The experience was overwhelming to me, for I was seeing them in full size and colour ... These paintings intimately exposed the human soul. They talked to me. They had a sort of cosmic order that made me feel at peace and at home for perhaps the first time in my life."41 It is difficult to imagine that Scarlett had not seen any paintings by Kandinsky before he painted Geometric I and II in 1935. He had been living in New York and was aware of European art and design. Moreover, Hilla Rebay was attracted to Scarlett's paintings precisely because they reminded her of Kandinsky. Scarlett's comment in praise of Kandinsky was likely made to flatter Rebay, whom he was trying to influence to respond positively to his art. He was most probably not encountering the reality of Kandinsky's work for the first time.

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70 Geometric /, 1935 Gouache and ink on paper

71

Geometric II, 1935 Gouache and ink on paper

REBAY, KANDINSKY, AND

BAUER

By the mid-ipios Kandinsky had begun using the circle as the most conspicuous formal element in his painting. The circle dominated in a number of memorable canvases as the carrier of a cosmogonic vision. Kandinsky was committed "to 'synthesis,5 whereby opposites are forced into complementary relationships and merged into larger entities. Intellect and emotion, calculation and spontaneity as well as the tensions between these opposites are expressed visually by circles, triangles and squares and their harmonious coexistence within the compositional field."42 In Kandinsky's painting Composition 8y 1923 (Plate 72), various geometric shapes are scattered over the composition and a large circle dominates. This painting was purchased from the artist by Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1929 and was typical of the works from the foundation's collection that Rebay showed Scarlett in 1938. Although Scarlett uses geometric shapes in his paintings Geometric I and //, the composition overall is tighter and more static than Kandinsky's painting. Scarlett's paintings from 1935 have patterns of overlapping shapes with gear and cog references, reminding the viewer of Francis Picabia's drawings of carburetors from 1919 and Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass of c. 1915-23. Hilla Rebay, perhaps more than anyone, was responsible for promoting Kandinsky's paintings in America. Born in Alsace, she discovered the work of Kandinsky while studying art in Germany. She also met and fell in love with artist Rudolf Bauer, a follower of Kandinsky's, during her association with Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. She exhibited her own paintings with avant-garde groups in Germany from 1914 to 1920. While in Germany, she was attracted to ideas espoused by the Theosophical Society, a spiritual group founded in New York by Helena P. Blavatsky in 1875. As a member of the theosophical movement and inspired by the work of Kandinsky and Bauer, she became deeply committed to the theory and practice of non-objective painting. Curator Mark Rosenthal states that Kandinsky's interest in theosophy, though short-lived, was strongest around the time he wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art. The adherents of theosophy were "disenchanted with materialism and sought enlightenment through a synthesis of various elements of mysticism, spiritualism, and esoteric philosophy."43 Intuition was central to Kandinsky's concept of "inner necessity" and the creation of a new art that "give[s] free scope to non-material strivings of the soul."44 Blavatsky used the image of a white ray of pure light to symbolize theosophy. Kandinsky referred to his art as a language within which colours could be used in a symbolic

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72 VASILY K A N D I N S K Y

Composition 8, July 1923 Oil on canvas

manner. He described the psychic effect of colour - red as blood, blue as heaven, yellow as strident, and black as totally dead silence. Kandinsky also advocated using formal contrasts of vertical and horizontal, black and white, and pure geometric shapes. Circles, squares, and triangles became essential components of the non-objective vocabulary. Rebay shared with Kandinsky and Bauer the belief that the non-objective painting vocabulary was the only vehicle for achieving inner knowledge of the intangible world of the spirit, and she incorporated Kandinsky's theories into her own paintings. In 1926 Solomon R. Guggenheim, a New York collector of old master paintings, commissioned her to paint his portrait. Through their association, he gradually changed his collecting focus and became committed to the new painting. A year later, in 1927, Rebay moved to New York with the collaboration and financial support of Guggenheim, a major collector of Kandinsky's work. With his collection of non-objective art rapidly filling his suite at the Park Plaza Hotel, he decided with Rebay's encouragement to open the apartment at intervals for viewing and to lend the works to public exhibitions. In 1937 Guggenheim established a foundation on the basis of the collection; the foundation was

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then incorporated and empowered to open a museum. Rebay toured exhibitions of works from Guggenheim's growing collection to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1936 and 1938, to Philadelphia in 1937, and to Baltimore in 1939 with the objective of creating a national audience for non-objective art. Each show was accompanied by a catalogue with a lengthy introduction written by Rebay explaining the principles of non-objective art. In the 1938 catalogue for the exhibition at the Gibbes Memorial Art Gallery in Charleston, she wrote: "Pure forms like the triangle, square, and circle are used for their own beauty in shape, and combined with balance of space interval to such perfection that spiritual life is originated to elevate our minds beyond earthly reminiscence. Creation of spiritual life is their essential message. This life is missing in earthly reproductions and also in abstractions of nature."45 Rebay also lectured at the exhibition openings to promote awareness of non-objective art among regional artists and the general public. Curator Louise Averill Svendson notes that "these shows were historical landmarks. They provided exposure in depth to contemporary European painting: fifty works by Kandinsky, fifteen Gleizes, six Legers and five Moholy-Nagys as well as Chagalls, Delaunays, and Feiningers."46

THE

M U S E U M OF

N O N - O BJ EC TI V E P A I N T I N G

The collection, formally titled "The Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Nonobjective Paintings," was put on view as a permanent display with the opening of the Museum of Non-objective Painting on i June 1939 in rented galleries at 24 East 54th Street. In the same year, Hilla Rebay, who had assumed the directorship of the museum, encouraged Rudolf Bauer to come to New York from Germany. She purchased over two hundred of his works for a collection that already had the largest holding of Kandinskys in North America. With Guggenheim's financial backing, Rebay distributed monthly stipends in the form of scholarships to promising artists. She also purchased their work for the museum collection and included them in group exhibitions. Rebay was committed to encouraging young artists who were interested in geometric abstraction, and offered them part-time employment as guards, lecturers, janitors, and framers. Jackson Pollock was one of the artists who worked as a part-time framer. Scarlett wrote Rebay in 1939 requesting work as an educator: "I feel quite sure that, with my deep understanding and love of the whole field of non-objective painting, coupled with a native ability to convey my ideas and others, I could be of some real value at furthering a sympathetic comprehension of what

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it is all about."47 His effort was awarded, and in that year he began working as a weekend lecturer at the museum - a position he held until 1946. The Guggenheim Foundation's scholarship support extended to other Canadian artists in addition to Rolph Scarlett. Non-objective filmmaker Norman McLaren and artist Edna Tacon, for example, both received stipends. Tacon studied in New York on a scholarship in 1941 and actively promoted nonobjective art in Toronto from 1941 to 1947 through her exhibitions and lectures, thus fulfilling the proselytizing mission that Rebay hoped her young artists would undertake.48 Her husband, Percy, was included in two exhibitions in 1942 (listed as Paul) and later became a prominent educator in Toronto. Scarlett would socialize with the Tacons and also with Canadian artist Lawren Harris when they were in New York.

LAWREN HARRIS

Lawren Harris had joined the Toronto Theosophical Society in 1923, and his work and writing in the 19208 were strongly influenced by his beliefs. Harris was extremely attracted to the spiritual in art. His first abstract paintings were done in 1934 and had their first Toronto exhibition in 1938 at the Art Gallery of Toronto (later the Art Gallery of Ontario). His abstractions from the late 19308 were composed of interlocking triangles placed against a radiating coloured ground, an approach that had evolved from his earlier abstracted arctic landscapes. Harris was attempting to express the spirit of the North in ethereal works that would also speak of a Canadian identity. In 1938, he moved to Sante Fe, New Mexico, where the Transcendental Painting Group was being organized. The group was dedicated to "an art which releases from its creators the deepest springs of vitality and consciousness."49 Harris's work was not directly influenced by Kandinsky, unlike that of some of the other members of the group. In 1940 Rebay invited Harris to show in a group exhibition that included Scarlett. Like Tacon, Harris was dedicated to bringing modernism to Canada, and as early as 1926 he persuaded the Art Gallery of Toronto to show Katherine Dreier's Societe Anonyme collection, which included paintings by Kandinsky.50 Although Lawren Harris actively participated in the American art scene, he chose to remain a resident of Canada.51 His compatriot Rolph Scarlett, on the other hand, had a lifelong attraction to the New York art world and after 1933 never returned to live in Canada. He did, however, maintain close contact with family and friends in Guelph, and he kept his Canadian citizenship until 1965,

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when at age seventy-six he reluctantly gave it up for financial reasons. It would have been impossible for Scarlett to establish himself as a successful abstract painter in Canada in the 19405. There were few collectors of contemporary art in Canada, let alone of advanced abstraction. Moreover, the Museum of Nonobjective Painting offered him an advantageous position with great potential for his career.

U N A C K N O W L E D G E D IN HIS HOME C O U N T R Y

As a result of living in New York, Scarlett was barely acknowledged as a Canadian artist in his native country. Canadian Roger Jellinek, a friend of Scarlett's and an editor at Walker and Company, New York, wrote an article on Scarlett for Canadian Art magazine in 19 65, hoping to make Rolph's work better known in Canada, but Scarlett was still granted only a footnote in Dennis Reid's A Concise History of Canadian Painting in 1976.52 The Guggenheim Museum sent loan exhibitions to the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1954 and to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1955, but neither exhibition included works by Scarlett. However, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts did receive a gift of Scarlett's painting Abstraction (Plate 86) in 1946. The University of Guelph Art Gallery (now the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre) was the first Canadian art museum to acquire a collection of Scarlett's work, receiving as a donation from the artist fifty paintings and works on paper in 1977. The gift was made in conjunction with an exhibition on the history of Guelph artists titled Visitors, Exiles and Residents. The Guggenheim Museum lent five works for the exhibition.

SCARLETT'S GUGGENHEIM

PAINTINGS

Hilla Rebay purchased sixty paintings, monoprints, and gouache on paper works by Scarlett over the period 1938 to 1946, the largest number by a single artist in the Guggenheim Museum Collection after Kandinsky and Bauer. She also acquired paintings by Scarlett for her own collection, often referring to him as her "greatest find."" Some of the paintings purchased by Rebay for her personal collection were transferred to the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. Scarlett said she always insisted on having first choice from everything he painted. Rebay was also actively selling paintings to the public to assist the artists and to encourage the development of a group of dedicated collectors. Rebay stated that it was difficult to get fifty or even twenty-five dollars for a non-objective

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painting in 1941.54 Scarlett remembered Solomon R. Guggenheim visiting his studio a number of times and purchasing approximately sixty of his paintings for his private collection and about forty as gifts for friends. The first Scarlett painting acquired for the Guggenheim Collection was Composition 1938-39 (Plate 73). Rebay included it in the museum's 1939 inaugural exhibition, titled Art of Tomorrow. The painting was incorrectly reproduced in the exhibition catalogue, however, as a vertical rather than horizontal work. Composition 1938-39 was shown in Europe shortly afterwards in one of the travelling exhibitions to prestigious museums in France, Germany, and Switzerland arranged by Rebay. The painting has a geometric rigour similar to the artist's 1935 works. Its focus is a central motif of triangles carefully balanced by an arrangement of precisely drawn circles. In 1948 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection moved to a six-storey mansion at 1074 Fifth Avenue (Plates 74, 75). In this new spacious location, Rebay had the opportunity to realize her distinct vision of how non-objective paintings should be exhibited. She created a meditative setting in small gallery spaces by covering the walls with pleated grey velour, installing grey carpeting on the floors, and providing soft-grey velvet seating. The walls were subtly illuminated with indirect lighting, and the music of Bach and Chopin filled the rooms from a hidden sound system. Rebay preferred having the paintings hung eighteen centimetres from the floor to promote communication with the viewer. She also enhanced the informality of the galleries by employing hostesses rather than guards to encourage the public to discuss the art works. Scarlett recalled that his painting Composition, 1940 (Plate 76), hung for one year in a prominent location on the main floor of the new museum premises.55 He considered Composition, 1940, to be his finest work and believed that his best paintings were done between the late 19305 and the late 19405. This was a period when he enjoyed financial security through his Guggenheim Foundation stipend and his industrial design work. The intellectual and emotional support derived from associating with Rebay and other non-objective painters stimulated his creativity. The artists exchanged information on new techniques, such as painting in watercolours on stretched silk or natural vellum dyed in a range of colours. The translucence of these media intensified the colours and enhanced the impression of objects floating in infinite space. In Composition on Pink (Plate 77), Edna Ta$on used the uneven textures of dyed pink vellum to suspend an arrangement of swirling circles and triangles.56 Scarlett produced some watercolours on silk stretched over frames.

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73

Composition 1938-39

Oil on canvas

74-75 Museum of Non-objective Painting, c. 1948 Right: Scarlett adhered two large dots to the photograph to identify his paintings that were in the exhibition.

H I LLA

RE B A Y ' S I N F L U E N C E

Throughout the 19405 Rebay produced an ambitious exhibition program of works from the collection. She curated exhibitions of different artists in groups of eight to twelve, focusing on an inner circle of artists who were dedicated to non-objective abstraction - Rudolf Bauer, Rolph Scarlett, Jean Xceron, Dwinell Grant, Penrod Centurion, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Irene Rice Pereira, John Sennhauser, and Hilly Rebay. The work of other artists who received stipends for art supplies were included on a loan basis in group exhibitions shown at the museum. Rebay also managed a program of touring exhibitions that were sent to galleries, libraries, and civic organizations in the United States and to embassies and museums, as noted above, in Europe. Rebay encouraged Rudolf Bauer to mentor some of the artists - like Scarlett - whose work in progress he critiqued. Scarlett felt that Bauer influenced his development as a painter by encouraging him and providing an open forum for discussion. He said of his mentor's work, "Bauer's paintings had seemed so aloof at first, so formidable in their ordered perfection and their peaceful beauty ... There was a mystery about them that baffled me."57 Scarlett recalled that

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Composition, 1940

Oil on canvas

77 E D N A TA^ON

Composition on Pink, 1942 Watercolour, gouache, and ink on dyed vellum

when he showed Bauer his small colour studies, such as Study for a Painting, 1940 (Plate 78), "Bauer never suggested or even hinted at anything that might alter the spirit of the study, but with uncanny sureness he pointed out some detail, maybe only a shift in the position or size of an element, or a change in colour or value of colour."58 Rebay also actively critiqued the artists' work. In 1939 Scarlett wrote Rebay, "It is a large debt I owe you for your encouragement and guidance in enabling me to find the path, first in draftsmanship, then in light and now in colour."59 Later he remembered Rebay's critiques as being unnecessarily controlling. She would often use chalk to mark up an unfinished work and expect the artist to follow her recommendations. He said he would remove the chalk marks and resubmit the same work to her a few weeks later. At the time, he was working in a studio in Great Neck on Long Island and would transport large canvases on the roof of his car to Rebay's country estate, Green Farms, to hear her critique. Rebay was deeply committed to advancing her vision of non-objective art, a vision rooted in her belief in the theosophical movement. Her commitment extended from the passion of her lectures to her critiques for emerging artists.

