By Felix Ruvolo
Located in San Francisco, CA
Artist: Felix Ruvolo – American (1912 - 1992)
Title: “Samson and Delila” aka “Untitled” from the suite: 10 West Coast Artists, Collector’s Press, 1967
Year: 1967
Medium: Lithograph on Arches paper
Size: 30 x 22.5 inches.
Publisher: Collector’s Press, San Francisco
Edition: 75.
Signature: Signed lower right in pencil
Embossed publisher’s chop lower left of the Collector’s Press, San Francisco;
Embossed printer’s chop lower left of Ernest De Soto
Numbered: 39/75 lower right in pencil
Condition: Excellent
This lithograph is from the notable portfolio “10 West Coast Artists” containing ten prints, title page and colophon page, published by Collector’s Press in San Francisco in 1967. Prints by Keith Boyle, Bruce Conner, Richard Diebenkorn, Roy de Forest, Sidney Gordin, Frank Lobdell, James Melchert, Manuel Neri, Frank Ruvolo, Peter Voulkos are in the portfolio. The print has no margins – it is full bleed. The print is in excellent condition.
Felix Ruvolo was born in New York City in 1912, but raised in the home of his grandparents in Sicily where he first studied with an Italian artist. At age 12, he returned to the home of his parents, who soon moved to Chicago. They were aware of his intense interest in art and had him continue studies with a local artist and then at the Chicago Art Institute.
By 1938 he was exhibiting regularly and was accorded his first invitation to participate in an American Federation of Arts traveling exhibition. Invitations to exhibitions at other major institutions followed--the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Phillips Gallery Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy, the Walker Art Center, the “Contemporary American Painting” surveys at the Krannert Museum from 1948 to 1961, the Sao Paulo Biennials in Brazil, the Galerie Creuse in Paris. He was represented in the ground-breaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951, “Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America.”
His many one-man shows included those at the Durand Ruel Gallery, the Catherine Viviano Gallery, the Grand Central, the Poindexter Gallery in New York and the University of Southern California. His works entered public and private collections such as the Chicago Art Institute, the Krannert Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Oakland Museum of Art, and the Aukland City Museum in New Zealand. His work was reproduced in national magazines and in anthologies published by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and Albright Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the American Encyclopedia, the Dictionaire de la Peinture Abstraite, and Il Giornale D'Italia.
His teaching career began at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1945 and continued until 1948 when he moved with his wife Mardi to New York. Mills College in Oakland had established a program of bringing distinguished artists, such as Fernand Leger, to the campus as guest instructors. Felix was invited for the summer session of 1948; during that sojourn, he had solo exhibitions in the Mills College Art Gallery and at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. At that time, he met many Bay Area artists who were to become life-long friends of the Ruvolos.
His national reputation had been firmly established, when in 1949 Felix was extended the invitation for appointment to the faculty on the Berkeley campus.
His earlier works were referential, often on fantasy themes. These new paintings were non-objective in idiom, rich in color, line and texture. They were marvelous, they were beautiful, they bespoke his creative genius. Critics came, collectors came, colleagues came, students came, friends from the East came. Artists were invited to serve
as visiting faculty. George McNeil, then Director of the Pratt Institute, said that he accepted an invitation to come to Berkeley because Felix was there.
Among his students who have achieved distinction in the profession are: Wayne Anderson, Walter de Maria, Mark di Suvero, William Brown, Mary Snowden...
Category
1960s Abstract Felix Ruvolo Prints and Multiples
MaterialsPaper, Lithograph
