Rolph Scarlett

Rolph Scarlett (1889–1984) is a modernist artist renowned and celebrated in the international art community for his work as an abstract painter, graphic artist and modernist designer. Born in Guelph, Ontario, he began his first artistic training through private tutoring, followed by academic art instruction and a 4-year jewellery apprenticeship.

Scarlett had worked and lived the largest part of his life in the United States. His paintings and artwork have been exhibited in some of the most important established Galleries and Museums in the United States, Canada and Europe, and are part of many important public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum – New York, Amon Carter Museum – Fort Worth – Texas, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and Museum of Art – Carnegie Institute – Pittsburgh.

Scarlett’s dedication to modernism was expressed in his art and design work. Although Scarlett also created action paintings and surrealist works, he especially loved and was devoted to geometric abstract non-objective painting. He describes this form as an expression of pure creation.

In his modernist tradition, Scarlett created set designs for films. He was a stage designer and created designs for George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman. He worked as a freelance designer for engineering firms and designed a guided missile for the British War Office in London (1937). Scarlett was an esteemed modernist designer who created modern designs for the industrial, theatrical, domestic product and jewellery industries.

In 1926, Scarlett’s painting, Static, was awarded first prize for modernist work at the Eighth Annual exhibition of the Toledo Federation of Art Societies at the Toledo Museum of Art. The Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York (later named the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) first opened in 1939, and Scarlett’s oil painting on canvas, Composition 1938-39, was included in the inaugural exhibition Art of Tomorrow.

Scarlett was appointed chief lecturer at the Museum of Non-objective Painting, New York (Guggenheim) and his paintings were included in 11 of the Museum’s (Guggenheim) Group Exhibitions for renowned American Non-objective Painters. The Guggenheim Museum purchased sixty paintings, monoprints and gouaches on paper from Rolph Scarlett.

Scarlett was a renowned and prolific painter who created abstract works in oil, watercolour, gouache and monoprint.  He profoundly made his mark, in both New York and internationally, as a geometric abstract painter during the 1930s and 1940s.