With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
Rudolf Charles (Carl) von Ripper
1905 – 1960
Von Ripper used a barn in New Canaan as a studio from 1939 to 1942, and perhaps again when he returned to Connecticut after World War II service in 1946. His artistic output from that studio has not been documented.
- Biography/Description of Work
As a young man in the 1920s, and with the social status of a baron, von Ripper lived in Berlin and Paris and moved in the same social circle as artists and writers such as Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Breton, Weil and Picasso, Dali, Matisse, Miro. He had his first solo exhibition in 1930, and the antifascist theme of his paintings brought him the unwanted attention of the Nazi party. During the 1930s he supported the German Resistance and criticized the Nazi regime, through both his actions and his work. His 1938 portfolio of prints entitled “Ecraser l’Infame” (“To Crush Tyranny”) would be his masterpiece. That year, with the help of the Catherwood Foundation, he left Europe for America, landing in New York among a circle of fellow ex-pats 00 Miro, Weil and Dali among them. The artwork for the January 2nd 1939 Time magazine Man of the Year (1938) cover was a print from “Ecraser l’Infame” that depicted Hitler playing an organ beneath torture victims. Von Ripper first came to Connecticut in 1939 under the auspices once again of the Catherwood Foundation. He served during World War II at Fort Bliss, in the Army Art Corps, the Military Intelligence Service and the OSS, all the while creating artwork and illustrations that depicted the horrors of war through distorted imagery. He returned to Connecticut in 1946, but found it difficult to create after years spent satirizing or decrying fascism and war. By 1951, after teaching at the Vienna Academy beginning in 1948, he was living in Mallorca with his second wife Avi Leege and the couple began a jewelry line, but did not give up political causes, returning for example to Austria to support the Hungarian resistance to the Communist government and help Hungarian refugees. Von Ripper died in Mallorca in 1960.
- Sources view
- Associated Resource(s)
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