Anne Ryan, collage, touch & the sublime
“Her tiny little scraps convey a sense of thrift...She seems to be saying, ‘This is everything I have. Is it enough?’” —Deborah Solomon
The museum closed in twenty minutes, and I was looking for Alice Neel. I consulted a greeter stationed near the entry, who checked her iPad. Room 421, she said. I rushed through the galleries, nodding quickly at Joan and both Lees, Krasner and Lozano, while pressing onward to find, finally, a tiny room, an antechamber, really, with somewhat dim light. There was no Alice Neel. The gallery displayed one artist’s work, about eight small frames. I saw pink. This was not right, I kept moving, almost frantic. I asked another museum guard who shrugged. Sometimes the website is wrong, she said.
I returned to the small room. The scale on the computer, the way you see Anne Ryan’s work here, is all wrong. Imagine something as small and wondrously detailed as a diorama; imagine feeling compelled to lean in. On paper no larger than a manuscript page, frayed cloth dish towels, burlap and silk, the cellophane from a pack of cigarettes, handmade Japanese paper, ticket stubs and string harmonize into sublime color and textural relationship, sensuous and reverberating with feeling.
“Someone unacquainted with the life of Anne Ryan might suppose, on seeing the display of her collages at Yale University Art Gallery,” Vivien Raynor wrote from The New York Times in 1980, “that they were the product of her youth.”
“Indeed, the ecstasy they radiate is the kind commonly associated with poets and composers who have died prematurely. But the artist came to collage in middle age, after a penurious and not very distinguished career as a writer, a painter, and a print maker.”
“Live in the parenthesis of your time,” Anne Ryan told her daughter.
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