Ida Rittenberg Kohlmeyer

Note: A native of New Orleans, Ida Kohlmeyer achieved international acclaim as an artist and developed her own unique perspective on abstract art. She is widely considered one of the most influential artists from Louisiana and the South, although her art career did not begin until later in life. Following graduation from Sophie Newcomb Memorial College at Tulane University in 1933, Kohlmeyer married and raised a family. Dissatisfied with what she called a “vapid, dilettante life,” she first joined the John McCrady Art School in 1947, and then began classes at Newcomb College under the tutelage of Pat Trivigno in 1950. She eventually pursued a master’s degree in fine arts, producing primarily figurative studies and representational work for her thesis. Following the completion of her degree in 1956, Kohlmeyer spent a formative summer at the art colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts studying under Hans Hofmann. Abstraction appealed to the Kohlmeyer, and she likened her sudden shift from representation to being freed from prison. The following year, Mark Rothko came to New Orleans in a visiting artist position at Tulane and moved his family into the Metairie home of Ida Kohlmeyer’s late mother. The resulting friendship between Kohlmeyer and Rothko would have a profound influence on the trajectory of her work.

By the 1970s, Kohlmeyer had transcended the influences of Hofmann and Rothko and moved entirely to non-objective subject matter. She developed her own code of schematic symbols, which she often arranged in a grid pattern. Her paintings are abstract, yet linguistic, and hint at the deep personal emotion behind them. While the symbols present a pictographic code, their meaning remains elusive. In the vibrant painting of 1986 by offered here, the artist’s signature vocabulary of glyphs has broken free of the grid system she originally employed to float across the canvas in a cacophony of shapes and colors. The glyphs hint at familiar shapes, each undergoing a dimensional distortion that further adds to the overall feeling of movement and vitality. Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, could not be more apropos as a title for this short-lived yet important series, and it acknowledges, as do many of Kohlmeyer’s titles (Cluster, Syntax, Rebus, and Synthesis) the dialogue of interpretation her canvases inspire with their viewers.

Throughout her active career, Kohlmeyer successfully exhibited her work in prestigious galleries and museum nationwide, with over one hundred solo exhibitions. She received the National Women’s Caucus for Art’s outstanding achievement award in 1980 and was the subject of her first major retrospective exhibition at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1983. Kohlmeyer can be considered a matriarch among American artists, as she broke the mold for southern artists and women artists alike during her lifetime. Her legacy is one of joyful, colorful paintings and a generation of female creators who follow in her footsteps.

Ref.: Plante, Michael. Ida Kohlmeyer: Systems of Color. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2004; Kessler, Jane. Ida Kohlmeyer: Thirty Years. Charlotte, NC: The Mint Museum, 1983.