Rolph scarlett biography

Born on June 13, 1889 in Guelph, Canada, and into an artistic family, Rolph Scarlett spent his teenage years as an apprentice in his uncle's jewelry firm.
Rolph Scarlett was a consummate explorer of twentieth-century abstract painting.
During Rolph Scarlett's remarkable seventy-five year career he was an avant-garde abstract painter, an innovative set designer, an industrial designer.

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Rolph Scarlett Canadian, 1889-1984

Rolph Scarlett was a consummate explorer of twentieth-century abstract painting. Never afraid of trying new styles, curious and opinionated, constantly engaged with the world around him while steadfastly aware that he was on his own path and his alone, Scarlett more than once proved to be at the artistic zeitgeist of the eras in which he lived. Exposed very early on to the work of Paul Klee through a chance meeting in Europe with the artist himself, Scarlett took up abstraction with a fervor that never diminished during his long and impressive career. To create something that had never existed before: this was Scarlett’s great cause. And that is what is most obvious when you look at Scarlett’s work—you have never seen anything quite like it.

Scarlett was Canadian-born, came of age in the Midwest, and spent few important years in Hollywood, where he designed stage sets. His work from this early period echoes Klee’s use of color, his confidence in naïve, primitive forms, and his blend of abstraction and

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Composition with yellow discs
Gouache on paper, circa 1940
8 x 13 inches

Biography

Rolph Scarlett was born in 1889, in Guelph, Ontario. Painter and designer of stage sets, industrial products and jewelry, was a favorite artist of Hilla Rebay, the painter who founded the Museum of Non-Objective Painting that eventually became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Scarlett travelled to New York in 1913 where he viewed the Armory Show. He came away fascinated with modern art.

Publishers abstract: During Rolph Scarletts remarkable seventy-five year career he was an avant-garde abstract painter, an innovative set designer, an industrial designer and the creator of unique sculptural jewellery in the American modernist tradition. In this beautifully illustrated book, Judith Nasby presents a retrospective of his life and work. Scarlett was born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1889. By the time he moved to the United States in 1918 he had already had some experience with the techniques of painting, jewellery, and designing for the stage which he put to good use in his career in New York. During

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The first critical retrospective of Rolph Scarlett's extraordinary achievements.

During Rolph Scarlett's remarkable seventy-five year career he was an avant-garde abstract painter, an innovative set designer, an industrial designer, and the creator of unique sculptural jewellery in the American modernist tradition. In this beautifully illustrated book Judith Nasby presents a retrospective of his life and work.

Scarlett was born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1889. By the time he moved to the United States in 1918 he had already had some experience with the techniques of painting, jewellery, and designing for the stage which he put to good use in his career in New York. During the 1930s and 1940s Scarlett was a leading practitioner of geometric abstraction, with sixty of his paintings in the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). A geometric sensibility also inspired the innovative, constructionist stage designs that he created for plays such as George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" (1929). As an industrial designer during the 193