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Scarlett said that Rebay "held the belief that painting in a geometrical nonobjective manner was a sacred trust and a striving for divine order."60 In a letter to Scarlett, she advised him "to concentrate on the quality (of your work). Remember it is God who paints: we are not doing it, and this is what you must realize. If so, you will be most enriched and so will we be."61 Scarlett's commitment to non-objective art differed significantly from Rebay's vision. He described his own artistic perspective in this way: "I've never been interested in theosophy or any other kind of metaphysics. I'm an atheist and materialist. We all come from a cosmic base. The underlying principle behind my work is an attempt to reach for universal order. The main thing is not spiritualism, its aesthetics, order, form, colour, and rhythm."62 Writer Joan M. Lukach has stated that "Scarlett can be defined as one of the key interpreters of the position of the Museum of Non-objective Painting."63 This assessment is not entirely correct, for as Scarlett's statement indicates, he was not one of the many contemporaries of Rebay's who believed that art was the expression of humanity's spiritual nature. Dwinell Grant was another artist from Rebay's inner circle who, like Scarlett, described himself as an atheist and expressed no interest in seeking the "spiritual in art."64 In spite of not sharing Rebay's spiritual leanings, Scarlett became a confidant of Rebay's. It was her volatile nature that drove the vision of the museum, and he no doubt valued their close association, though it was not without conflict. Scarlett recalled her threatening to cancel his Guggenheim Foundation scholarship in 1941 because she felt he did not sufficiently thank her and Solomon R. Guggenheim for visiting his studio.65 On September i, 1941, Rebay had written to him as follows: I will never forget the day old Mr. Guggenheim had the graciousness to come over to your little studio on a very hot day, just to encourage you, and you did not even have the heart and grace to say to him, "How very good of you, sir, to take this trouble of coming over here," or how happy you felt about it. If you felt anything at that moment, it was only your own precious existence, as so it seemed at that time. I waited flabbergasted but not a word came out of you. But you always accept as a matter of course the many troubles I have taken for you; and if I lacked thoughtfulness as much as you do, I wonder where you would have been the last three years, and not only this, but today, especially, as a painter? Till only recently your colors were the most uncultured ones I ever saw, and my help and trouble to write the scales down for you, made all the difference.

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78

Study for a Painting, 1940 Gouache and pencil on paper

I am sure this you did not tell Mr. Bauer. I am glad to hear that Mr. Bauer called one of your paintings a masterpiece. Mr. Bauer looks for perfection of construction, yet there must be also that something which creates the magic, this indefinite cit' in paintings which makes one want to live with them. So far your self-centeredness prevents you from atmospheric reaction and sensitiveness to the infinity of spirituality which creates this spell which is the magic a masterpiece should have to be lived with.66 Four weeks later, on September 28, Scarlett sent his reply: For the life of me I can't see what I am supposed to say in answer to your letter of Sept ist. As regards my painting, you have held the ax and now you have elected to drop it - and chop off my head. Well so what! I had a good job which I gave up in order to accept the scholarship and devote my full time to non-objective painting. Now I have another job and no time to paint. Fve never starved and I don't intend to, if honest and hard work can prevent it. You know very well that I can't paint unless I am assisted and you led me to believe that the Foundation would assist out-standing ability. You have acclaimed me, many times in private and in public as possessing great ability and Mr. Bauer has backed me up in your appraisal. You have urged me over and over again to keep on painting, but instead of making it possible for me to continue you have suddenly cut-off the scholarships; your sole explanation being that I lacked the sweet grace to attract people or some such rot. Am I not to understand that the assistance an artist may expect from the Foundation depends not on his merit as an artist, but on the extent to which his personality pleases you. You should know by this time, that I have never been ungrateful or unappreciative for what has been done for me financially or critically as an artist, and that I have given myself heart and sole [sic] to my own work and to the museum. I have loved non-objective painting as I have never loved anything in my life before and I am sincerely devoted to the movement. If my actions and words of the past two years have not made this clear to you, nothing I say now would make any difference.

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I realize that I have barely begun to paint these past two years, having been through a hard disciplinary period - the fruits of which, I am only now on the point of reaping. If the Foundation has not the means to make it possible for me to continue, so be it. But, if I am being refused help at your instigation on the grounds you mentioned in your letter - well I leave it to you, dear Baroness, to judge for yourself what you would have to say if you were in my place.67 On another occasion, in April 1944, Scarlett wrote a letter in connection with an attempt to have Rebay replaced as director of the foundation by Rudolf Bauer: To Whom It May Concern; I hereby declare that I have never made the following statements: "that the Baroness Rebay's administration of the Museum of the Sol. R. Guggenheim Foundation of Non-objective Painting was ruinous." and "that the Baroness Rebay's lectures at the 'Museum' were scandalous and distasteful to me." Furthermore I charge that such allegations are malicious lies and I deny that I ever made such ridiculous and unjust-accusations. Yours very truly, Rolph Scarlett68 According to writer Joan M. Lukach," [T]o attempt to have Rebay removed as director by means of defamation was the effort of small minds. Such mentalities were not the sort to appeal to Solomon Guggenheim. When Rebay eventually did offer to resign, Guggenheim refused to accept her offer."69 In another uproar, in 1945, Scarlett was called to testify in a court case involving a lawsuit brought by Rudolf Bauer against Rebay for slander against Bauer's wife.70 Rebay was successful in winning the trial. In spite of the tempestuous environment, Scarlett was sympathetic to Rebay and admired her accomplishments. In 1945 he helped her curate the Alice Mattern Memorial Exhibition and assisted her with other museum matters as well, serving as her chief lecturer, for example, a position he held for nine years.71 In 1946 he resigned from his lecturer position because of financial concerns and increased responsibilities with his job at the Swivelier Company. Rebay responded by providing him with foundation support - described by Scarlett - as a "godsend" that would allow him greater freedom to paint. As an artist, he continued to be involved with the museum, exhibiting regularly in

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79

Brooch, c. 1940 Gold

group exhibitions in New York and in loan exhibitions sent across the United States. Rebay also commissioned Scarlett to make her a gold brooch, c. 1940 (Plate 79). The brooch's composition, a circle within a square, is a transposition of a non-objective painting into jewellery. According to Scarlett, Rebay never took possession of the brooch because of an argument they had had. Rebay was a prolific artist, managing to develop her painting career in the midst of her demanding administrative duties and complicated personal life. She maintained a studio at her country home where she produced large-scale paintings. Some works, Untitled, 1944 (Plate 80), for example, were close to two and a half metres in height. The rapid swirling motion opposed by the vertical arrangement of bars and squares suggests an interpretation of contrapuntal music. For Rebay, non-objective art and music were compatible modes for expressing her spiritual aspirations.

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8o H I L L A REBAY

Untitled, 1944 Oil on canvas

Scarlett remained a close adviser to Rebay throughout her tenure as director and maintained a regular correspondence with her for more than ten years. He spent many hours with her, discussing her vision of the ideal museum for presenting non-objective art. She envisioned a museum that would be a series of spiralling galleries linked by ramps that would lead the viewer upwards towards "heaven," or spiritual enlightenment. The lower galleries would house early twentieth-century artists such as the cubists, while the upper galleries would contain a progressive installation of non-objective art. She planned to have studios for the non-objective painters near the building's apex. Scarlett

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was also present at meetings with Rebay, Guggenheim, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright concerning the design for the new museum on Fifth Avenue. Guggenheim hired Wright in 1943 and finally approved the museum plans in 1949. Wright's controversial "giant snail" museum was not completed until ten years later. Rebay and Guggenheim viewed the unusual organic ramp design as the perfect platform for promoting the ideals of non-objective art.

THE SOLOMON R . G U G G E N H E I M MUSEUM

After Solomon Guggenheim's death in 1949, the museum was reorientated away from a singular focus on non-objective art towards a more general modernist approach. This change also led to the retirement of Rebay as director in 1952. There were other changes as well. As recorded by Louise Averill Svendsen, "draperies were taken down, walls were painted a pristine white, heavy gold frames removed in favour of no frames at all, and the paintings were catalogued and conserved."72 Perhaps most significantly, the museum's name was changed from the Museum of Non-objective Painting to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Scarlett felt that this major shift in the museum's curatorial direction was a great disservice to Rebay's and Guggenheim's vision and to all of the artists whose work had been collected and exhibited by the museum: "This caused me great financial hardship, loss of prestige, and loss of artistic recognition."?}

S C A R L E T T AS A P A I N T E R

Rebay had called Scarlett "one of her greatest finds." In spite of the dramatic swing from the adulation of Rebay and Guggenheim in the 19408 to virtual anonymity by the late 19508, Scarlett never stopped painting. For him, nonobjective painting was an "expression of pure creation." He wrote these words in the catalogue for an exhibition of contemporary American painting: The searching non-objective artist does not turn to nature for inspiration or direction; rather, he looks within himself, within his own soul, as he strives to cultivate that spark of inner vision which lies latent in all of us. In order that the visual expression of this inner vision may be neither impaired nor marred by distracting elements, the creative artist deliberately avoids the use of any recognizable object, since these objects of necessity hold

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Rolph Scarlett, c. 1950

for each of us a certain literary and emotional connotation which has nothing to do with the creation of a non-objective painting. If the beholder of a non-objective painting is to derive the greatest value from this experience or is to participate in the picture's esthetic aliveness, he must first lay aside all preconceived ideas of what a painting should, or should not be about, and apply himself directly to a study of the means and values the artist has used to develop his painting. Let him trace for himself the rhythm pattern of the lines and other elements. Study the juxtaposition of mass against mass, feel the receding and advancing of the colors in spiritual space. Let him observe the relation and play of point against counter point and thus feel the esthetic values of each painting's own inner order.

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It is only by means of such thoughtful, careful observation in this fascinating world of non-objectivity, where color and form make music for the eye; only by such recreation upon his own soul can he realize for himself the living impulse and mysterious quality of a non-objective painting^ Scarlett believed that geometric abstraction in the non-objective style was the highest form of painting and one of the most difficult to do. Composition 1938-39 (Plate 73), for example, reveals his intuitive use of rich colours in the bold contrasting harmonies of orange and blue. The triangles and rectangles are shaded to appear as floating objects, and some of the circles are fully dimensional mysterious spheres. Scarlett created shapes by tracing pillboxes, mechanical objects, and pieces of metal, and he used a pin and a string to make a circle. Study for a Painting, 1940 (Plate 78), is a small gouache on paper in sensuous pink and green. The composition of this study is an arrangement of floating forms, carefully balanced chromatically by small amounts of yellow. The focus of this gouache study is circular forms. The painting Composition, 1940 (Plate 76), also contains circles, but they have become multi-bladed disks suspended in an atmosphere inhabited by smaller orbs and geometric shapes. The repetition of parallel lines and rectangles in this painting is a motif that also appears in his industrial designs and jewellery. Scarlett had firm ideas about the composition of a painting: "It's where the last dot goes. That's the most important thing. You may have the symphony complete with all its parts, but then comes the final note. Without that it's not complete.'^ Study for a Painting contains a grid for enlarging to create an oil painting, a method Scarlett taught to his students. He would use the study as a guide as the oil painting evolved, making colour and compositional adjustments. It was his belief that the idea of the work was more important than the actual paint application. Scarlett admired Rudolf Bauer for his use of hard-edged forms against a flat background, evident in works such as Largo, 1931 (Plate 81). Scarlett's paintings from the early 19405 contain similar characteristics. In Agitato, 1943 (Plate 82), he uses two music staffs to anchor the arrangement of motifs. A similar painting is Accen t in Change, n.d (Plate 83), which was originally purchased by Rebay for her own collection but later became part of the Guggenheim Museum Collection in 1971. This painting relies heavily on the repetition of parallel lines for impact, much as Scarlett's streamlined industrial designs do. Both paintings have an even surface that does not reveal any brushstrokes.

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Scarlett, however, was moving towards a freer and more open approach to painting, one he began exploring in monoprints during the early 19408. He made monoprints by rolling ink onto a piece of glass, applying a variety of shapes cut from cardboard and tin, and creating textures with dangling strings. He would make a series of each monoprint, often combining woodcut and stencil so as to establish a matrix that would change slightly as each sheet of paper was printed. Some of his paintings began with a modulated monoprint background that suggested infinite space. An example is Andante con Moto, 1945 (Plate 84), in which the objects float against a dramatic light and dark ground, creating an ambiguous spacial relationship. Parallelograms superimposed with spokes create a spinning form at the centre of the painting.

81 RUDOLF BAUER

Largo, 1931 Watercolour on paper

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79

82

Agitato, 1943 Oil on canvas

83

Accent in Change, n.d. Oil on canvas

Another painting, Andante, 1945 (Plate 85), has a rich, open, brown background containing orange and blue rectangles. In this work, thin lines define an elegant disk and fan shapes. Scarlett was pushing the non-objective vocabulary towards softer organic forms in paintings such as Abstraction, 1946 (Plate 86). In this work, pink cloud-like forms are placed in a rhythmic pattern against a deeply receding blue space that suggests infinity. The composition is firmly anchored in the foreground by geometric motifs. The brilliant yellow on the grey background creates a lively colour harmony. Scarlett referred to his paintings from the late 19408 and early 19508 as lyrical non-objectives because of the softer-edged forms and the gradual blending of the motifs with the background. In their calligraphic lushness, these paintings are Scarlett's reaction to the emergence of abstract expressionism. However, their agitated, gestural brushwork is his emotional response to the horrors of World War II. Some paintings from the late 19408 have been dated incorrectly as mid-193os works.76 These paintings are expressionistic and charged with emotion. The motifs are now fully integrated into the background, very much in keeping with the intensely individualistic paintings by action painters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. In both 1951 and 1952 Scarlett was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's annual exhibition of contemporary painting. He titled the painting selected for the 1951 exhibition Agitation, signalling a change from his previous lyrical titles based on musical terms. Both paintings in the Whitney exhibitions were gestural creations in bold colours, incorporating drip application of paint in a network of rhythmic lines, a technique championed by Jackson Pollock at the time. Around 1950 Scarlett also began to include aggressive jagged shapes and surrealist-inspired figurative motifs in paintings he called The Fantastics. He was perhaps influenced by several New York artists, such as Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb, who in the 19408 were extending surrealist themes by incorporating references to archaic and Native American art. Scarlett's paintings contained grotesque animals and humans as he sought to express his personal feelings about the "guts of life."77 The tragic death of the husband of Scarlett's stepdaughter, killed in an automobile accident in 1951, prompted a deep emotional response in Scarlett, which was given form in his highly charged expressionist canvases. By the early 19608 Scarlett returned to geometric abstraction, creating paintings with hard-edged flat forms and a heightened palette much like his Bauer-inspired works of the early 19408. He also returned to the non-objective vocabulary of circles, squares, and triangles as primary compositional devices.

