Ruth Vollmer

Ruth Vollmer (1903 – 1982 New York City), was a German artist born in Munich. She was born in 1903 as Ruth Landshoff. Her father, Ludwig Landshoff, was a musicologist and conductor and her mother, Philippine Landshoff, was an opera singer. Their intimates was Jewish. At age 19 she began to perform as an player and took the advice of her dad to draw all day. She then had many contacts to the teachers and students at the Bauhaus. In 1930 she married a pediatrician named Hermann Vollmer, whom she met in Berlin. Ruth and Hermann moved from Germany to New York in 1935. Ruth began act out designing window displays for Bonwit Teller, Tiffany's, Lord & Taylor, and additional department stores. Her displays experimented in the same way as wire, steel, and copper mesh to Make figural forms. In 1943, Vollmer became a U.S. citizen. In 1944 she established a commission from the Museum of Modern Art for its fifteenth anniversary exhibition, "Art in Progress." Vollmer continued to affect 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 Make a mural for the lobby of 575 Madison, where she created a large wall relief that used wire rods and wire mesh to put-on with light, texture, and transparency. Vollmer visited Giacometti once more during the summer of 1951. During the 1950s she begins to works bearing in mind clay as well. Additionally, in 1954 she began to tutor at the Children's Art Center at the Fieldston School in Riverdale and continued to teach until the mid-sixties. In 1960, she participated in the NYU expression series "Artists on Art" with her buddy 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 play a part with bronze and put on an act her sham Betty Parsons Gallery. In 1963, she joined the American Abstract Artists (AAA) and showed her in their exhibitions from 1963 on. By 1970 Vollmer's practice had taken on a additional dimension, exploring highbrow geometrical forms and mathematical concepts, particularly spirals and platonic solids. Sol LeWitt wrote a rapid essay on Vollmer's ham it up for Studio International titled "Ruth Vollmer: Mathematical Forms." In 1971 Ruth Vollmer participated in the to-do of the invalidation 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 fight with Alzheimer's. A majority of her large personal art accretion of over one hundred sculptures, paintings, and drawings was donated to MoMA. Her personal art increase included works by Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and Chryssa.