Celebrating Central Park and those who gather within its green borders, Picturing Central Park: Paintings by Janet Ruttenberg will be on view at the Museum of the City of New York from September 13, 2013 to January 5, 2014.

For more than a dozen years, New Yorker Janet Ruttenberg has been a quiet but remarkable fixture in Central Park, sketching the scenery on massive sheets of paper laid on the ground and then returning to her nearby studio to transform them into major works of art, but never exhibiting them publicly until now.

“Until this week, Janet Ruttenberg’s work has been a hidden treasure,” said Susan Henshaw Jones, Ronay Menschel Director of the Museum of the City of New York. “This is the chance for all New Yorkers – and visitors from around the world – to discover and celebrate her bold and fantastical paintings and watercolor studies. They are simply amazing!”

Nine works on paper and eight paintings, two with projected video, are in the exhibition. These large-scale works-most measuring 15 feet in width-are supplemented by a selection of preparatory photographs and drawings, depicting the park in the height of its spring, summer, and fall glory. Ruttenberg concentrates on three places:

Ruttenberg concentrates her exploration of the park and its people on three places:

  • Most frequently depicted is Sheep Meadow, painted from a position under a grand American Elm tree near Minerals Pavilion, looking south across the 15-acre expanse of lawn packed with people, toward the Central Park South skyline that floats like a crown above the meadow.
  • Ruttenberg also paints and creates video at Literary Walk around the statue of Shakespeare, with its devoted cadre of summer-evening tango dancers. The projected video on the paintings makes the dance come alive with movement and tango music, sung by Oscar de la Renta.
  • A third group of works incorporates Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s equestrian statue of General Sherman, which stands in the north half of Grand Army Plaza, separated from the park’s southeast entrance by a small street, but officially part of the park. While Ruttenberg is drawn to areas where people congregate in her first two locations, in these pieces she focuses on the glorious white-blooming pear trees that surrounded the gilded statue of Sherman before a freak storm felled them in October 2011.

On close inspection, however, the works reveal themselves to be filled with human details that transport them beyond the level of simple landscape. For Ruttenberg, the park is a backdrop for her real preoccupation: the people. It is the blend-the variety-that inspires her. Of her work in the park she says, “that’s really the message…the mix of the nationalities of the world.”

Born Janet Lee Kadesky in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1931, Ruttenberg began painting and drawing as a child. Early encouragement by schoolteachers and an uncle who was a painter set her on the path at a young age to become an artist. While still in school in Iowa, she took summer courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. She left Iowa to spend her high school years at Emma Willard, in Troy, New York, returning for college in 1949 to study printmaking with Argentinean master Mauricio Lasansky at the University of Iowa. Marriage in 1951 to Derald Ruttenberg cut short her years at the University, and she moved to Chicago with her husband, continuing her study there.

Ruttenberg’s training has been exceptionally varied, beginning with her uncle’s tutelage in old-master painting techniques, to the study of photography, sculpture, portraiture, bookbinding, paper-making, silkscreen, and intaglio. After moving to New York City in 1965 with her husband and four children, she divided her work between painting and printmaking, eventually becoming a master printer.

Ruttenberg has chosen never to show or sell her works, and this is her first museum exhibition; clearly, her ambitions are not careerist but artistic. She is an indefatigable worker all the same. She has been steadily producing pieces in paint, paper, and stainless steel for decades, but it was Central Park, late in life, that gave her what she had been seeking: “nonstop subject matter.” When New York’s magnificent park was designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, their twin objectives were to create a pastoral refuge from the stresses of urban life, as well as a place to socialize. While some today still find sanctuary in its quieter corners, as increasing numbers of people flock there, the park has become a kind of constantly shifting piece of performance art. Green and glorious under the care of the Central Park Conservancy for the past 23 years, the park now receives a staggering 40 million visits a year, providing more than enough material for an artist who finds painting faces and bodies to be of “unending interest.”

These legions of park-goers may see Ruttenberg painting in her usual spot at the top of the Meadow, but because she is so steadfastly guarded, they don’t know who she is. She sometimes adopts the moniker “August Parker,” because of the amount of time she spends in the park in late summer. In a sense, like many New York fixtures, she is hidden in plain sight, and she embraces the anonymity.

Central Park Works
The story of Ruttenberg’s fascination with the park and its people begins with the painting Roller Blades, the first work in the series and arguably the most arresting. Walking through the park one day she saw “a lovely lady” seated on a quilt in Sheep Meadow, torso partially bare, wearing roller blades. To the artist, this woman “represents New York-her mixture of nationalities, freedom, and beauty.” Ruttenberg headed immediately to her studio, and the painting poured out of her, all in one session, onto a 7-by-15-foot canvas. It was made without studies, photographs, or sketches, purely from memory and imagination. In the years before, she had been painting portraits, and the woman in Roller Blades is the most “portrait-like” of all the figures in her park paintings, underscored by the use of flesh tones, while the rest of the figures are cast in blue, against the high-keyed yellow-green of the grass. Looking at this painting-the only one in the series not derived from plein-air studies-some might label Ruttenberg a fabulist. Though the central subject is based on an actual person, most of the surrounding figures are borrowed from the long history of art, in which Ruttenberg is steeped. Amongst the regular (and some quite irregular) park-goers, she has sprinkled a pair of ancient Egyptians here, a group from Raphael or a girl from Seurat there, and a host of others from art through the centuries, resulting in quite an exotic gathering on Sheep Meadow lawn.

