Collection: Rolph Scarlett

Rolph Scarlett (1889–1984) was a Canadian-born American painter and designer, and one of the pioneers of non-objective abstraction in the United States. He was born in Guelph, Ontario, into a family of moderate means; at fourteen he left school to pursue art, and his father apprenticed him to his uncle’s jewellery business, a training that later allowed him to earn a living from commercial design. At the age of eighteen he moved to New York, where he worked in jewellery while studying at the Art Students League in 1908–1909. After early figurative, Cubist-influenced landscapes and cityscapes, he turned to abstraction in the 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s he also designed stage sets for plays, musicals and films in New York and Southern California, including productions for Radio City Music Hall, and worked as an industrial designer, for example on the Bakelite Company’s booth at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. From 1939 Hilla Rebay championed his work and bought it for the Museum of Non-Objective Painting – the institution that became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – where he served as chief lecturer until 1954. The museum eventually owned around sixty of his paintings and monoprints, and his “Yellow Bar” (1942) remains in the Guggenheim collection. Scarlett spent his last years in Woodstock, New York, and continued to make abstract work until his death in 1984. His work was rediscovered in the 1990s, leading to exhibitions such as “Listen With Your Eyes” at Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco in 2011. The untitled gouache on paper (1940), offered by TUMO Gallery, dates from the height of his association with the Museum of Non-Objective Painting.