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84

Andante con Moto, 1945 Oil on canvas

85

Andante, 1945 Oil on canvas

86

Abstraction, 1946 Oil on canvas

87

Untitled, 1968 Gouache on paper

Scarlett was a very prolific artist, in these later years producing sumptuous gouaches like Untitled, 1968 (Plate 87), that suggest musical staffs and notes. These late works are fresh and more open than his earlier works. The symphonic theme is very evident, as objects seem to be flying in harmonious balance. Scarlett's art was grounded in aesthetic principles rather than divine inspiration, even though he did use terms like mysticism when discussing art. He summed up his approach to painting with these few words: "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." 78 Scarlett felt that there was a strong affinity between music and non-objective painting in terms of the way the artist creates the work and the way the viewer perceives it. And as we have noted, the close relationship of music and art was one of the tenets of Kandinsky's theory. Kandinsky believed that music was the art form most capable of expressing the artist's soul." [The artist] naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art," he wrote. "And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of color, for setting color in motion."79 Scarlett used the analogy of music in his lectures to help the many museum visitors who disliked or had no knowledge of abstraction. He recalled, "... I lectured by saying I was going to teach them to listen with their eyes. I took the general position that the paintings were complicated, yet simple. And if a person liked good music he usually liked the paintings. Then I would begin to show them how a painting was organized - very much like music. As a matter of fact, many of the artists used musical terms in naming and discussing their paintings."80 After almost twenty years without a solo exhibition in New York, Scarlett was given an exhibition by the Jacques Seligmann Gallery in 1973. Hilton Kramer, the New York Times art critic, reviewed the exhibition: "The vivid, busy, almost too dynamic abstract paintings by this veteran artist inevitably call to mind the 'geometrical' period of Kandinsky in the nineteen-twenties and thirties and its transformation into an artistic orthodoxy at the old Museum of Non-Objective Arts in New York in the forties. Yet Mr. Scarlett's paintings somehow survive their period flavor. They are realized with such conviction and precision and feeling that their forms, though obviously derivative, acquire a personal dimension."81 PAINTER,

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S C A R L E T T AS

A TEACHER

After his association with the Guggenheim Museum ended, Scarlett moved to Shady, near Woodstock, New York, in 1955. Woodstock had been an artists' colony since the beginning of the twentieth century. He kept up his part-time work for the Swivilier Company until 1962 and established himself as a freelance designer, identifying himself as "Consultant Engineer and Industrial Designer" on his letterhead. He continued to paint and taught artists from the community. While Scarlett was at the Museum of Non-objective Painting, he mentored some of the younger artists, such as Seattle painter Maude I. Kerns, who studied with him during the summers. In 1949 Scarlett wrote to Rebay: "I naturally encourage the people [artists] that work with me to work hard, so that there might be a possibility of, at least having one painting hung in an exhibition at the museum. Where else can these converts go?"82 Scarlett had also taught painting in Edgewater, Florida, in the 19508 and in Madeira, Portugal, in the 19608, in the latter locale executing luminous gouache paintings of streetscapes that were similar to his 19308 stage designs. He had a strong belief in the value of teaching the non-objective vocabulary as a means of releasing a student's creative spirit. The teaching methodology he followed was Kandinsky's prescription from Point and Line to Plane. He would have the student focus on developing a series of small compositions using pencil on paper. Once the colour harmonies were established, the student would complete the studies in gouache paint. Scarlett would then critique the studies and guide the student as he or she developed a sketch into a mid- to large-scale painting.

Scarlett's house, 8 Reynolds Road, Shady, New York

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In 1961 Scarlett turned with renewed vigour to creating jewellery, which he had enjoyed doing periodically throughout his career. His apprenticeship at his uncle's jewellery firm in Guelph when he was a teenager had given him a solid grounding in fabrication techniques, casting, settings, and knowledge of stones. He used these skills to make unique pieces that are essentially wearable sculpture. He also applied to his jewellery the same artistic vision that underlies his paintings. Indeed, his jewellery extends his geometric abstraction into three dimensions. The colour harmonies and interlocking lines and planes of his jewellery compositions also reveal the pieces' direct links to his paintings. Scarlett preferred working in sterling silver and occasionally in gold with semi-precious stones. He was not interested in producing fine jewellery with diamonds and other gems, and he would use a synthetic stone with complete artistic licence, to achieve a certain colour effect. He was particularly fond of agates. The natural shape and coloration of the stones inspired many of Scarlett's jewellery compositions. An example is Pendant, 19408 (Plate 88), which has a large, irregular-shaped bluish agate with two prominent swirls on its surface. The agate is set in a curved bezel with lines of silver serving as a framing device. Scarlett added small silver cubes, like punctuation marks, to give energy to the piece as he had to his paintings, such as Geometric I, 1935 (Plate 70). A chain of alternating large links and rods completes the design of the pendant. Scarlett took a different approach in creating the silver Pendant, c. 1955 (Plate 89), rapidly executing this piece using chasing and repousse techniques. He inscribed rectilinear forms and a flecked background, working from the reverse with a stylus as if he were drawing. The lively shapes seem to dance across the surface. The pendant's background is similar to the modulated monoprinted grounds of paintings such as Andante con Moto, 1945 (Plate 84). Scarlett's constructivist aesthetic is particularly evident in Pendant, 1964 (Plate 90). This piece is almost austere in the simplicity of its forms. Its crisp edges, flat planes, and silver and black coloration suggest a constructivist wall relief. In this piece, Scarlett suspended petrified-wood triangles and a crescent by thin silver rods. The pendant's composition is similar to that of gouache on paper works such as Study for Lyric Dramatic, 1943 (Plate 91). In this gouache study Scarlett positioned hard metal-like shapes in front of a flat, pink biomorphic form. Study for Lyric Dramatic and its accompanying oil painting (Plate 92) are good examples of Scarlett's working method, showing how the composition of the study evolved. Scarlett turned the image 180 degrees in the oil painting. Other changes he made were to introduce the colour mauve in the

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88 Pendant, 19405 Silver with agate

89 Pendant, c. 1955 Silver (chasing and repousse)

90 Pendant, 1964 Silver with onyx and ebony

Top: 91

Study for Lyric Dramatic, 1943 Gouache on paper

Bottom: 92

Lyric Dramatic, 1943 Oil on canvas

lower motif and to shade the background. This constructivist approach is also evident in the two-fingered Ring, 19405 (Plate 93), which has geometric cutouts applied to a rectangular base. Pendant, 1965 (Plate 94), is a more complex interaction of lines and planes. In this piece, malachite stones are balanced by a repetition of scallop shapes containing round onyx stones. The scallop edge can be found in paintings done thirty years earlier, such as Geometric II, 1935 (Plate 71). The pendant also has a graceful line of silver that unites its four separate elevations. Scarlett was especially drawn to the beauty of stones, and he collected them throughout his life, trading with other jewellers and relying on gemologists like his Guelph friend Bruce Metcalfe, who supplied him with stones when he visited his home town. Just as the stone's colour and shape had influenced the resulting design in Pendant, 19408, (Plate 88), so it did in Pendant, 1965 (Plate 95). In this piece the striations on the large pink agate are like ripples on a beach, an image Scarlett enhanced by exposing its natural edge. The stone is held in a wide caliper-like frame. The sumptuousness of the pink coloration is pushed further with the addition of an oval agate with red lichen patterning and a dome-shaped stone in swirling black and pink. Many of Scarlett's pendants were quite large, creating a spectacular effect on the wearer, who could be, Scarlett felt, either female or male. He seldom made chains later in his life because he found it so boring to repeat the same shape. Pieces without chains were meant to be supported on a black silk cord.

93 Ring, 19405 Silver with amethyst and carnelian

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94 Pendant, 1965 Silver with onyx, malachite, and coloured glass

95

Pendant, 1965 Silver with agates

In his house in Shady he set up his jewellery bench in a small side room. When I visited him in 1976, he showed me his jewellery bench with all the necessary tools and materials close at hand. He had his life's work in paintings oil, gouache, watercolour, and monoprints - stored precariously in his garage and in a rented barn. In his living room, we sat on a modernist sofa he had designed. Above the sofa was a John Sloan etching. I drew his attention to the brooding print of the Bowery and he said, "I knew Sloan." That comment epitomized the extraordinary length of his connection to and evolvement in the twentieth-century art world, stretching from the Ash Can School to post-modernism. The only other Scarlett-designed objects in his house were two end tables and a complicated "Fourth of July" cotton tablecloth whose weaving pattern he had painstakingly devised.

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He had interesting theories about longevity - for example, a breakfast diet of raw onions, toast, raw eggs, and a can of beer promoted long life. He reserved for special visitors his 1885 Madeira, kept in a bottle with a broken top secured with a cloth and a string. In later years, because a walking impairment made it difficult for him to work on large canvases, he focused on creating works on paper as well as jewellery. Although he moved numerous times, he was able to retain hundreds of paintings and works on paper dating from 1907. He had often neglected to sign his paintings and works on paper when they were made, and in the 19708, when he was contacting dealers, he added his signature to many works. He also attempted to create a market for his jewellery, locally through the Jarvis Gallery in Woodstock and more widely through dealers in New York. Scarlett made his jewellery very quickly without sketches. The pieces were created freely as they evolved in his mind. He would make small or large adjustments as the work progressed to achieve the desired result. Roger Jellinek, in describing the way Scarlett painted, wrote: "His decisions were always intuitive. He would change his paintings many times, returning to them constantly, and working at great speed until he felt certain that a single change would destroy the painting. The quality he sought was magic."83 In a similar fashion he would freely lop off a section of jewellery and try another if he felt it might be better. Technically he never sought perfection. His aesthetic was based on the idea that the method of fabrication should be apparent. The endless hours required to achieve a fine finish suited neither his disposition, his patience, nor his artistic vision. Rough edges were left around joints holding bits of tarnish, giving the pieces greater depth than a perfect polish would. His background in watchmaking and knowledge of precision machinery led him to develop unusual fabrication techniques, particularly in the setting of stones. Many pieces seem to have the logic of a feat of mechanical engineering. Ring, c. 1970 (Plate 96), for instance, consists of a very large citrine supported by flying buttresses. The stone is elevated on two gold bars to allow all its faceted sides to reflect light. This dramatic and weighty ring is supported on the finger by two gold bands, a thoughtful consideration of the artist's, since it was intended to be worn as a dinner ring. Other pendants (Plate 97, for example) have sweeping wings encrusted with differently coloured stones. The central motif in this piece is a shard of slate with a turquoise applied. Hatching on the surface of the silver creates a contrast between shiny and matte, further activating the piece's complex design. This

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96 Ring, c. 1970 Silver with gold and citrine

97 Pendant, 1954-59 Silver with turquoise, agate, slate, smoky quartz, amethyst, citrine, and coloured glass

pendant mimics the many jewelled dots and squares in canvases like Intermezzo', c. 1945 (Plate 98), in which Scarlett was exploring biomorphic shapes. Intermezzo has a large turquoise form that contains a black shape densely packed with jewelled elements. Zigzag lines like electrical bolts unite the various motifs. Intermezzo hints at Scarlett's working method, for in the lower right there is a barely visible organic shape painted over with a geometric form, a change he considered a better compositional solution. Scarlett was as prolific a jewellery maker as he was a painter, creating more than 250 pieces of jewellery when he was in his seventies, eighties, and nineties. He sold through dealers and occasionally worked on commission. Scarlett did not work from sketches for his own jewellery, although he did make prototype drawings that he submitted as freelance proposals to commercial firms. In 1976 he showed me fifty complex jewellery designs that he planned to send on speculation to Tiffany's in New York. Rolph Scarlett created his unique jewellery in the American modernist jewellery tradition, a tradition that was highly influential in the decorative arts through the 19405 and 19505. Writer Toni Greenbaum discusses the studio jewellery movement in the United States: Beginning about 1940, a revolutionary jewelry movement began to emerge in the United States, and this was then spurred on by the devastation of World War II, the trauma of the Holocaust, the fear of the bomb, the politics of prejudice, the sterility of industrialization, and the crassness of commercialism. A new coterie of American artisans chose to express their frustration with society's conventions through the most intimate art form: jewelry. Although each employed a personally expressive mode, they were unified in their desire for social change. These jewelers exemplified the outsider, the rebel. One can easily picture them, like Sal Paradiso and Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, hitchhiking across America, hanging out in Greenwich Village dives, and grooving to bebop jazz.8« Painters and sculptors such as Alexander Calder and Harry Bertoia were making handmade and highly individualistic jewellery. The influence of cubism, surrealism, and constructivism is evident in their work. Other metalsmiths had backgrounds as teachers or journalists. They were self-taught and equally committed to making expressive personal statements in one-of-a-kind jewellery. Greenbaum notes that there was a ready market for alternative jewellery that would serve as "emblems for art-loving humanists in an age of alienation":

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98

Intermezzo, c. 1945 Oil on canvas

Studio jewelry was made for the liberal, intellectual fringe of the American middle-class - the young andfree-spiritedchampions of modern art. Many women needed the individuality of adornment that handmade jewelry offered. As art historian Blanche Brown recalled: About 1947 I went to Ed Wiener's shop and bought one of his silver square-spiral pins ... because it looked great, I could afford it and it identified me with the group of my choice - aesthetically aware, intellectually inclined and politically progressive. That pin (or one of a few others like it) was our badge and we wore it proudly. It celebrated the hand of the artist rather than the market value of the material. Diamonds were the badge of the philistine.85 Scarlett envisioned his free-spirited patrons wearing his extraordinary pendants, rings, and bracelets to the theatre and the Metropolitan Opera and they did. He shared his artistic ideals with artists like Ed Wiener and Sam and Carol Kramer in New York and Margaret De Patta in San Francisco. American modernist jewellers used bold expressive shapes and rejected fine gems in favour of semi-precious stones. Some of the studio jewellers incorporated shells, wood, found objects, and ceramic stones in their work. De Patta also made finely finished prototypes for quasi-production work executed by commercial firms. In the 19408 and 19508 many of the modernist jewellers had their own studios/shops around Greenwich Village and in mid-town Manhattan, not far from the Museum of Non-objective Painting on 54th Street. Although Scarlett was close by, he did not associate with any of the studio jewellers. In those years he largely dedicated his time to establishing his career as a non-objective painter and made only a few pieces of jewellery. Throughout his jewellery-making career Scarlett conceived and made each piece of jewellery as a unique sculptural entity, letting the form emerge from the fabrication technique. Many of his jewellery designs mimic his paintings. Ring, c. 1960 (Plate 99), has a large grey agate elevated above an organic-like silver platform. Pendant, c. 1970 (Plate 100), has a pink striated stone surrounded by a repetition of rectangular blocks and perforations. A more formal geometric approach was taken in Pendant, c. 1970 (Plate 101), whose cruciform shape was created with citrines, synthetic sapphires, and onyx. A dangling pearshaped citrine relieves the formality of the design of this piece.

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99

Ring, c. 1960 Silver with agate

100 Pendant, c. 1970 Silver with gold, onyx, and agate

1O1

Pendant, c. 1970 Silver with citrine, onyx, and synthetic sapphires

In the late 19605 and 19705 Scarlett's jewellery became even more sculptural. A second Pendant, c. 1970 (Plate 102), sprouts a whimsical sea horse head with a green eye. The body of the "sea horse" is a brown oval agate secured on just one side to show its natural edge. Silver lozenges, projecting rings, and tendrils embrace the stone. This pendant's three-dimensionality was so complete that Scarlett had to make a stand so that it would sit upright. It is supported by a trestle-like device reminiscent of a console table in a 19305 cinema. To other pieces, Scarlett added small whimsical features such as lips, hands, a skeletal arm, and a wheel in the spirit of surrealist jeweller Salvador Dali, who once made a piece of jewellery adorned with his patented dripping clock face. Ring, 1976 (Plate 103), is another complex piece, built up like a multi-level theatre set reminiscent of Scarlett's 1928 designs for Lazarus Laughed (Plate 12). He included arches, ramps, and stones elevated like stage properties. Perforations allowed light to enter the piece and lessened its weight for the wearer's comfort. In referring to his theatre designs, Scarlett would say that "light completed the geometry of the stage."86

102 Pendant, c. 1970 Silver with agates

103

103

Ring, 1976 Silver with turquoise, citrine, and synthetic stone

The use of light is also prominent in Pendant, 1976 (Plate 104), which features four large rutilated quartz stones. These beautiful transparent stones contain a maze of brown hair-like structures. The stones are held in bezels with cut-outs that allow light to enter from the side. One stone is held in a 2.5-centimetre-high bezel reminiscent of a compass with projections at the cardinal points. The design radiates clock-like around a central stone. Other smaller coloured stones are held on spoon-like rods. Scarlett's extravagant bracelets are wearable body decoration. He also considered them free-standing sculptures that fully extended his artistic vision into three dimensions. Bracelet, 1966 (Plate 105), is like a constructivist stage set with a riser holding a wonky 19308 skyscraper and a glass-domed tower. Scarlett added coloured glass, free-form castings, and hatchings to enliven the surface. Bracelet, 1971 (Plate 106), has an unusual arrangement of two pendants in smoky quartz and amethyst dangling from a post-and-beam device. Scarlett added a scooping form below to echo the shapes of the tingling pendants.

