Artists

Louis Ritman

Russian, 1889-1963

Louis Ritman, one of six sons born in Kamenets-Podolski, Russia, moved with his family to Chicago sometime in late 1903 or early 1904. After a brief period with Wellington J. Reynolds at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, Ritman continued his studies under John H. Vanderpoel, the mainstay of the Chicago art community, at the Art Institute of Chicago. He studied briefly under William Merritt Chase at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts then he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian in Paris (1909). One of Ritman’s early works, La toilette (location unknown) was accepted by the Salon jury in 1911.

That spring or summer, he came under the influence of Claude Monet and American impressionist painter-friends in Giverny; he was lured by the intimism that was practiced by Karl Albert Buehr, Richard E. Miller, Lawton Parker, Frederick Frieseke, Guy Rose, and Alson Skinner Clark, the genre that featured artfully posed female models in intimate, decorative interiors, usually illuminated by natural light. Ritman would return to Giverny for five summer seasons (1912-16). His earliest works show a conservative assimilation of impressionism but soon Ritman accomplished “the technique of producing a typical Giverny-type flower garden in the manner of Frieseke or any other Monet disciple” (Richard H. Love, Louis Ritman from Chicago to Giverny, 1989, p. 163). The period between 1912 and 1918 should be regarded as Ritman’s peak. He developed compositions with an abundance of patterns and a great degree of abstraction, for example in Pink and Blue (1913), there is a deliberate play on real flowers and patterned wallpaper flowers, in close juxtaposition. The rectangular patterns on the teapot have very little to do with naturalistic reflections. Although the apples and checkered tablecloth are reflected in Pink and Blue’s teapot, the play of rectangles on its surface transforms it into an ambiguous object. Here, Ritman was experimenting in post-impressionism at a time when the artist had only recently plunged into impressionism.

Back in America during the war years, Louis Ritman was offered a one-man show at the Art Institute of Chicago. He exhibited his works in Parker’s Chicago studio in 1914 and a year later, two of Ritman’s paintings were on display at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco where he won a silver medal. One of Ritman’s masterpieces, Lady by a Window, shows a continued application of the shingle stroke, a heavier use of the palette knife, and forms broken into rectangular sections — overall a return to Cézannesque formalism. His mature works demonstrate a masterful compromise between realism — rendering the effects of natural light — and abstractionism. Ritman won the Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy in 1921. Then, after twenty-one years of prestigious activity as a painter in Paris, Ritman was persuaded by Robert B. Harshe of the Art Institute of Chicago to accept the position of professor of painting in 1930. Thirty years later, Ritman moved with his wife Marguerita Steffenson Ritman, a professor of sociology, to Winona, Minnesota, where he died in 1963.