Anne Ryan US, 1889-1954

Anne Ryan 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.

During the 1920s, Ryan frequented art and literary circles in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood, and published a novel, Raquel, as well as a volume of poetry, Lost Hills. In 1931 and 1932 she lived in Majorca and then Paris.

Then she returned to the United States and settled on West Fourth Street in New York City. She began to paint in 1938 and had her first solo exhibition in 1941 at The Pinacoteca on Lexington Avenue. Ryan also wrote a series of poems in the late 1930s and 40s called "Lines to a Young Painter".