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Pendant, 1976 Silver with rutilated quartz, malachite, citrine, amethyst, agate, and coloured glass

105 Bracelet, 1966 Silver with quartz and coloured glass

106 Bracelet, 1971 Silver with gold, copper, smoky quartz, and amethyst

Pendant, 1966 (Plate 107), is even larger at sixteen by twenty-four by four centimetres. With its large silver flanges perforated with rows of squares and circles, this wearable sculpture has an architectural presence. The shiny curving forms suggest airplane wings and fuselage. Scarlett's positioning of the stones and overlapping planes create spaces within the piece revealing the continuing evolution of his non-objective vocabulary. He convincingly extended this vocabulary into the jewellery medium, transforming a non-objective painting into three-dimensional form. His sculptural pieces are unique in the breadth of their vision, the beauty of the stones, and the imaginative settings, many of which suggest unusual "engineering" solutions.

107

Pendant, 1966 Silver, malachite, tiger-eye, and synthetic stones

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RECOGNITION

OF SCARLETT'S CONTRIBUTION

Although Scarlett exhibited his paintings and jewellery locally, he felt he had been abandoned by the New York art world. After twenty years without a solo show in New York, the Jacques Seligmann Gallery purchased a number of his paintings and works on paper and gave him a solo exhibition in 1973. Five years later, Scarlett had the satisfaction of returning to Guelph to see his work in an exhibition at the University of Guelph. In the last two years of his life, art dealer Joan Washburn gave him two solo exhibitions at the Washburn Gallery in New York. A year before his death, Scarlett was included in the Carnegie Institute's important 1983 touring exhibition Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America 1929-1944. This exhibition signaled the new and growing interest of curators, collectors, and scholars in mid-century American abstraction. In the mid-1990s the Guggenheim Museum began deaccessioning some paintings and works on paper by the non-objective artists. Thirty works by Scarlett were sold, the majority to New York dealers, leaving thirty paintings, gouache on paper works, and monoprints in the Guggenheim Museum Collection. New York Times writer Carol Vogel criticized the museum's decision in an article titled "Is the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Selling Off Its History?" Her comments were made in connection with an exhibition at Gary Snyder Fine Art (titled The Museum of Non-objective Painting: American Abstract Art) that contained deaccessioned works by artists Rolph Scarlett, Rudolf Bauer, Hilla Rebay, and others from the 19305 and 19408. Vogel writes: Mr. Snyder, noting that the market for this kind of art is growing, said fourteen works from his current show had been sold. He added that he believed the Guggenheim officials who decided what works the museum would sell might "not have the best eye." "To let go of a Scarlett like this," he said, referring to "Composition," a colorful painting from 1938-39, "is to ignore the roots of Abstract Expressionism. But they don't consider this historical period to be of any value. They don't think this stuff can compete with Abstract Expressionists or European modernism." "In every case, we still have huge holdings by these artists," Ms. Dennison [a curator at the Guggenheim] said. "We are not overlooking our history."87 The sale of Scarlett's work had the benefit of bringing his art to the attention of a new group of younger collectors who were focusing on this period. The rapid sale of these works by dealers and at auction through Christie's in

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New York and Waddington's in Toronto expanded the number of dealers carrying his work. Representation in public collections also expanded. A major canvas, Allegro, 1944, was donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Scarlett's 1939 painting Composition, lent by the Guggenheim Museum, was included in the prestigious 1999 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-1950. In 2001 New York dealer Gary Snyder included Scarlett's gestural action paintings from the early 19508 in an exhibition titled Abstract Expressionism: Expanding the Canon. Even though Scarlett produced some action paintings and surrealistinspired works in the course of his seventy-five-year career, he was essentially dedicated to exploring the possibilities of geometric abstraction. In 1996 Mark Rosenthal curated the landmark exhibition Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. As part of the exhibition, Rosenthal replicated a gallery from the 1948 Museum of Non-objective Painting to recreate Hilla Rebay's vision of the ideal environment for showing non-objective art. The gallery, located next to the Guggenheim Museum's famous ramp, had the requisite pleated-velour covered walls, grey carpeting, and benches, with classical music filling the spaces. Rosenthal hung paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Ily Bolotowsky, Fernand Leger, Rudolf Bauer, and Jean Xceron with Scarlett's oil on canvas Black, White, and Rose from 1944. This prestigious exhibition was held fifty years after Scarlett's paintings were last shown at the Guggenheim Museum. When the Museum of Non-objective Painting opened in 1939, Canadian painter Rolph Scarlett was one of the featured artists in the inaugural exhibition, along with Vasily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hilla Rebay, and Rudolf Bauer. Scarlett had become part of the inner circle of artists dedicated to promoting geometric abstraction in North America. The recognition of his contribution through Rosenthal's 1996 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum came twelve years too late for Scarlett to savour. The exhibition, however, did finally acknowledge the significant contribution Rolph Scarlett and the other non-objective artists made to the history of American abstraction in the twentieth century. Scarlett's significance lies in the way he was able to extend his artistic vision convincingly into four distinctive practices - painting, jewellery, and industrial and stage design. At times he was engaged in all four simultaneously. Even though he believed he made his major accomplishment as a painter, his jewellery has been recognized internationally through exhibition catalogues such

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as Designed for Delight, Alternative Aspects of Twentieth Century Decorative Arts, published by the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts in 1997. Scarlett has been acknowledged as a metalsmith of considerable originality, accorded a place within the history of North American decorative arts for his highly innovative and sculptural approach to jewellery. His eight hundred industrial design drawings in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art Collection are a valuable record of the working method of industrial designers in the mid- to late 19308. This was the era when artists could, with the right entrepreneurial initiative, reinvent themselves as professional designers. By being inquisitive and mechanically inclined, Scarlett was able to create designs for an impressive range of domestic and industrial objects, from refrigerators to guided missiles. Few bodies of work of this magnitude by industrial designers have survived, making this collection of Scarlett's drawings a valuable research resource for investigating the streamlined modern style. Scarlett's stage designs embody the style of the American modernist movement. These beautiful gouache drawings reveal the extension of his artistic ideals into the world of theatre through imaginative constructivist stage sets and costume designs. Although the Depression cut short his promising career in the theatre, the photographs of his 1929 Man and Superman sets are evidence of his contribution to the avant-garde American theatre movement. Rolph Scarlett was a Canadian abstractionist who used a non-objective vocabulary as a vehicle for expressing his artistic vision. With his pluralist approach to what it meant to be an artist, he focused his intellectual and technical abilities on every artistic challenge he undertook. His art was a progression of ideas that united painting, design, and jewellery and were expressed through a lifelong commitment to exploring the possibilities of geometric abstraction.

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APPENDIX I PLATES AND

PHOTOGRAPHS

PLATES

1

Pine Treesy c. 1914 Oil monoprint on paper 37.8 cm x 26.0 cm Macdonald Stewart Art Centre Collection, Guelph Gift of Jack and Joan Metcalfe, Guelph, 2004 Photo: Don Russell

2

Gordon Street Bridge, Guelph, c. 1920 Oil on canvas 66.0 cm x 73.75 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 110977.090 Photo: Judith Nasby

3

Oscar Bluemner Space Motive, a New Jersey Valley, c. 1917-18 Oil on canvas 77.5 cm x 102.9 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Purchase with funds from Mrs Muriel Palitz 78.2 Photo: Sheldon C. Collins REFERENCE

Haskell, Barbara. The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-1950. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/W.W. Norton & Company, 1999:113, 115 (colour repr.). 4

City scape, c. 1920 Oil pastel and pencil on paper 21.2 cm x 23.9 cm Collection of the Rolph Scarlett Estate Photo: Washburn Gallery EXHIBITION

New York, Washburn Gallery, Rolph Scarlett Drawings and Watercolors, 26 April - 14 May 1983, no. 48 (repr.) 5

Buildings with Bridge, c. 1920 Charcoal and pastel on paper 21.3 cm x 27.5 cm Collection of the Rolph Scarlett Estate Photo: Washburn Gallery EXHIBITION

New York, Washburn Gallery, Rolph Scarlett Drawings and Watercolors, 26 April -14 May 1983, no. 28 (repr.) 6

112

Joseph Stella The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted: The Bridge, 1920-22 Oil and tempera on canvas 224.8 cm x 137.2 cm The Newark Museum, New Jersey Purchase 1937, Felix Fuld Bequest Fund Photo: The Newark Museum/Art Resource, NY

APPENDIX

I

REFERENCE

Haskell, Barbara. Joseph Stella. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994: 91, 268 (colour repr.). 7

Face, c. 1925 Linocut 21.6 cm x 18.4 cm Collection of the Rolph Scarlett Estate Photo: Allen Bryan

8

Stage Design for Hoboken Blues, 1925 Gouache on board 38.1 cm x 49.2 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG999.043.o89 Photo: Martin Schwalbe REFERENCE

Davis, Deborah. "We had Rolph of Guelph." Guelph Mercury, 30 October 1998 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000: British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 NOTE

The title of the exhibition in Montreal was Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design and Jewellery. 9

Stage Design for King Lear, 1928 Gouache on paper 23.5 cm x 26.2 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 PLATES

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10 Stage Design for King Lear, 1928 Gouache on paper 23.5 cm x 26.2 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 11 Lazaruss House from the Outside, 1928-32 (Lazarus Laughed stage design) Gouache on board 36.5 cm x 53.7 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG999.043.090 Photo: Dean Palmer EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 12 House in Judea, 1928-32 (Lazarus Laughed stage design) Gouache on board 36.5 cm x 53.7 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG999.043.O9i Photo: Dean Palmer NOTE

The designs were created in Toldeo in 1928 and signed and dated in 1932.

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13 Lazarus, 1928 Oil on canvas 92.0 cm x 71.3 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG977.095 Photo: Martin Schwalbe 14-17 Johan Hagemeyer (1884-1962) Photographs of four sets for Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, Pasadena Playhouse production, 7-23 November 1929 14 Set for opening scene Gelatin silverprint Collection of Rolph Scarlett Estate 15 Set with car that catapulted across the stage Gelatin silverprint Collection of Rolph Scarlett Estate 16 Harrison Ford (Sr) in the Don Juan in Hell scene Gelatin silverprint University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG999.046 EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001 17 The final scene Gelatin silverprint University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG999.047 PLATES

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EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Ralph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001 18 Abstraction, 1929 Oil on canvas location unknown Photo: Johan Hagemeyer REFERENCES

Moure, Nancy Dustin. California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media. Los Angeles: Dustin Publications, 1988: 272-3 (repr.). Scarlett, Rolph. With Harriet Tannin. The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2003: 26 (repr.). EXHIBITION

Hagemeyer Studios, Pasadena, 1930 19 Regatta, c. 1930 Oil on Masonite 78.7 cm x 110.2 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG977.092 Photo: Martin Schwalbe REFERENCE

Nasby, Judith. The University of Guelph Collection. Guelph: University of Guelph, 1980: 318 (repr.). 20 Three Brooches, c. 1928 Silver (chasing and repousse) top 3.5 cm x 5.4 cm x 0.7 cm centre 4.4 cm x 5.4 cm x 0.7 cm bottom 4.4 cm x 5.4 cm x 0.7 cm Collection of Harriet Tannin Photo: Allen Bryan

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21 Design for Proscenium Arch and Stage Curtain for Parcel Post, c. 1935-37 Gouache and pencil on paper 24.5 cm x 29.0 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 22 Stage Design for Cyrano, c. 1935-37 Gouache on paper 23 cm x 30 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 23 Stage Design for Miracle, c. 1935-37 Gouache on paper 22.1 cm x 27.5 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 24 Church and Apple Tree, c. 1935-37 Gouache on paper 22.2 cm x 28.3 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna

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Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 25 Costume Design, c. 1935-37 Gouache and silver pencil on paper 27.5 cm x 14.3 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003

26 Salt or Pepper Shaker, c. 19 35 Pencil, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper 10.9 cm x 6.8 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses

Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.12 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Montreal, Quebec, McCord Museum of Canadian History, L'art deco: expression de la vie moderne, 1925-1939,1996 Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 -14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003

27 Salt or Pepper Shaker, c. 1935 Pencil, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper 10.4 cm x 7.5 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses 118

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Musee des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de I'American Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.14 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Montreal, Quebec, McCord Museum of Canadian History, Hart deco: expression de la vie moderne, 1925-1939,1996 Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry', 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 -14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 28 Salt or Pepper Shaker, c. 1935 Pencil, gouache, silver ink, and Conte crayon on paper 11.0 cm x 6.2 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.18 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry', 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 29 Salt or Pepper Shaker, c. 19 35 Silver ink, pencil, and Conte crayon on paper 21.3 cm x 17.0 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses

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Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.4 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest 30 Coffee Service, c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper 26.4 cm x 50.0 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.127 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 31 Coffee Service, c. 19 3 5 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper 33.1 cm x 52.6 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de rAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.i26 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario,

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Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 32 Coffee Poty c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper 21.5 cm x 16.7 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de FAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.466 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Ralph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 33 Coffee Pot, c.i 9 35 Pencil, silver ink, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper 21.5 cm x 17.0 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de rAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. etMme Samuel Esses 090.225.467 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest REFERENCE

Nasby, Judith. Ralph Scarlett, Art, Design & Jewelry. Exhibition brochure. Guelph: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1997 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph

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Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 34 Coffee Pot, c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper 33.0 cm x 22.9 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de rAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395-130 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 35 Coffee Pot, c. 19 3 5 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper glued on cardboard 36.1 cm x 28.6 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.i3i Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British

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Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 36 Cocktail Shaker and Glasses, c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper 39.1 cm x 32.4 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de FAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.9i Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest REFERENCE

Nasby, Judith. Rolph Scarlett, Art, Design & Jewelry. Exhibition brochure. Guelph: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1997 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 37 Cocktail Shaker and Glasses, c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper 39.1 cm x 32.4 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de I'American Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.7i Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario,

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Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001 38 Serving Dish, c. 1935 Pencil and Conte crayon on paper 25.4 cm x 32.0 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. etMme Samuel Esses 091.395.291 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 39 Ice Bucket, Corkscrew and Tongs, c. 1935 Pencil, Conte crayon, and gouache on paper 32.4 cm x 49.2 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. etMme Samuel Esses 091.395.69 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry', 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003

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40 Corkscrew, c. 1935 Pencil, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper 32.9 cm x 25.4 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de I'American Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. etMme Samuel Esses 091.395.87 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry > 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001 41 Poker-Chip Container; c. 1935 Pencil, gold ink, gouache, and black ink on paper 17.4 cm x 21.6 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de lyAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.i89 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry', 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 42 Cart, c.i935 Pencil, silver ink, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper 20.3 cm x 29.1 cm

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The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Music des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.109 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 43 Glass, c. 1935 Pencil on paper 28.5 cm x 15.2 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de I'American Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.170 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 44 Glass, c. 1935 Pencil on paper 28.5 cm x 15.2 cm

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The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.i76 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Ralph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 45 Glass, c. 1935 Pencil on paper 28.1 cm x 15.4 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de FAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.i75 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 46 Toiletry Set, c. 1935 Pencil, watercolour, silver ink, and gouache on paper 21.7 cm x 32.5 cm

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The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de rAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.400 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 47 Bathroom Scale, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, watercolour, and gouache on paper 17.1 cm x 24.3 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.405 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 48 Refrigerator, c. 19 35 Pencil, silver ink, and watercolour on paper 22.5 cm x 19.9 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses 128

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Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de rAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.333 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Montreal, Quebec, McCord Museum of Canadian History, L'art deco: expression de la vie moderne, 1925-1939,1996 Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 49 Radio Cabinet, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, and gouache on paper 22.5 cm x 14.1 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.5 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 50 Radio Cabinet, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, gouache, and Conte crayon on paper 24.8 cm x 13.3 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses

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Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de FAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.1 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 51 Radio Cabinet, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, and gouache on paper 23.2 cm x 19.1 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de F American Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.6 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 52 Sofa, c. 1935 Pencil, silver pencil, and gouache on paper 23.3 cm x 30.3 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de F American Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 130

