Ida Rittenberg Kohlmeyer (American/New Orleans, 1912-1997) , "Untitled: Cluster Series", 1982, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 48 1/2 in. x 71 5/8 in., simple slat frame . Provenance: Acquired from the artist, c. 1990. Note: In the early 1970s, Ida Kohlmeyer emerged from an immersion in Abstract Expressionism and began a series of expressive and colorful paintings she titled the Cluster series. This series represents the first unique style that was solely identified with the artist and consists of a grid of rectangular elements, similar in shape and size, surrounded by a white border. The Cluster series afforded Kohlmeyer the opportunity to experiment within her grid with automatic drawing, a technique which would define the series, and a vibrant color palette. The series drew critical acclaim for Kohlmeyer, and in her words: "embodied my whole voyage through years of searching for a personal visual statement." From the late 1970s into the early 1980s, Kohlmeyer often multiplied the number of symbols in her Cluster works exponentially, greatly increasing the color saturation and heightening the comparison of her canvases to a mysterious pictorial language. Her admiration of Joan Miró, whom she had met in Paris in 1956, influenced her decision to develop this personal code of schematic symbols that she would then employ throughout the rest of her career. Kohlmeyer's mature works, such as the canvas offered here, evoke deep feeling through carefully placed shapes and colors. Her paintings speak to the arbitrariness of symbols as well as to the universal desire to communicate. Throughout her active career, which continued into the 1990s, Kohlmeyer successfully exhibited her work in New York galleries and important museums. She considered herself a beneficiary of the feminist art movement, and in 1980 she received the National Women's Caucus for Art's outstanding achievement award. She described her drive to make art as a "compulsion, a withdrawal from much that is pleasurable in life, a need to work, for which no other activity can substitute, and a constant search for self." This monumental work from 1982 is a quintessential example of Kohlmeyer's style and the result of years of exploration and introspection coming to fruition on her canvas. Each individual symbol can be viewed as a complete painting unto itself, interacting with the others within the grid to create an overall composition designed for contemplation rather than interpretation. 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

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