ROLPH SCARLET
CANADIAN ARTIST
ABOUT ROLPH SCARLETT
Abstracted From McGill Queen's University Press
Canadian Artist Rolph Scarlett enjoyed an incredible career that spanned seventy-five years. He was considered an avant-garde abstract painter, an innovative set designer, an industrial designer, and the creator of unique sculptural jewellery.
Rolph Scarlett was born in CANADA in 1889. Early in 1918 he moved to the US and began experimenting with the techniques of painting, jewellery, and designing for the stage which he put to good use in his career in New York. During the 1930s and 40s Scarlett was a leader in the art genre called geometric abstraction.
Rolph Scarlett exhibited sixty paintings in the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). His art work is characterized by the geometric sensibility and he inspired the innovative, constructionist stage designs that he created for plays such as George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman" (1929). Scarlett worked as an industrial designer during the 1930s, during which time he produced an outstanding collection of drawings of an amazing variety of subject matter. From common daily use objects to the latest new amusement rides and even guided missiles. His streamlined modern designs epitomized the use of efficiency, science, and progress. Throughout his life he had made unique sculptural jewellery and after his retirement in the 1960s jewellery increasingly became his focus. He actively made jewellery until a few years before his death at age ninety-five.
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