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090.225.105 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry', 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 53 So/a, c. 1935 Pencil, silver pencil, and gouache on paper 23.9 cm x 30.3 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de FAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.77 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 54 So/a, c.i935 Pencil, silver pencil, and gouache on paper 23.5 cm x 30.7 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. etMme Samuel Esses 090.225.103 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest

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REFERENCES

Nasby, Judith. Rolph Scarlett, Art, Design & Jewelry. Exhibition brochure. Guelph: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1997 (colour repr.). Nasby, Judith, and Diane Charbonneau. "Rolph Scarlett, Discovering a Modernist Canadian Artist." Collage, the Magazine for Friends of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Winter 2002-3): 3 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 55 So/a, c. 1935

Pencil, silver pencil, and gouache on paper 23.7 cm x 30.5 cm

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.88 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry', 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 56 Desk, c. 1935 Pencil, watercolour, silver ink, and gouache on paper glued on cardboard 29.3 cm x 43.0 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses

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Musee des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de lyAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 090.225.295 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 57 Store Interior (Elevation), c. 1935 Pencil, silver pencil, and watercolour on paper 21.4 cm x 50.8 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de rAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.268 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry', 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 58 Storefront, c. 1935 Pencil, silver ink, watercolour, gouache, and Conte crayon on cardboard 49.3 cm x 38.3 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses PLATES

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D91-395-273 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 -14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 59 Storefront, c. 19 35 Pencil, silver ink, watercolour, and Conte crayon on cardboard 49.0 cm x 38.2 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. etMme Samuel Esses 091.395.276 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 60 Bakelite Display for New York World's Fair, c. 1939 Pencil, silver ink, and gouache on cardboard 39.4 cm x 50.9 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.282 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest

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EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 61 Sky Fighting, 1939 Pencil, gouache, gold ink, and red pencil on paper 57.2 cm x 36.2 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.144 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 62 Facade for an Amusement Park Ride, c. 19 39 Pencil, gouache, and silver ink on paper 57.5 cm x 72.5 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses D9i.395.3io Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario,

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Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 63 Building to House "Dipsy Doodle" Amusement Park Ride, 1939 Pencil, gold ink, and gouache on paper 25.4 cm x 49.8 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de rAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.271 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 64 Peek-a-Boo, 1939 Pencil and red pencil on paper 28.6 cm x 36.2 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection, gift of the American Friends of Canada through the generosity of Mr and Mrs Samuel Esses Musee des beaux arts de Montreal, Collection Liliane et David M. Stewart, don de VAmerican Friends of Canada grace a la generosite de M. et Mme Samuel Esses 091.395.146 Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Giles Rivest EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 136

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65 Rocket Torpedo Dia 15, c. 1937 Ink and coloured pencil on paper 48 cm x 75 cm Collection of the Rolph Scarlett Estate Photo: Martin Schwalbe REFERENCES

Ghione, Liza. "International." Canadian Art 14:1 (Spring 1997): 28 (repr.). Scarlett, Rolph. With Harriet Tannin. The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2003: 141 (repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 -14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 66 Bali Desk Lamp, 1959 Painted aluminum and brass 51 cm x 33 cm Manufactured by Swivelier Company. Inc., New York Collection of Michael Schwartz Photo: Dean Palmer EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 67 Bali Desk Lamp (prototype), 1959 Photo: Michael Schwartz 68 Bali Desk Lamp (prototype), 1959 Photo: Michael Schwartz 69 Sailboats, 1934 Watercolour on paper 32.0 cm x 46.4 cm PLATES

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Private collection Photo: Dean Palmer 70 Geometric /, 1935 Gouache and ink on paper 54.6 cm x 36.8 cm Private Collection Photo: Dean Palmer EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 71 Geometric II, 1935 Gouache and ink on paper 57.2 cm x 36.8 cm Private collection Photo: Dean Palmer EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 72 Vasily Kandinsky Composition 8, July 1923 140.0 cm x 201.0 cm Oil on canvas Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1937 37-262 Photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, David Heald REFERENCE

Barnett, Vivian Endicott. Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1983: 83, 160, 161 (colour repr.).

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73 Composition 1938-39 Oil on canvas 78.8 cm x 134.5 cm Private collection Photo: Gary Snyder Fine Art REFERENCES

Scarlett, Rolph. With Harriet Tannin. The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2003: in, 149 (colour repr.). Snyder, Gary. The Museum of Non-objective Painting, American Abstract Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Snyder Fine Art, 1996: 9 (colour repr.). Tannin, Harriet, ed. Rolph Scarlett, Early Master of the Non-objective. Exhibition catalogue. Woodstock, New York: Woodstock Artists Association, 1993 (colour repr.). Vogel, Carol. "Early Guggenheim Purchases for Sale." New York Timesy 3 May 1996 (repr.). EXHIBITIONS

New York, Museum of Non-objective Painting, Art of Tomorrow. Opened i June 1939, no. 400 (repr.) New York, Snyder Fine Art, The Museum of Non-objective Painting, American Abstract Art, 1996 Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997 NOTE

Purchased by the Museum of Non-objective Painting in 1939. Deaccessioned from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum c. 1995. 74 Museum of Non-objective Painting, c. 1948 Photograph of a gallery in the first 5th Avenue building Photographer unknown EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003

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75 Museum of Non-objective Painting, c. 1948 Photograph of a gallery in the first 5th Avenue building Photographer unknown EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 NOTE

To fulfil Hilla Rebay's vision for exhibiting non-objective paintings at the museum, a meditative setting was created through the use of walls covered with pleated, grey velour, carpeted floors, and background music by Bach and Chopin. 76 Composition, 1940 Oil on canvas 167.6 cm x 207.0 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 42.898 Photo: Rolph Scarlett EXHIBITION

New York, Museum of Non-objective Painting, Fifth Anniversary Exhibition, 25 June - 31 October 1942 NOTE

According to the artist, the painting hung on the main floor of the first 5th Avenue museum building for one year. 77 Edna Tacon Composition on Pink, 1942 Watercolour, gouache, and ink on dyed vellum 50.8 cm x 55.9 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Photo: David Heald REFERENCE

Zemans, Joyce, Elizabeth Burrell, and Elizabeth Hunter. New Perspectives of Modernism in Canada: Kathleen Munn and Edna Ta$on. Exhibition catalogue. Toronto: Art Gallery of York University/Editions du GREF, 1988: 32, 72 (colour repr.). 140

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EXHIBITIONS

Toronto, Ontario, Eaton's, Non-objective Painting by Edna Tacon, opened 8 January 1944 New York, Museum of Non-objective Painting, Loan Exhibition, opened 18 April 1944 NOTE

Originally purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim for his private collection. 78 Study for a Painting, 1940 Gouache and pencil on paper 19.0 cm x 24.7 cm Private collection Photo: Dean Palmer REFERENCE

Nasby, Judith, and Diane Charbonneau. "Rolph Scarlett, Discovering a Modernist Canadian Artist." Collage, the Magazine for Friends of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Winter 2002-3: 7 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 79 Brooch, c. 1940 Gold 6.0 cm x 6.0 cm x 0.4 cm Commissioned by Hilla Rebay Collection of Harriet Tannin Photo: Allen Bryan 80 Hilla Rebay Untitled, 1944 Oil on canvas 238.8 cm x 198.1 cm Private collection Photo: Gary Snyder Fine Art, Peter Jacobs/Ariel Schafan REFERENCE

Snyder, Gary. The Museum of Non-objective Painting, American Abstract Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Gary Snyder Fine Art, 1996:19 (colour repr.). PLATES

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81 Rudolf Bauer Largo, 1931 Watercolour on paper 43.8 cm x 31.8 cm Private collection Photo: Gary Snyder Fine Art, Peter Jacobs/Ariel Schafan REFERENCE

Snyder, Gary. The Museum of Non-objective Painting, American Abstract Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Gary Snyder Fine Art, 1996:10 (colour repr.). 82 Agitato, 1943 Oil on canvas 147.3 cm x 147.3 cm Private collection Photo: Gary Snyder Fine Art REFERENCES

Matheson, Dawn, and Rosemary Anderson, eds. Guelph: Perspectives on a Century of Change 1900-2000. Guelph, Ontario: Guelph Historical Society, 2000: 83 (repr.). Nasby, Judith. Rolph Scarlett, Art, Design & Jewelry. Exhibition brochure. Guelph: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1997 (colour repr.). Snyder, Gary. The Museum of Non-objective Painting, American Abstract Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Snyder Fine Art, 1996: 20 (colour repr.). Stead, Hilary. Guelph, A People's Heritage. Guelph, Ontario: City of Guelph, 2002: 45 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

New York, Snyder Fine Art. The Museum of Non-objective Painting, American Abstract Art, 1996 Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000 NOTE

Acquired by the Museum of Non-objective Painting in 1943. Deaccessioned from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum c. 1995. The study for Agitato was also exhibited in the exhibition at the Canadian Embassy Gallery, Washington DC. It was illustrated in Debra

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Bresnan. "Woodstock woman makes sure Rolph Scarlett is rediscovered." Daily Freeman Preview, 30 July 1993: 3. 83 Accent in Change, n.d. Oil on canvas 182.9 cm x 110.5 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 71.1936 R2/5 Photo: Rolph Scarlett NOTE

This painting, originally purchased by Hilla Rebay for her personal collection, was acquired by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1971. 84 Andante con Moto, 1945 Oil on canvas 142.6 cm x 107.0 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 45-990 Photo: Rolph Scarlett NOTE

This painting was acquired for the collection in 1945. According to the artist, the painting has a monoprinted background. 85 Andante, 1945 Oil on canvas 116.8 cm x 116.8 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 47.1091 Photo: Rolph Scarlett REFERENCES

Scarlett, Rolph. With Harriet Tannin. The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2003: 113 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

New York, Museum of Non-objective Painting, Loan Exhibition, 6 June 1945 - closing date unknown Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Duxieme Salon des realites nouvelles, 18 July -17 August 1947

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86 Abstraction, 1946 Oil on canvas 98.7 cm x 122.0 cm The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gift of Lady Davis Musee des beaux arts de Montreal don de Lady Davis 1946.962 Photo: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Christine Guest EXHIBITION

Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design and Jewellery, 12 February - 13 April 2003 87 Unfitted, 1968 Gouache on paper 43.9 cm x 55.2 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG999.043.087 Photo: Martin Schwalbe EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 88 Pendant, 19408 Silver with agate 13.3 cm x 7.8 cm x 1.8 cm Signed: Rolph Scarlett Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003

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89 Pendant, c. 1955 Silver (chasing and repousse) 8.3 cm x 5.0 cm x 0.9 cm Private collection Photo: Keith Betteridge EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 -14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 90 Pendant, 1964 Silver with onyx and ebony 15.0 cm x 9.0 cm x 1.4 cm Signed: ROLPH SCARLETT 9-4-64 Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody REFERENCE

Nasby, Judith. Rolph Scarlett, Art, Design & Jewelry. Exhibition brochure. Guelph, Ontario: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1997 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 91 Study for Lyric Dramatic, 1943 Gouache on paper 22.3 cm x 30.0 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Elizabeth Pollet (Scarlett's stepdaughter) UG997.015 Photo: Martin Schwalbe EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art,

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Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 92 Lyric Dramatic, 1943 Oil on canvas 89 cm x 119.7 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG977-097 Photo: Martin Schwalbe EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 NOTE

Scarlett turned the image 180° for the oil on canvas painting. 93 Ring, 19408 Silver with amethyst and carnelian 3.9 cm x 4.9 cm x 4.6 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Signed on verso: Rolph Scarlett Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 -14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 94 Pendant, 1965 Silver with onyx, malachite, and coloured glass 18.04 cm x 8.9 cm x 2.6 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Signed on verso: ROLPH SCARLETT Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody 146

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EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 95 Pendant, 1965 Silver with agates 16.6 cm x 11.1 cm x 4.1 cm Chain, silver with carnelian 3.3 cm x 2.0 cm x 0.7 cm Signed: Rolph Scarlett Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 96 Ring, c. 1970 Silver with gold and citrine 3.6 cm x 4.4 cm x 5.5 cm Signed: RS Private collection Photo: Keith Betteridge EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - i April 2003 97 Pendant, 1954-59 Silver with turquoise, agate, slate, smoky quartz, amethyst, citrine, and coloured glass 27.4 cm x 22.0 cm x 3.0 cm PLATES

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Signed: ROLPH SCARLETT 10-28-54 6-13-54 8-15-59 Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Ralph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 98 Intermezzo, c. 1945 Oil on canvas 84.0 cm x 134 cm University of Guelph Collection Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Gift of Rolph Scarlett, 1977 UG977-094 Photo: Martin Schwalbe REFERENCE

Davis, Deborah. "We had Rolph of Guelph." Guelph Mercury, 30 October 1998 (repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Selections from the Collection, i April - 30 August 1985 Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 99 Ring, c. 1960 Silver with agate 4.0 cm x 3.8 cm x 3.8 cm Private collection Photo: Keith Betteridge EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British

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Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 100 Pendant, c. 1970 Silver with gold, onyx, and agate 13.0 cm x 8.3 cm x 1.6 cm Private collection Photo: Keith Betteridge EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Ralph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 - 14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 101 Pendant, c. 1970 Silver with citrine, onyx, and synthetic sapphires 20.6 cm x 7.8 cm x 2.0 cm Private collection Photo: Keith Betteridge EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Ralph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 102 Pendant, c. 1970 Silver with agates 13.9 cm x 11.4 cm x 6.5 cm Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody EXHIBITIONS

Woodstock, New York, Jarvis Gallery, Ralph Scarlett Paintings and Drawings, 1973 Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Ralph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British

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Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 103 Ring, 1976 Silver with turquoise, citrine, and synthetic stone 7.0 cm x 3.7 cm x 4.8 cm Private collection Photo: Keith Betteridge EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000 -14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 104 Pendant, 1976 Silver with rutilated quartz, malachite, citrine, amethyst, agate, and coloured glass 21.2 cm x 15.2 cm x 2.7 cm Signed: ROLPH SCARLETT 76 Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 105 Bracelet, 1966 Silver with quartz and coloured glass 20.7 cm x 9.7 cm x 8.3 cm Signed: ROLPH SCARLETT 10-12-66 Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry, 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario,

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Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February - 13 April 2003 106 Bracelet, 1971 Silver with gold, copper, smoky quartz, and amethyst 12.0 cm x 7.3 cm x 7.1 cm Signed: Rolph Scarlett 4/4/71 Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody EXHIBITIONS

Washington DC, The Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry', 18 March - 3 June 1997; Guelph, Ontario, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 23 March - 4 August 2000; British Columbia, Kelowna Art Gallery, 26 November 2000-14 January 2001; Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 12 February -13 April 2003 107 Pendant, 1966 Silver, malachite, tiger-eye, and synthetic stones 16.2 cm x 24.5 cm x 4.4 cm Signed on verso: ROLPH SCARLETT 7-10-66 Collection of Sandra and Samuel Esses Photo: Exhibitions International, Richard Goodbody REFERENCES

Eidelberg, Martin, ed. Designed for Delight: Alternative Aspects of Twentieth Century Decorative Arts. Paris: Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Flammarion, 1997:184, 224 (colour repr.). Nasby, Judith, and Diane Charbonneau. "Rolph Scarlett, Discovering a Modernist Canadian Artist." Collage, the Magazine for Friends of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Winter 2002-3: 7 (colour repr.). EXHIBITIONS

Quebec, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewellery, Quebec, Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts, Designed for Delight: Alternative Aspects of Twentieth Century Decorative Arts, 1997-2000 (international touring exhibition), No. 150; 12 February 13 April 2003

PLATES

AND

PHOTOGRAPHS

15!