After her inspired experience with this first painting, Ruttenberg realized the park subject matter was so rich she had to continue working there. She returned to Central Park again and again, finding a wealth of faces and bodies to paint and a quintessential New York set in which to place them: meadow, surrounding trees, and the ever-evolving midtown skyline beyond. In the rest of the series, she continues to work on this epic scale both on paper and canvas, deeming the subject dictates the size.

Feeling she needed to master the form of this stage-set for her paintings of people in the park, Ruttenberg next began to make enormous watercolors of Sheep Meadow, always intended as studies for future oil paintings. In such works as Study #2 and Study #8, she addresses various pictorial problems of perspective, scale, spatial recession, light and shadow, color, skyline composition, and figure placement. These studies were made in numerical sequence and are unidealized descriptions of the scene spread out before her, based on close observation. In concert with endless data accumulated in thousands of preparatory photographs, tiny watercolor sketches, and videos she makes of figures and elements of the landscape, the oil paintings then take shape. The large-scale watercolor studies provide the underlying structure and the other preparatory works the specifics for her highly original oil paintings. Though the large watercolors hold their own as finished works-panoramic landscapes of Meadow and its southern skyline-the artist insists they are means to the end of the paintings on canvas.

In the paintings she modifies and adjusts the information from the studies, sometimes putting aside the facts of the scene to follow a more visionary approach. Featuring such idiosyncrasies as shaped canvases with morning glories spilling off the side, whimsical crowning elements above the frame, projected video of dancers or birds that “marries with the painting” underneath, frames papered in pages from the NYC phonebook, collage elements of mixed-up scale, a palette of exceptionally high-keyed color, and LED backlighting that makes the canvas glow and twinkle through little pin pricks, some of the paintings become so abstract they verge on the hallucinatory. In Judgment of Paris with Morning Glories, for example, the three-dimensional Sheep Meadow setting is almost completely obscured by a fantastical, surface-focused collage of twining vines and enormous leaves, randomly placed bits of photographed chain-link fence, flying morning glory blossoms, and scattered vignettes of painted and photographed figures, all of which swirl around the large central figures that are themselves borrowed from The Judgment of Paris, an iconic Renaissance print drawn by Raphael and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi in the early 16th century.

Central Park was conceived by Olmsted and Vaux as a democratic gathering spot for all New Yorkers, and in Ruttenberg’s paintings people of all ages, races, and orientations cluster on blankets across the meadow, dance around the Shakespeare statue, and connect. Proving the park to be, 154 years after first opening to the public, a magnificent garden party open to all.

 Ruttenberg’s Process and Working Method
The large-scale panoramic watercolor studies of Sheep Meadow are made on-site in the park, the paper always in the same spot, centered on a projecting root of an American Elm tree to ensure the vantage point remains unchanged. Ruttenberg has developed a practice of using horizontal strips of paper, 15 feet long and of varying heights, which are then pieced together by a paper conservator with Velcro backing to form the complete composition. She rolls up these strips and carts them back and forth from the studio to the park, thereby making portable something quite unwieldy in its huge size. In the park she paints on these paper strips standing up, working with very long brushes, often standing on the paper, leaving shoe prints, mud, and other debris, which she sees as part of the work.

When the watercolor studies are complete, Ruttenberg uses them to feed into the paintings on canvas, which she makes in her Upper West Side studio. While the oil paintings are in progress, she sometimes photographs them and takes large prints back into the park, where she paints directly on top of the photographs. She then uses these painted photographs to finish the oil paintings, “to bring them up to another level.” She generally works on many paintings at the same time, sliding them around her studio on giant easels to move from one to another.

Context in the History of Art
Ruttenberg’s work is part of the long and rich tradition of painting figures in a garden landscape. From images of scholar gardens in ancient China, to Persian miniature visions of paradise, to frivolous 18th-century French fêtes galantes, aristocratic figures in idealized gardens were a recurring subject. With the 19th century came a change: gatherings of real people in public parks began to appear in art in the 1860s, explored in France by the Impressionists and later the Post-Impressionists and in New York, shortly after the opening of the park, in paintings and engravings of people at play there, most often ice skating, but also playing lawn tennis, boating, strolling, cycling, taking carriage outings, and riding horseback. The artists were recording the modern world around them, and congregating in public parks for sport or simply to mingle had become part of modern experience.

In the decades just before and after the turn of the 20th century, such painters as Childe Hassam, William Merritt Chase, and Maurice Prendergast, interested in recording the urban scene, turned to Central Park for their paintings of the elegantly attired leisure class enjoying the out-of-doors. Though Ruttenberg’s paintings follow in this continuum, by contrast, her work shows genuinely classless gatherings of New Yorkers, not just the privileged few. Her resolutely contemporary and unvarnished figures are nude, tattooed, disheveled, nuzzling in public, and generally ignoring all rules of decorum. She is an urban realist, and the balance of beauty and earthiness that comes through in her figures brings vitality and exuberance to her work and reflects the spirit of the people who inhabit the green world of the park today.

Picturing Central Park: Paintings by Janet Ruttenberg is expected to coincide with the release of Gatherings by Janet K. Ruttenberg, published by Pointed Leaf Press, which will be made available in the Museum’s Shop.

The exhibition is designed by Wendy Evans Joseph of Cooper Joseph Studio and curated by Andrea Henderson Fahnestock.

Museum of the City of New York
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New York (NY) 10029 United States ‎
Tel. +1 (212) 5341672
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Opening hours
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Related images

  • 1. & 3. From Gatherings (detail), Janet K. Ruttenberg, published by Pointed Leaf Press. © Janet Ruttenberg, 2013. Photograph by Malcolm Varon
  • 2. From Gatherings (detail), Janet K. Ruttenberg, published by Pointed Leaf Press. © Janet Ruttenberg, 2013. Photograph by Antoine Bootz