Artist

Anne Ryan

Portrait of Anne Ryan
Portrait of Anne Ryan

American, 1889–1954

Anne Ryan was an American Abstract Expressionism artist. 10 works are cataloged here, principally at Museum of Modern Art. Anne Ryan was born in Hoboken.

Anne Ryan (1889–1954) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist associated with the New York School. Her first contact with the New York City avant-garde came in 1941 when she joined the Atelier 17, a famous printmaking workshop that the British artist Stanley William Hayter had established in Paris in the 1930s and then brought to New York when France fell to the Nazis. The great turning point in Ryan's development occurred after the war, in 1948.

She was 57 years old when she saw the collages of Kurt Schwitters at the Rose Fried Gallery, in New York City, in 1948. She right away dedicated herself to this newly discovered medium. Since Anne Ryan was a poet, according to Deborah Solomon, in Kurt Schwitters's collages “she recognized the visual equivalent of her sonnets – discrete images packed together in an extremely compressed space.” When six years later Ryan died, her work in this medium numbered over 400 pieces.

Works by Anne Ryan

Collections represented

Catalog records compiled from museum open-access collections; the artworks shown are in the public domain. Spotted an error in this record? Tell us.