PHOTOGRAPHS

Page 2. Scarlett working at his jeweller's bench, c. 1980 Photo: Harriet Tannin Page 15. Toledo Blade review Courtesy of Lucas County Public Library, Toledo, Ohio Page 49. Illustration from the New York World's Fair souvenir booklet showing Scarlett's design for the exterior signage and for the Bakelite Corporation's great hall display Page 77. Rolph Scarlett, c. 1950 Photographer unknown Page 88. Scarlett's house, 8 Reynolds Road, Shady, New York Photo: Judith Nasby Page 155. Rolph with his stepdaughter Elizabeth Pollet, c. 1940 Photographer unknown

152

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APPENDIX II CHRONOLOGY

Note: Chronology compiled by the author and Harriet Tannin, administrator of the Rolph Scarlett Estate 1889 Born 13 June in Guelph, Ontario. Lived at 33 Queen Street. His father, James, was employed at the Bell Organ Company, Guelph. 1900 Won Guelph Public School certificate of merit in drawing. 1901 Began art lessons with Sister Antoinette at Loretto Academy in Guelph. 1902 Completed formal education at St George Public School. 1902-07 Apprenticed to his uncle's jewellery firm, W. A. Clark, at 99 Upper Wyndham Street, Guelph. 1908 Left Guelph to live in New York and worked in the jewellery field. 1908-09 Studied at the Art Students League under William Merritt Chase, John Sloan, and George Luks. Sold jewellery at various New York firms. While living in New York, he married his first wife, Ruth, and they had a son (no further information available about his family). 1910-12 Head of jewellery repair department at Marcus and Company on 5th Avenue.

1912 Returned to live in Guelph. 1914-18 Premiere of The Gay Pierrots. Involved in comic opera productions in Guelph with Bruce Metcalfe. Toured shows in southern Ontario. 1916-18 Worked on munitions production at the Massey-Harris Company. 1918-19 Worked for jewellery companies in Toronto, including P.W. Ellis. 1919 Moved to New York and worked in the commercial jewellery field. Employed by the Omega Watch Company. 1923 Travelled to Geneva, Switzerland, where he met Paul Klee. 1924 Pursued his career as an artist and stage designer in New York. Worked as a freelance designer for engineering firms. 1926 Moved to Toledo. Exhibited in the Eighth Annual Exhibition of the Toledo Federation of Art Societies at the Toledo Museum of Art. Awarded first prize for modernist work. Painting Static was reviewed and illustrated in the Toledo Blade newspaper. 1927 Exhibited in the Ninth Annual Exhibition of the Toledo Federation of Art Societies at the Toledo Museum of Art. Mohr Art Galleries prize winner. Solo exhibition at Columbia House, Waterville (Toledo). Exhibited 150 paintings and works on paper. 1928 After divorcing his first wife, married Emily Smith, who had two daughters, Barbara and Elizabeth Pollet, from her marriage to artist Joseph Pollet. Member of the Art Klan Club of Toledo. Designed sets at the Stage Club for Trista, The Lady of the Weeping Willow and Christopher Morley's East of Eden. Moved to Los Angeles. 1929 Made set designs in Hollywood for films by Pathe and films directed by D.W. Griffith. Art director for George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman^ Pasadena Community Playhouse. 1930 Solo exhibition, Hagemeyer Studios, Pasadena, California. 1932 Moved to Guelph and lived at 310 Paisley Road. Pursued his painting practice. 1933 Moved to New York. Lived at 32 Grace Avenue, Great Neck, Long Island. 1935 Joined Design Associates, working as a freelance stage and industrial designer. 1935-37 Designed sets for Radio City Music Hall, working with stage designer Albert Johnson.

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Rolph with his stepdaughter Elizabeth Pollet, c. 1940

1937

Produced guided missile designs for the British War Office, London. 1938 Awarded a Guggenheim Foundation scholarship from the Museum of Non-objective Painting (later renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Part-time weekend lecturer from 1939 to 1946. 1939 The Museum of Non-objective Painting opened, and the painting Composition 1938-39 by Scarlett was included in the opening exhibition Art of Tomorrow. Declined to renew his contract with Design Associates to accept a Guggenheim Foundation scholarship that allowed him to paint full time. 1940 Appointed as chief lecturer at the Museum of Non-objective Painting. Associated with Canadian artists Edna Tacon, Paul Tacon, and Lawren Harris, who showed in group exhibitions with Scarlett at the Museum of Non-objective Painting. Represented by the Modern Age Art Gallery, New York, and by the Galerie Charpentier, Paris.

CHRONOLOGY

155

19 41 Began working part time as a designer and fabricator for Reliance Devices Inc. (later renamed the Swivelier Company Inc.), located at 30 Irving Place. 1943 Attended meetings with Hilla Rebay, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and Frank Lloyd Wright concerning Wright's design for the new museum. 1945 Testified on Rebay's behalf in a slander suit brought against her by artist Rudolf Bauer. 1946 Resigned as part-time lecturer at the museum because of job responsibilities at the Swivelier Company, which had opened a branch plant in Nanuet, New Jersey. 1947 Employed four days a week by the Swivelier Company, as a designer of lighting fixtures and mechanical devices for domestic and industrial markets, and for the aircraft and ship-building industries. 1949 Solomon R. Guggenheim died. The collecting and exhibiting focus of the Museum of Non-objective Painting changed to a more generalist approach. Scarlett lost his main source of income. 1 949-53 Visiting lecturer and critic through a Carnegie Scholarship Fund Grant at the College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois, during the annual Festival of Contemporary Arts (also exhibited in 1950, 1951, 1953). Cover illustration on the 1951 exhibition catalogue. 1952 Lived on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. 1955 Moved to Shady, New York (near Woodstock). Lived at 8 Reynolds Road. 1952-58 Taught painting at the Edgewater artists' colony in Edgewater, Florida, during the winter. 1961 Focused on making jewellery and continued to paint and work as a freelance designer. 1962 Retired from the Swivelier Company. 1962-63 Taught painting in Madeira, Portugal. 1965 Became an American citizen. Roger Jellinek writes article on Scarlett for Canadian Art magazine. 1977 Fifty paintings and works on paper donated by Scarlett to the University of Guelph Collection in connection with the exhibition Visitors, Exiles, and Residents: Guelph Artists Since 1827, University of Guelph Art Gallery, Guelph, Ontario. 1984 Died 7 August in Kingston, New York, at age ninety-five. 156

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APPENDIX III EXHIBITIONS

SOLO E X H I B I T I O N S

Note: The existence of a catalogue or exhibition brochure with the number of illustrated plates is indicated within parentheses following the applicable exhibition entry. The total number of Scarlett's works exhibited, if known, is also indicated. 1927

Rolph Scarlett, Oil Paintings, Watercolors and Pastels. Columbia House, Waterford (Toledo) (150). 1930 Rolph Scarlett, Oil Paintings and Watercolors. Hagemeyer Studios, Pasadena. 1945 Rolph Scarlett. Modern Age Art Gallery, New York. 1949 Rolph Scarlett. The Jacques Seligmann Gallery, New York. 1950 Rolph Scarlett: Twenty Watercolors. Mercer University Art Gallery, Atlanta. 1951 Rolph Scarlett. Paul Sargent Gallery, Eastern Illinois State College, Charleston.

1953 1973

1975 1979 1982 1983 1985 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1993

1994 1995 1997

20oo

158

APPENDIX

Rolph Scarlett: Twenty Non-objective Watercolors. Studio Guild, New York (20). Rolph Scarlett. The Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City. Rolph Scarlett. The Jacques Seligmann Gallery, New York. Rolph Scarlett. The Jacques Seligmann Gallery, New York. Rolph Scarlet^ Paintings and Jewelry. Jarvis Gallery, Woodstock, New York. Rolph Scarlett Jewelry. Jaro Gallery, New York. Listen with Your Eyes. Kleinert Gallery, Woodstock, New York. Rolph Scarlett: Works on Paper from c. 1940. Washburn Gallery, New York (exhibition brochure, 6 plates). Rolph Scarlett: Drawings and Watercolors. Washburn Gallery, New York (exhibition brochure, 9 plates). Rolph Scarlett^ Drawings and Watercolors. Washburn Gallery, New York. Rolph Scarletty Paintings and Works on Paper (II). Washburn Gallery, New York. Rolph Scarlett: A Selection of Prints from the Estate. Associated American Artists, New York (exhibition brochure). Rolph Scarlett: Designs for the Theatre. Stubbs Books & Prints, New York (checklist, 44). Rolph Scarlett. Struve Gallery, Chicago. (Catalogue, 13 plates) Rolph Scarlett 1889-1984. Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York. Rolph Scarlett) Early Master of the Non-objective. Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, New York (catalogue, 7 plates). Rolph Scarlett: Monoprints. Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York. Rolph Scarlett: Gouaches and Prints from the 19308 and 19405. Beth Urdang Gallery, Boston. Rolph Scarlett) Works on Paper c. 1945. Washburn Gallery, New York (exhibition brochure, 2 plates). Rolph Scarlett: Art) Design & Jewelry. Preview exhibition organized by the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph; Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy, Washington, DC. (exhibition brochure, 8 plates, 118). Rolph Scarlett (1889-1984). Fletcher Gallery, Woodstock, New York. Rolph Scarlett (1889-1984). Uptown Gallery, Downsview, Ontario (catalogue, 59 plates, 59).

Mi

2000-01 Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design & Jewelry. Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph, Ontario (148). Exhibition travelled to Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, British Columbia, 2001 (146). 2002 Rolph Scarlett: Abstract Expressionist Works from the 19403 and 19508. Fletcher Gallery, Woodstock, New York. 2003 Rolph Scarlett, Art, Design and Jewellery. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec (organized by the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph, Ontario) (92). GROUP EXHIBITIONS

1926 Eighth Annual Exhibition of the Toledo Federation of Art Societies. The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. 1927 Ninth Annual Exhibition of the Toledo Federation of Art Societies. The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. 1928 Tenth Annual Exhibition of the Toledo Federation of Art Societies. The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. 1939 Art of Tomorrow. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York (catalogue, i plate, i). Group Exhibition. Golden Gate Museum, San Francisco. 1940 Eight American Non-objective Painters: Penrod Centurion, John Ferren, Gerome Kamrowski, Hilla Rebay, Rolph Scarlett, Charles Smith, John von Wicht, Jean Xceron. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. Twelve American Non-objective Painters: Emil Bisttram, Florence Brillinger, Manuel Essman, Robert Gribbock, Noah Grossman, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, Hanany Meller, Agnes Pelton, Rouben Samberg, Rolph Scarlett. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. Twelve American Non-objective Painters: Florence Brillinger, Penrod Centurion, Josette Coeffin, Dwinell Grant, Noah Grossman, Hanany Meller, I. Rice Pereira, Hilla Rebay, Mary Ryan, Rolph Scarlett, Charles Smith, Jean Xceron. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. Ten American Non-objective Painters: Penrod Centurion, Josette Coeffin, Manuel Essman, Noah Grossman, Hanany Meller, Marie Menken, I. Rice Pereira, Mary Ryan, Rolph Scarlett, Charles G. Shaw. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. Group Exhibition. Galerie Carpentier, Paris.

EXHIBITIONS

159

1941 Ten American Non-objective Painters: Florence Brillinger, Olga Egeressy, Thomas Eldred, Edward Landon, Lloyd R. Ney, Mary Ryan, Rolph Scarlett, Roland St John, Edna Ta$on, Paul Ta$on. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. Eight Non-objective Painters: Florence Brillinger, Werner Drewes, Dwinell Grant, Maude I. Kerns, Edward Landon, Ted Price, Mary Ryan, Rolph Scarlett. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. Eight Non-objective Painters: Thomas Eldred, Dwinell Grant, Noah Grossman, Marguerite Hohenberg, Ladislas Moholy-Nagy, Otto Nebel, I. Rice Pereira, Rolph Scarlett. Museum of Nonobjective Painting, New York. 1942 American Non-objectives. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. 1945 Loan Exhibition. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. Group Exhibition. Modern Age Art Gallery, New York. 1947 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation: Zeitgenossische Kunst und Kunstpflege in U.S.A. Kunsthaus, Zurich, and Palais des BeauxArts, Paris. Group Exhibition. Galerie Carpentier, Paris. 1 947~5O Deuxieme Salon des realites nouvelles (Museum of Non-objective Painting touring exhibition). Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1947; Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle, as Gegendstandlose Malerei in Amerika, 1948; Munich, Kunstrunde, 1948; Mannheim, Stadtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1948 (catalogue); Frankfurt am Main, Kunstkabinett, 1948 (henceforth no catalogue); Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, October 1948; Braunschweig, Galerie Otto Rals, 1948; Hamburg, Kunstrunde, 1948; Hannover, Landesmuseum, 1949; Diisseldorf, Kunsthalle, 1949; Essen, 1949 (institution unknown); Karlsruhe, Kunsthalle, 1949; Bremerhaven, Firma Nordkunst, 1949; Munich, Amerika-Haus, 1950; Bremerhaven, Amerika-Haus, 1950; Hamburg, AmerikaHaus, 1950; Bremen, Amerika-Haus, 1950; Hamburg, AmerikaHaus, 1950; Braunschweig, Amerika-Haus, 1950. 1948 Group Exhibition. The Society for Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Group Exhibition. The University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

l6O

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1949

New Exhibition, American Non-objective Painters: Jordan Belson, Ilya Bolotowsky, Kenneth Campbell Svend Clausen, Hohannesian, Ibram Lassaw, Alice T. Mason, Lloyd Ney, Hilla Rebay, Rolph Scarlett, Zahara Schatz, Charles Smith, Lucia Stern, Robert Wolff, Jean Xceron. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York (checklist). New Exhibition, Non-objective American Painters. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New Yqrk. Tenth Anniversary Exhibition. Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York. Contemporary American Painting. College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois, Champaign (catalogue, i). 1950 University of Illinois Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. College of Fine and Applied Arts, Champaign, Illinois. American Painting Today. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1951 Contemporary American Painting. College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois, Champaign (catalogue, i plate, i). Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (catalogue, i). 1952 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (catalogue, i). 1953 Contemporary American Painting. College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois, Champaign (catalogue, i plate, i). 1955 Museum of Non-objective Painting Loan Exhibition^ Sarasota Art Association, Sarasota. 1968 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Acquisitions of the 19305 and the 19405: A Selection of Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings in Tribute to Hilla Rebay (1890-1967). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (catalogue, i). Group Exhibition. Sarasota Art Association, Sarasota. 1971 Non-objective Paintings. Manson-Williams Proctor Institute, Utica. 1977 Visitors, Exiles and Residents: Guelph Artists Since 1827. University of Guelph Art Gallery, Guelph, Ontario (catalogue, 4 plates, 11). 1980 Group Exhibition. Zabriskie Gallery, New York.

