Ruth Vollmer was an early and distinctive figure among the American artists who turned toward geometric and minimalist forms during the 1960s and 1970s. A generation older than such artists as Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Sol LeWitt, Vollmer had considerable influence within this artistic circle.
Background
Born in Germany on January 12, 1903, Vollmer immigrated to the United States with her husband in 1935. Her father, Ludwig Landshoff, was a musicologist and conductor and her mother, Phillipine Landshoff, was an opera singer. Their family was Jewish.
Career
At the age of 19 Ruth began to work as an artist and took the advice of her father to draw every day. She also had many connections to the teachers and students at the Bauhaus. Her first recognition came from her department store window displays and large-scale retail tableaux for Bonwit Teller, Lord & Taylor, and Tiffany. For one such display she constructed animals and mannequins simply from wire netting, realizing her objective “to exhibit, commercially, wire sculpture for its own beauty.”
Thus, from the early years of her career, Vollmer’s creativity was marked by the fusion of apparently contrasting concepts: mathematical precision and natural organicism; materials in both raw and manipulated states; elegance and casualness. Her work ranged over many media including ceramic, wood, metal, and acrylic plastic and the majority of her sculpture embodied an intellectual rigor expressed in the exacting craftsmanship of geometric solids, intersecting planes, and complex, curved surfaces.
In 1943, Vollmer became a United States citizen. In 1944 she received a commission from the Museum of Modern Art for its fifteenth anniversary exhibition, "Art in Progress." Vollmer continued to work with wire mesh and exhibited her work “Composition in Space” at the Museum of Modern Art in their 1948 exhibition "Elements of Stage Design."
In 1950, she was commissioned to create a mural for the lobby of 575 Madison, where she created a large wall relief that used wire rods and wire mesh to play with light, texture, and transparency. Vollmer visited Giacometti for a second time during the summer of 1951. During the 1950s she begins to work with clay as well. Additionally, in 1954 she began to teach at the Children's Art Center at the Fieldston School in Riverdale and continued to teach until the mid-sixties.
Vollmer handled various materials to reveal their inherent visual interest, and sometimes shaped them into forms that seemed counterintuitive to their expected functions: wood turned into a screw, or plastic fashioned to resemble a mollusk’s shell. Vollmer’s expansive view of geometry can be seen in a short musing on that basic form, the sphere.
In 1960, she participated in the NYU discussion series "Artists on Art" with her friend Robert Motherwell. 1960 proved to be a significant for Ruth Vollmer- she had her first solo exhibition at Betty Parson's Section Eleven gallery space. Throughout the 1960s Vollmer continued to work with bronze and show her work Betty Parsons Gallery. By 1970 Vollmer's practice had taken on a new dimension, exploring complex geometrical forms and mathematical concepts, particularly spirals and platonic solids.
In 1971 Ruth Vollmer participated in the protest of the cancellation of the Hans Haacke at The Solomon R. Guggenheim exhibition by writing a letter to the director, Thomas Messer. In 1976, she had a large one-person exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art. In 1982, Ruth Vollmer died after a long battle with Alzheimer's. A majority of her large personal art collection of over one hundred sculptures, paintings, and drawings was donated to MoMA. Her personal art collection included works by Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and Chryssa. The artist died on January 1, 1982 in New York City, New York, United States.
Ruth Vollmer adhered to the artistic traditions of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism.
Quotations:
“Being immersed in the mystery of the sphere, I can vaguely perceive a variety of manifestations: cosmic and earthly, biological and crystalline. Of all forms, the sphere is the most purely three-dimensional… It touches any plane at only one point. And a sphere can never be constructed from planes.”
Membership
In 1963, she joined the American Abstract Artists and showed her in their exhibitions from 1963 on.
Connections
In 1930 Ruth married a pediatrician named Hermann Vollmer, whom she met in Berlin. Ruth and Hermann moved from Germany to New York in 1935.