Rolph Scarlett: 

Painter, Designer, Jeweller

September 30, 2004 to July 10, 2005

  “The first critical retrospective of Rolph Scarlett’s extraordinary achievements.”  MQUP (2004)

During Rolph Scarlett’s remarkable seventy-five year career, he was an avant-garde abstract painter, an innovative set designer, an industrial designer, and the creator of unique sculptural jewellery in the American modernist tradition. Art Centre director/curator Judith Nasby presented a retrospective of Scarlett’s life and work in this exhibition and her newly published book, Rolph Scarlett: Painter, Designer, Jeweller, the result of a twenty-five year research journey that required both biographical investigation and the location of his work in Canada and the United States.                 

Scarlett was born in Guelph, Ontario in 1889.  When he moved to the United States in 1918, he already had some experience with the techniques of painting, jewellery, and stage design.  During the 1930s and 1940s, Scarlett was a leading practitioner of geometric abstraction, with sixty of his paintings in the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).  A geometric sensibility also inspired the innovative, constructionist stage designs that he created for plays such as George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman” (1929).

As an industrial designer during the 1930s, Scarlett produced a remarkable body of design drawings for everything from household objects to New York World’s Fair amusement park rides and guided missiles.  His streamlined modern designs emphasized efficiency, science and progress.  Sculptural jewellery increasingly became his focus and after his retirement in the 1960s, he actively made jewellery until a few years before his death at ninety-five.

(This retrospective exhibition of works by Rolph Scarlett travelled to the Art Gallery of the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo Japan.)

“Nasby offers solid research, including a lot of interesting and new material, on a relatively unexplored subject who was an important figure in the modernist movement.”
Joyce Zemans, Joan and Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts, York University

  “All of Scarlett’s areas of creativity are skilfully woven together in a fascinating narrative of his life.  The breadth of Nasby’s treatment is impressive and the unique quality of her book is its overview of the artist’s life and work as a totality rather than focussing on only one aspect.”
David Hanks, Curator, Stewart Program for Modern Design, Montreal

Image: Lyric Dramatic (c 1945)

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Last modified: March 13, 2007