E X H I B I T I O N S

l6l

1983-85 Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America 1927-1944. Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. (Exhibition travelled to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) (catalogue, i plate, i). 1983 Under Glass. Washburn Gallery, New York. 1984 American Abstract Paintings from the 19305 and 19408. Washburn Gallery, New York. 1986 Modernist Canadian Prints. Associated American Artists, New York (catalogue, i plate, 3). 1988-89 The Ebsworth Collection, American Modernism, 1911-1947. The St Louis Art Museum, St Louis. (Exhibition travelled to Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Honolulu Academy of Fine Arts). 1988 Foundations of the American Avant-Garde. Struve Gallery, Chicago. American Abstract Drawing 1930-1987. Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Arkansas. Rudolf Bauer, Rolph Scarlett, Hilla Rebay. Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York. 1989 Past/Present. Washburn Gallery, New York. Modernism: Art and Design from 1925-1950. Struve Gallery, Chicago. Modern American and European Prints. Associated American Artists, New York. Hilla Rebay and Her Circle. Portico New York Inc., New York. 1990 In Review: Bolotowsky, Mason, Scarlett, Shaw. Washburn Gallery, New York (exhibition brochure, 2 plates). Under Fire. Washburn Gallery, New York. American Abstract Artists. Washburn Gallery, New York. Masters of Geometric Abstraction. Beth Urdang Fine Arts, Boston. 1991 Modern American Prints. Associated American Artists, New York. 1991-92 The Second Wave: American Abstractionists of the 19308 and 19408. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts. (Exhibition travelled to Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainsville; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington) (catalogue). 162

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1992-93 Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American AvantGarde, 1912-1950. Dayton Art Institute, Dayton. (Exhibition travelled to the Phillips Collection, Washington DC, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth) (catalogue, 3 plates, 3). The Uses of Geometry Then and Now. Snyder Fine Art, New York. (Catalogue, i plate) 1994 On Paper: Abstraction in American Art. Rosenfeld Fine Art, New York. 1995 New York: Two Different Perspectives. Beacon Hill Fine Art, New York. 1996 Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (catalogue, i). L'art deco: expression de la vie moderne 1925-1939. McCord Museum of Canadian History, Montreal (checklist, 9). The Museum of Non-objective Painting: American Abstract Art. Snyder Fine Art, New York (catalogue, 3 plates). Abstraction across America 1934-1946. Rosenfeld Gallery, New York. 1996-98 Champions of Modernism. The Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, Rochester, 1996; Mary Washington College Galleries, Fredericksburg, Virginia, 1996; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, 1997; Sunrise Museum, Charleston, West Virginia, 1997; Brevard Museum of Art and Science, Melbourne, Florida, 1998 (catalogue, 8 plates, 2). 1997 Singular Impressions^ The Monotype in America. National Museum of American Art, Washington DC (catalogue, i plate, i). Group Exhibition. Beth Urdang Fine Arts, Boston. 1997-2000 Designed for Delight: Alternative Aspects of Twentieth Century Decorative Arts. Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts, Montreal, 1997; Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, 1997; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, 1998; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 1998; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, 1999; Chiostro Del Bramante, Rome, 1999; Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam, 2000; Fundacion Pedro Barrie de la Maza, La Coruna, 2000; Espace Landowski, Boulogne-Billancourt, France, 2000 (catalogue, i plate, i).

E X H I B I T I O N S

163

1998 Against AH Odds: American Abstraction from the 19305 and 19408. David Findlay Jr Inc, New York. American Abstraction of the 1930$ and 19405. The J. Donald Nichols Collection, Wake Forest University Fine Arts Gallery, Winston-Salem (catalogue, 5 plates, 5). 1999 Abstraction: The 19405 and 19505. Washburn Gallery, New York. The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-1950. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (catalogue, i plate, i). Americans and Expatriots: Non-objective Painting in America 1920-1950. David Findlay Jr Inc, New York. 00oo America Gone Modern, From the Twenties to the Sixties. Spanierman Gallery, New York (catalogue, i plate). 2001 Abstract Expressionism: Expanding the Canons. Snyder Fine Art, New York. 20 02 Art for the New Collector. Spanierman Gallery, New York (catalogue). Kindred Spirits. David Findlay Jr Inc, New York. 2003 Hilla Rebay, Rudolf Bauer and Rolph Scarlett. Snyder Fine Art, New York. PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph, Ontario Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska, Lincoln Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario

164

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NOTES 1 Scarlett, interview by Harriet Tannin, 1979, as quoted in Ralph Scarlett: Early Master of the Non-objective, exhibition catalogue (Woodstock, New York: Woodstock Artists Association, 1993), n.p. 2 Colwill-Maddock, Diary of Fanny Colwill Culvert, 65. 3 Brimmell, "Famous Artist's plan finally takes root." 4 "True to Schedule," Guelph Evening Mercury and Advertiser. 5 Gray, John Marin by John Mann, 10, 49. 6 Haskill, The American Century, 145. 7 "Toledoans Painted These," Toledo Blade, 16. 8 Williams, "Translating Music into Visual Form." 9 Peterson, "Modernist Painter's Exhibit Is Riot of Shapes, Figures." 10 Levin and Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation, 10. 11 Ibid., 14-15. This article originally appeared as "The Allied Artists," by Roger Fry, The Nation 13 (2 August 1913): 676-7, and was quoted in Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1914; rev. ed. 1919). 12 Ibid., 16.

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

166

"Modernist Art Applied to Stage Club's Scenery," Toledo Sunday Times. Ibid., n.p. Burdick, Hansen, and Zonger, Contemporary Stage Design, 12. Bablet, The Revolutions of Stage Design, 47. Eynat-Confmo, Beyond the Mask, ix, 101,108. "Modernist Art Applied to Stage Club's Scenery," Toledo Sunday Times. Scarlett's designs for Lazarus Laughed were not used for the Pasadena Playhouse's 1928 and 1929 productions. These were designed by James Hyde. Floyd, The Plays of Eugene O'Neill, 319-20. Eynat-Confino, Beyond the Mask, 118. Shaw, Man and Superman - A Comedy and a Philosophy, 2004. [24 March 2004]. Scarlett, "Man and Superman," 2. Young, "Settings Win Attention in Shaw Play." Los Angeles California Record, "Man and Superman ... ?" Scarlett, interview with Nasby, 1976. Millier, "Realism or Abstraction?" Levin and Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation, 156,158. Grote, Bauhaus, 7. Scarlett, interview with Nasby, 1976. Loewy, Industrial Design, 52-3. Phillips, High Styles, 96. Grote, Bauhaus, 109. Whalen, "New York World's Fair Souvenir Program," 4. Ibid., 55. Abraham & Straus. "You've seen the Fair." Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 132. Correspondence with Steve Van Dulken, patents information, British Library, 20 August 2001. Interview with Michael Schwartz, president, Swivelier Company, 1997. Eidelberg, Design for Living, Furniture and Design 1950-2000, 22. Letter from Scarlett to Rebay, 26 January 1939, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 12. Barnett, Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, 15. Rosenthal, Abstraction in the Twentieth Century, 34. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 24,32-9.

NOTES

45 Hilla Rebay, "Non-Objectivity Is the Realm of the Spirit," 9. 46 Svendson, Guggenheim Museum. 47 Letter from Scarlett to Rebay, 8 April 1939, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 48 Zemans, Burrell, and Hunter, New Perspectives of Modernism in Canada, 30. Scarlett recalled that Canadian artist Isabel Mclaughlin regularly visited New York to see the exhibitions but never showed at the museum. 49 Levin and Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation, 88. 50 Murray, Origins of Abstraction in Canada, 14. 51 Hunter, Lawren Harris: A Painter's Progress, 41, 78. Hunter notes that Lawren Harris returned to Canada in 1940, settling in Vancouver, because a change in Canadian monetary policies no longer allowed him to direct funds to the United States. 52 Reid, A Concise History of Canadian Painting, 182. 53 Levin and Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation, 178. 54 Letter from Rebay to Scarlett, i September 1941, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 55 Interview with Catherine Corre, 23 February 1993, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives. 56 Zemans, Burrell, and Hunter, New Perspectives of Modernism in Canada, 32, 72. 57 Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 31. 58 Ibid., 3359 Letter from Scarlett to Rebay, i May 1939, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 60 Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 56. 61 Letter from Rebay to Scarlett, 31 March 1947, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 62 Scarlett, interview with Nasby, 1976. 63 Lukach, in Lane and Larsen, eds, Abstract Painting and Sculpture, 215. 64 Levin and Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation, 189. 65 Letter from Scarlett to Rebay, 28 September 1941, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 66 Letter from Rebay to Scarlett, i September 1941, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 67 Letter from Scarlett to Rebay, 28 September 1941, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 68 Letter from Scarlett, 8 April 1944, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum.

NOTES

167

69 Lukach, Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spiritual in Art, 179. 70 Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 44-8. 71 Letter from Scarlett to Rebay, i October 1945, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 72 Svendson, Guggenheim Museum. 73 Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 85. 74 Contemporary American Painting (1953), 218, 219. 75 Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 39. 76 Some paintings from the late 19408 have been mistakenly dated c. 1936. See Rolph Scarlett, exhibition catalogue, Struve Gallery, Chicago, for reproductions of two oil on canvas paintings, both Untitled, c. 1936 (35" x 31-5" and 22" x 29" respectively). The latter painting is also illustrated in Levin and Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation, 137. 77 Jellinek, "Rolph Scarlett," 25. 78 Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 50. 79 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 18. 80 Scarlett, The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History, 32. 81 Kramer, "Rolph Scarlett." 82 Letter from Scarlett to Rebay, 10 February 1945, Hilla Rebay Foundation Archive, Guggenheim Museum. 83 Jellinek, "Rolph Scarlett," 24. 84 Eidelberg, Messengers of Modernism, 15. 85 Brown, "Ed Wiener to Me," 13. 86 Scarlett, interview with Nasby, 1976. 87 Vogel, "Early Guggenheim Purchases for Sale."

168

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham & Straus. "You've seen the Fair ... now see our World's Fair plates." Advertisement. New York Times, 4 June 1939. Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1951. Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1952. Art for the New Collector. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2002: 31, 45. Bablet, Denis. The Revolutions of Stage Design in the 2oth Century. Paris: Leon Amiel, 1977. Barnett, Vivian Endicott. Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1983. Beuning, Margaret. "Presenting Artists of the Inward Realm." Art Digest 20 (July 1946): 20. Brimmell, Dick. "Early vision now coming to the fore." Guelph Tribune, 7 June 1995.

Brimmell, Helen. "Famous Artist's Plan Finally Takes Root." Guelph Mercury, 16 May 1977. - "Local Exhibit on Rolph Scarlett Open Now at Canadian Embassy." Guelph Mercury, 21 March 1997: Di. Bresnan, Debra. "Woodstock woman makes sure Rolph Scarlett is rediscovered." Daily Freeman, "Preview," 30 July 1993: 3, 9. Brown, Blanche R. "Ed Wiener to Me." In Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Flammarion, 1996. Burdick, Elizabeth B., Peggy C. Hansen, and Brenda Zonger, eds. Contemporary Stage Design. Middletown, Conn.: International Theater Institute of the United States, 1974. "By Local Talent." Guelph Evening Mercury and Advertiser, 31 January 1914. Camfield, William A. Francis Picabia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979"Canadian Embassy to Launch Touring Exhibition." At Guelph, 12 May 1977. Clark, Chris, ed. Guelph, 175 Years in the Making. Guelph, Ont: Guelph Tribune, 2002: 18. Colwill-Maddock, Marian Frye. Diary of Fanny Colwill Calvert, Portrait of an Artist 1948-1936. Guelph: Ampersand Printing, 1981. Contemporary American Painting. Exhibition catalogue. Illinois: University at Urbana-Champaign, College of Fine and Applied Arts, 1949: 2-27 to 4-3. Contemporary American Painting. Exhibition catalogue. Illinois: University at Urbana-Champaign, College of Fine and Applied Arts, 1950: 2-26 to 4-2. Contemporary American Painting. Exhibition catalogue. Illinois: University at Urbana-Champaign, College of Fine and Applied Arts, 1951: 3-4 to 4-15. Contemporary American Painting. Exhibition catalogue. Illinois: University at Urbana-Champaign, College of Fine and Applied Arts, 1953: 218-19. Davis, Cynthia J., ed. White Metal Universe: Navajo Silver from the Fred Harvey Collection. Exhibition catalogue. Phoenix, Ariz.: Heard Museum, 1981. Davis, Deborah. "We had Rolph of Guelph." Guelph Mercury, 30 October 1998. Drogseth, Dennis. "Group Show at WAA." Woodstock Times, 16 March 1978: 6. Duff, Marilyn. "Artist Gets Hero's Welcome." Guelph Mercury, 7 May 1977. Duncan, Alastair. American Art Deco. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986.

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Eidelberg, Martin, ed. Design 1935-1965, What Modern Was. Montreal: Le Musee Des Arts Decoratifs de Montreal/Harry N. Abrams, 1991. - Messengers of Modernism: American Studio Jewelry 1940-1960. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Flammarion, 1996. - Designed for Delight, Alternative Aspects of Twentieth-Century Decorative Arts. Paris: Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Flammarion, 1997. - Design for Living, Furniture and Design 1950-2000, The Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection. Paris: Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Flammarion, 2000. "Emily Scarlett." Woodstock Times, September 1986. "Exhibition at Seligmann's." Art Digest 23:23 (April 1949). Evans, Victoria. "Bertram Brooker's Theory of Art as Evinced in his 'The Seven Arts' Columns and Early Abstractions." The Journal of Canadian Art History 9:1 (1986). "Exhibition of Oils and Watercolors at J. Seligmann." Art News, 48:46 (April 1949). Eynat-Confino, Irene. Beyond the Mask: Gordon Craig, Movement, and the Actor. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. "First Nighter, The." Guelph Evening Mercury and Advertiser, 16 February 1914. Floyd, Virginia. The Plays of Eugene O'Neill. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985. Gay Pierrots, The. Theatre program. Guelph, Ont.: Griffin's Opera House, 1914. Gegendstandlose Malerie in Amerika. Exhibition catalogue for Stradrische Kuntshalle, Mannheim. New York: Museum of Non-objective Painting, 1947Ghione, Liza. "International." Canadian Art 14:1 (Spring 1997): 28. Glasser, Bruce. Homage to Hilla Rebay. Exhibition catalogue. Bridgeport: Carlson Gallery, University of Bridgeport, 1972. Gray, Cleve, ed. John Marin on John Marin. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, n.d. Grote, Ludwig. Bauhaus. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1969. Haskell, Barbara. Joseph Stella. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Harry N. Abrams, 1994.

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- The American Century, Art & Culture 1900-1950. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/W.W. Norton & Company, 1999: 292, 295. Hayes, Jeffrey R. Oscar Bluemner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Horowitz, Mikhail. "Artist assures her mentor a place in art history." Daily Freeman, 7 October 1983:11. Hunter, Andrew. Lawren Harris: A Painter's Progress. New York: Americas Society, 2000. In Review: Bolotowsky, Mason, Scarlett, Shaw. Exhibition brochure. New York: Washburn Gallery, 1990. Jellinek, Roger. "Rolph Scarlett-Twentieth-Century Painter." Canadian Art 22:3 (May/June 1965): 23-5. "Johan Hagemeyer." The Archive, Center for Creative Photography (University of Arizona), June 1982: plate 18. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1977. - Point and Line to Plane. New York: Dover Publications, 1979. Klee, Paul. Pedagogical Sketchbook. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953. Knott, Robert, ed. American Abstraction of the 19303 and 19405, The J. Donald Nichols Collection. Exhibition catalogue. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Fine Arts Gallery/Harry N. Abrams, 1999:123-7. Kramer, Hilton. "Rolph Scarlett." New York Times, March 1973. - "Saluting Pioneer Abstractionists: Revisionist Perspectives on American Abstract Painting." Art & Antiques, March 2003:134-5. Lago, Kathleen. "'Listen with Your Eyes!' Rolph Scarlett: He has Known Some of the Greats of his Time." Woodstock Times, 14 June 1979: 20-1. - "Non-objective Artist Can't Suppress Enthusiasm: Striving for Cosmic Order is Raison d'Art." Daily Freeman, 6 February 1979: 9. Lane, John R., and Susan C. Larsen, eds. Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America 1927-1944. New York: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh/Harry N. Abrams, 1983: 214, 215. Larson, Orville K. Contemporary Stage Design in the American Theatre from 1915 to 1960. Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1989.

