Image courtesy of the Museum of Wisconsin Art
Ruth Grotenrath 'Modern Madonna'
Ruth Grotenrath 'Modern Madonna', 1935, Casein on Masonite
Although Ruth Grotenrath and Schomer Lichtner were happily married, they kept their artmaking separate. According to Warehouse Art Museum codirector John Shannon, the two Wisconsin artists maintained separate studios and promised to enter each other’s workplaces “by invitation only.”
Grotenrath and Lichtner exhibited together during their long marriage, which began in 1934 and ended with her death in 1988, but Grotenrath had only one solo show—a posthumous career highlight—until now. The Warehouse’s “Rediscovering Ruth Grotenrath: All Things Belong to the Earth” is the first comprehensive retrospective of her work, beginning with a black-and-white woodcut for her Riverside High School yearbook and ending with paintings completed at the conclusion of her life.
As curator Annemarie Sawkins explains, the exhibit is chronological in part, but primarily arranged with visual intent. Grotenrath’s work is spaciously spread across the commodious gallery, allowing the eye to rest on particular images without distraction. There is no visual overload, but there is plenty to see.
One of “Rediscovering’s” dominant images, for its size as well as its theme, Modern Madonna (1935), betrays the influence of Diego Rivera and other politically charged public artists of that era. The mother at the painting’s heart, grasping a screaming child to her breast, is menaced on all sides by bayonets and objects forming a swastika and a fasces; the hand of capitalism dispenses gold coins as a leering demon snickers over her shoulder. It’s a Roman Catholic martyrology revised to represent the torments of humanity on the road to World War II.
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Grotenrath never painted anything like that again, but Modern Madonna bears some ideological links to the work for which she is often remembered. As an employee of the New Deal WPA, she was hired by the federal government to adorn the walls of schools, post offices and other public places with murals. “Rediscovering” includes sketches for one of her murals, the charcoal outlines of heroic laborers rebuilding America in the face of the Great Depression.
But soon enough, other influences supplanted social realism. “They went to Taliesin frequently,” Shannon says of Grotenrath and Lichtner, who were exposed to Frank Lloyd Wright’s enthusiasm for Japanese printmaking and an aesthetic that transposed those clean lines and blank spaces to the forms suggested by the Midwest landscape. The couple also took the train to Chicago where they spent many hours at the Art Institute studying the European modernists whose influence can be seen in Grotenrath’s bold colors and rejection of Renaissance perspective.
Image courtesy of the Museum of Wisconsin Art
Ruth Grotenrath 'Yuki'
Ruth Grotenrath 'Yuki', ca. 1970,Casein on paper
Along one wall of “Rediscovering” a series of Grotenrath’s still lifes form a timeline of artistic development. From the careful realism of her early years, she developed a vibrancy of vital colors and a dense layering of objects. She was a ceramicist and while only a few of her ceramics are on display, her paintings often include her distinctive tilework along with one of her cats—and the persistent appearance of split pears. Sawkins and Shannon offered no interpretation of those split pears beyond suggesting that Grotenrath liked their shape and form.
Grotenrath’s landscapes mirror the Wisconsin surroundings she knew so well. One in particular is outstanding for size, color and content. Meadows (Lorrie Otto’s Garden) (1970) reflects on her friendship with the environmentalist whose garden she depicts as an explosion of leaves and flowers, trunks and stems—plants of all sorts in outrageous bursts of color but arranged in different levels of density so that the eye can discern the individual components.
At the gallery’s entranceway is an exhibit within the exhibition, a wall of black-and-white photographs by the Warehouse’s codirector Jan Serr of Grotenrath and Lichtner at home in 1985. The visual preface gives a sense for a happy marriage in a creative environment. Their wooden kitchen table, fashioned by Lichnter, is visible as a flat red plane in many of Grotenrath’s paintings.
Assembled from the collections of several museums and private collectors, including many objects never exhibited before, “Rediscovering Ruth Grotenrath: All Things Belong to This Earth” runs through March 31 at the Warehouse Art Museum, 1635 W. St. Paul St. For more information, visit wammke.org.
