1896-1977
Theme/Style – Landscapes, genre, Abstraction
Media – Oils, lithographs
Artistic Focus – Ruth Armer’s work went through various stages, reflecting the phases of her own life. Her early paintings were representational. Later, her style became broader and more expressionistic, and then moved more toward abstraction in the 1950s. By the 1960s her paintings had taken on a hard-edge style.
Career Highlights –
- Born in San Francisco in 1896, Ruth Armer studied at the California School of Fine Arts.
- Armer also studied in New York City at the Art Students League and at the School of Fine and Applied Art under George Bellows, Robert Henri, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan.
- Armer’s first one-woman exhibition was in 1922 at Vickery, Atkins & Torrey in San Francisco.
- During the next 50 years, Ruth Armer’s work was exhibited in numerous group shows in San Francisco, as well as solo exhibitions at the Oakland Art Gallery in 1932; the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1936, 1939, and 1950; Gump’s in 1967; and Quay Gallery in 1971-72.
- Outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, Ruth Armer’s paintings were included in exhibitions in New York City including the seminal American Painting Today 1950 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Art: USA: 58 at Madison Square Garden. Her art also was exhibited in Brazil at the Museu de Arte Moderna’s III Bienal in Sao Paulo in 1955.
- Ruth Armer was a trustee of the California School of Fine Arts from the early 1940s until the early 1950s, and she remembered the school generously in her will.
- A lifelong resident of San Francisco, Armer passed away in 1977.
Bibliographic references are available upon request.