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Leonard, R.L., and C.A. Glassgold. Modern American Design. New York: Acanthus Press, 1992. Levin, Gail, and Marianne Lorenz. Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde 1912-50. Dayton, Ohio: Dayton Art Institute, 1992:137-8,177-8. Loewy, Raymond. Industrial Design. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1979. Lombardi, D. Dominick, and Steven P. Lowy. Champions of Modernism: Nonobjective Art of the 19308 and 19405 and Its Legacy. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Portico, 1996:10,18, 20, 26. Long, Stephen. Modernist Canadian Prints. Exhibition brochure. New York: Associated American Artists, 1986. "Look and Listen." Daily Freeman, 6 February 1979. Lorenz, Marianne. Rolph Scarlett: Works on Paper c. 1945. Exhibition brochure. New York: Washburn Gallery, 1995. Lukach, Joan M. Hilla Rebay: In Search of the Spirit in Art. New York: George Braziller, 1983. - In Lane and Larsen, eds. Abstract painting and Sculpture. "Made in Guelph." Guelph Evening Mercury and Advertiser, 18 February 1914. "Man and Superman ...? Shavian play closing this week." Los Angeles California Record, 19 November 1929. Matheson, Dawn, and Rosemary Anderson, ed. Guelph: Perspectives on a Century of Change 1900-2000. Guelph, Ont: Guelph Historical Society, 2000: 83. Mays, John Bentley. "Abstraction's Staying Power." Globe and Mail, 24 February 1996: Ci6. Millier, Arthur. "Realism or Abstraction?" Los Angeles Sunday Times, 9 February 1930. "Modernist Art Applied to Stage Club's Scenery, Toledo Has Sincere Exponent Who Designed Sets." Toledo Sunday Times, June 1928. Moser, Joann. Singular Impressions, The Monotype in America. Washington DC: National Museum of American Art/Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997:137> 138,140,141Moure, Nancy Dustin. California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media. Los Angeles: Dustin Publications, 1988: 272, 273. Murray, Joan. Canadian Art in the Twentieth Century. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1999: 51-2.

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- Origins of Abstraction in Canada: Modernist Pioneers. Exhibition catalogue. Oshawa: Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 1994:14. Narel, Dorothy A. "Rolph Scarlett's Paintings." Kingston Daily Freeman, 20 August 1973. Nasby, Judith. "The Macdonald Stewart Art Centre." Canadian Collector, 5 September/October 1980: 34-8. - Rolph Scarlett, Art, Design & Jewelry. Exhibition brochure. Guelph, Ont.: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1997. - The University of Guelph Collection. Guelph: University of Guelph, 1980: 317-19- Visitors, Exiles, and Residents: Guelph Artists since 1827. Exhibition catalogue. Guelph, Ont.: University of Guelph, 1977: 6,17,18. Nasby, Judith, and Diane Charbonneau. "Rolph Scarlett, Discovering a Modernist Canadian Artist." Collage, the Magazine of the Friends of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Winter 2002-3: 37. Or am Eva, Percy Tacon: The Guggenheim Collection. Exhibition brochure. Mississauga: Art Gallery of Mississauga, 1996. Peters, Lisa M. America Gone Modern: From the Twenties to the Sixties. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2000: 37, 53. Peterson, Arthur. "Modernist Painter's Exhibit is Riot of Shapes, Figures; Futurist Art, as Depicted by Toledo Artist, Is Only a Jumbled Mass of Unrealities to the Uninitiated Layman." Toledo Sunday Times, 1926. Phillips, Lisa. High Styles. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1985. Pinchon, Edgcomb. "A Painter at Play" unpublished manuscript, dated November 1931. Rebay, Hilla. Art of Tomorrow: Fifth Catalogue of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-objective Painting. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1939:166. - Introduction to the exhibition catalogues. Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-objective Painting. First catalogue 1936, Charleston; second catalogue 1937, Philadelphia; third catalogue 1938, Charleston; fourth catalogue 1939, Baltimore. Reid, Dennis. A Concise History of Canadian Painting. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973:182. 174

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Rolph Scarlett: A Selection of Prints from the Estate. Exhibition brochure. New York: Associated American Artists, 1988. Rolph Scarlett: Drawings and Watercolors. Exhibition brochure. New York: Washburn Gallery, 1983. "Rolph Scarlett: Factless Precisionist at Museum of Non-objective Painting." Art Digest 18:18 (1943). Rolph Scarlett: Works from c 1940. Exhibition brochure. New York: Washburn Gallery, 1982. "Rolph Scarlett Retrospective in Woodstock." Antiques and the Arts Weekly, 27 August 1993:15. Rosenthal, Mark. Abstraction in the Twentieth Century. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1996. Scarlett, Rolph. With Harriet Tannin. The Baroness, the Mogul and the Forgotten History of the First Guggenheim Museum. From memoir taped in 1982. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2003. Scarlett, Ralph [sic]. "Man and Superman, A Comedy and a Philosophy by George Bernard Shaw. Introduction to playbill for the production 7-23 November 1929. Pasadena Community Playhouse News, 1929: 2. "Scarlett Letters." Hudson Valley Literary Supplement, 30 April 1992:12-14. Shaw, Bernard. Man and Superman. Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1903. Also, Bartleby.com (1999) at . Snyder, Gary. The Museum of Non-objective Painting, American Abstract Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Snyder Fine Art, 1996. -1937 American Abstract Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Snyder Fine Art, 1995. - The Uses of Geometry Then and Now. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Snyder Fine Art, 1993:14. Stead, Hilary. Guelph, A People's Heritage. Guelph, Ont.: City of Guelph, 2002: 45. Stern, Andrea Barrist. "Rolph Scarlett, his art, like his life, was purely inventive." Woodstock Times, 16 August 1984. Stifani, Cosimo. Rolph Scarlett (1889-1994). Exhibition catalogue. Downsview, Ont.: Uptown Gallery, 2000. Struve, Keith. Rolph Scarlett. Exhibition catalogue. Chicago: Struve Gallery, 1990. Svendson, Louise Averill. "Guggenheim Museum." Brochure, n.d.

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Tannin, Harriet, ed. Rolph Scarlett, Early Master of the Non-objective. Exhibition catalogue. Woodstock, N.Y.: Woodstock Artists Association, 1993. - Who Is Rolph Scarlett. Video interview, 1980. Twine, Tinker. "'Listen With Your Eyes,' Rolph Scarlett retrospective celebrates a modern master." Woodstock Times, 29 July 1993: i, 18,19. "Toledoans Painted These, Portrait in Oil and 'Static' among Exhibits." Toledo Blade, 26 April 1926:16. "True to Schedule." The Gay Pierrots and the Good Ship 'Spankhurst' Arrived Last Night and Took the Guelph First Nighters by Storm." Guelph Evening Mercury and Advertiser, 17 February 1914. Vogel, Carol. "Early Guggenheim Purchases for Sale." New York Times, 3 May 1996. Webster, Judith, ed. "Rolph Scarlett: Art, Design, and Jewelry." Canada Quarterly 5:2 (July 1997): 3Whalen, Grover A. Introduction to New York World's Fair souvenir program. New York: Sun Dial Press, 1939. Williams, Glen. "Translating Music into Visual Form: The Influence of Music on the Work of Bertram Brooker." Canadian Art Review 27:1-2 (2000): 111-22. Wolf, Tom. Woodstock's Art Heritage: The Permanent Collection of the Woodstock Artists Association. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1987:128, 129. "World of Form: Exhibition at 4 Directions." Art News 54 (May 1955): 48. Young, Bob. "Settings Win Attention in Shaw Play." Pasadena Star News, 8 November 1929. Zemans, Joyce, Elizabeth Burrell, and Elizabeth Hunter. New Perspectives of Modernism in Canada: Kathleen Munn and Edna Ta$on. Exhibition catalogue. Toronto: Art Gallery of York University/ Editions du GREF, 1988.

176

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX abstraction: stage design, 9,11, 23; expressionism, 26, 82; geometric, 23> 45> 57> 60, 62, 65, 78, 82, 89,100. See also non-objective style aesthetic: compositional techniques, 11-12, 60, 96, 98-9; figurative works, 16, 21, 26, 56, 82; symbolism, 18, 60. See also non-objective style Albers, Josef (1888-1976), 33 amateur threatre, 17 Appia, Adolphe (1962-28), 18 apprenticeships, 4, 89 Armitage, Elise Cavanna (1905-62), 26 Armory Show, 16 art deco, 11, 45, 49 art nouveau, 5

Art Students League, 5 auctions, 108-9 avant-garde, 60, no Bakelite Corporation. See plastics Bauer, Rudolf (1889-1953), 60-2, 64, 67, 69, 72-3,78, 78-9,108-9 Bauhaus School, 29,32-3, 41, 43, 45-6, 54 Bel Geddes, Norman (1893-1958), 45-6 Bertoia, Harry (1915-78), 34, 98 Bisttram, Emil (1895-1976), 16 Bluemner, Oscar (1867-1938), 7, 9 Breuer, Marcel (1902-81), 32, 41, 43 Brooker, Bertram (1888-1955), 12,16

Calder, Alexander (1898-1976), 98 Centurion, Penrod (1950-), 67 Chase, William Merritt (1849-1916), 5 Chicago Institute of Design. See Bauhaus School commissions, 5, 74, 98 constructivism, 11-12,17, 23, 57, 89, 93, 98,104,106 Craig, Edward Gordon (1872-1966), 18, 21, 24 cubism, 7, 9,16, 75, 98 Dali, Salvador (1904-89), 103 decorative arts, 34, no de Patta, Margaret (1902-64), 100 Depression, the, 27,33-4,39, no design: amusement park rides, 48-52; costumes, 29,32,32, 56; domestic furniture and appliances, u> 33>34-52; film, 21, 23, 27; freelance, 18, 29,33, 57, 88; industrial, n > 33~46> 65, 78, no; mechanical devices, 54-5; military, 52,33, 57; stage design, 9,17, 23-5, 27, 29 drawings, 7,10 Dreyfuss, Henry (1904-72), 45-6 Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968), 16, 60 early practice, 4-17, 89 Eddy, Arthur Jerome (1859-1920), 16-17 education. See teaching appointments film, 21, 23, 27 Frankl, Paul T. (1887-1958), 11 Fry, Roger (1866-1934), 16-17

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INDEX

futurism, 12,15,17 galleries: Art Gallery of Ontario (also Art Gallery of Toronto), 63-4; Braxton Gallery, 26-7; Carnegie Institute, 108; Columbia House, 12; Gary Snyder Fine Art, 109; Gibbes Memorial Art Gallery, 62; Jacques Seligmann Gallery, 87,108; Jarvis Gallery, 96; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 109; Macdonald Stewart Art Centre (also University of Guelph Art Gallery), 16, 64,108; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (also Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts), 64, no; PhotoSecession Gallery, 7; Toledo Museum of Art, 12,15; Washburn Gallery, 108; Whitney Museum of American Art, 5, 82,109. See also Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Gorky, Arshile (1904-48), 82 Gottlieb, Adolph (1903-74), 82 gouache. See painting Grant, Dwinell (1912-91), 67, 70 Griffin's Opera House, 5 Griffith, D.W. (1875-1948), 23 Guelph, Ontario, 4-5, 7-9,16, 89 Guggenheim, Solomon R. See Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum guided missile, 52,53 Hagemeyer, Johan (1884-1962), 24-25,24-35,27 Harris, Lawren (1885-1970), 63 Jellinek, Roger, 64, 96 jewellery, 7,12, 27,28, 74, 78, 89-110

Johnson, Edward (1878-1959), 5 Jonson, Raymond (1891-1982), 16 Kandinsky, Vasily (1866-1944), 2, 16-17, 26, 32, 57-64, 61, 87,109 Klee, Paul (1879-1940), 7, 9 Kramer, Sam (1913-64), 100 linocuts. See printmaking Loewy, Raymond (1893-1986), 33-4, 41, 46, 54 Luks, George (1866-1933), 5 McLaren, Norman (1914-87), 63 Marin, John (1870-1953), 7 Matisse, Henri (1869-1954), 16 Meierhold, Vsevolod (1874-1940), 11 Merrild, Knud (1894-1954), 26 Metcalfe, Bruce, 5, 93 Millier, Arthur (1893-1975), 25, 27 modernism, 7,16, 26-9,34-46 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo (1895-1946), 32-3, 62, 67,109 monoprints. See printmaking Museum of Non-objective Painting. See Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum musical influences 12,15-17, 24, 78, 82, 86-7 New Bauhaus. See Bauhaus School New York World's Fair (1939), 29, 46-52 non-objective style, 32-3, 47, 60, 62, 65, 72, 75-8, 82, 88,107 O'Keeffe, Georgia (1887-1986), 26-7 O'Neill, Eugene (1888-1953), 18

painting, 7,8,12, 21-2, 34, 57-9, 64-5, 78, 86-9, 92, 95, 98-9,108, no patents, 52 Picabia, Francis (1879-1953), 16, 60 Pollock, Jackson (1912-56), 62, 82 Popova, Liubov (1889-1924), 11-12, 29 post-impressionism, 16 post-modernism. See modernism printmaking, 6, 9, 64, 79, 95,108 Prohibition. See Depression, the prototypes, 98,100 precisionists, the, n Puiforcat, Jean (1897-1945), 34 Rebay, Hilla (1890-1967), 57, 60-5, 67, 69-76,75, 78, 88,108-9 religious subjects, 18,20, 21,22. See also theology reviews: painting, 25, 27, 64, 87, 96, 108; theatre, 5, 23-5 Rice Pereira, Irene (1907-71), 67 Schlemmer, Oskar (1888-1943), 29, 33 Sennhauser, John (1907-78), 67 Sheeler, Charles (1883-1965), 11 Shore, Henrietta (1880-1963), 26-7 Sloan, John (1871-1951), 5, 95 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 16, 57, 60, 62, 64-5, 67, 70, 72-6, 100,108 spiritualism. See theosophy stage productions. See design; theatrical productions Stella, Joseph (1877-1946), 7, n stencils. See printmaking Stieglitz, Alfred (1864-1946), 7,16 surrealism, 82, 98,103

INDEX

179

Swivelier Company Inc., 54,55, 73, 88 synthetic materials: gems, 89, 90-1, 93,94; plastics, 32,34,39, 46-8 Tacon, Edna (1913-80), 63, 65,69 teaching appointments, 54, 62-3, 72-3, 87-8 theatrical productions, 5,17; Cyrano, 29,50; Hoboken Blues, 11-12,14; £mg Lear, 18,19; Lazarus Laughed, 18,20, 21,22,103-4; Mfltt flttd Superman, 21, 23,24, 25, 29; Miracle, 29,51; Parre/ P05f, 29,50 theosophy, 60, 62-3, 69-70; atheist beliefs, 16, 21,70, 87 Transcendental Painting Group, 63

ISO

INDEX

van der Rohe, Mies (1886-1969), 32 Warrener, Lowrie (1900-83), 16 wartime practice, 7,34, 48-9>5°> 52-3, 82, 98 watercolours. See painting Weber, Kem (1889-1963), 11, 45 Weston, Edward (1886-1958), 27 Wiener, Ed (1918-91), 100 woodcut. See printmaking Wright, Frank Lloyd (1869-1959), 76 Xceron, Jean (1890-1967), 67 Zorach, William (1887-1966), 5

JUDITH NASBY

Judith Nasby has been a curator and public art gallery director for more than twenty-five years. As curator at the University of Guelph in Ontario, she directed the University Art Gallery until 1975, when she began working on the development of the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. As director/curator, she has been responsible for developing one of the most comprehensive sculpture parks in Canada and overseeing the development of a 4,000-piece permanent collection with specializations in contemporary Canadian silver and Inuit drawings. She has curated over 100 exhibitions and written fifty pieces for publication, including a 300-page catalogue of the University of Guelph collection. She has lectured and toured exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Iceland, Denmark, India, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and China. Her book Irene Avaalaaqiaq: Myth and Reality was published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2002. In 2002 she was a visiting curator at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in Chongqing, China, and in 2003 a distinguished international visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She is an adjunct professor in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph and in 2001 was named Woman of Distinction in Arts and Culture YMCA-YWCA.