Nicole Smith
Specialist, Head of Sale
Lot 8W
IDA RITTENBERG KOHLMEYER(1912-1997)Horizontal Rectangles 81-A 61 x 107 in. (154.9 x 271.8 cm.)
19 November 2025, 15:00 EST
New YorkUS$50,000 - US$70,000
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IDA RITTENBERG KOHLMEYER (1912-1997)
Horizontal Rectangles 81-A
signed and dated 'Kohlmeyer 1981' (lower right)
oil, oil stick and charcoal on canvas
61 x 107 in. (154.9 x 271.8 cm.)
Painted in 1981
signed and dated 'Kohlmeyer 1981' (lower right)
oil, oil stick and charcoal on canvas
61 x 107 in. (154.9 x 271.8 cm.)
Painted in 1981
Footnotes
Provenance
Private collection.
Allene Lapides Gallery, Santa Fe.
Acquired directly from the above by the late owner in circa 1991.
Literature
Ida Kohlmeyer: Thirty Years, Charlotte, North Carolina, 1983 (illustrated p. 45; titled Synthetic Clusters).
Ida Rittenberg Kohlmeyer was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the youngest of four siblings in a Polish Jewish family. Having excelled as an athlete in her youth and studied English as an undergraduate, Kohlmeyer did not discover her passion for painting until her late 30s. Once she had, Kohlmeyer fiercely committed herself to artmaking, undoubtedly changing the course of her life.
Married with children by 1950, Kohlmeyer returned to her alma mater, Newcomb College, then the women's college of Tulane University, and enrolled in drawing and painting classes as a pastime. It was not long before this hobby turned into a serious endeavor and future career. While studying at Newcomb, Kohlmeyer was introduced to Clyfford Still who recognized her fierce passion and potential, suggesting she go to Provincetown to study with Hans Hofmann. Under his instruction, she abandoned traditional modes of representation and embraced Abstract Expressionism. When Kohlmeyer returned to New Orleans, she met Mark Rothko who would eventually become her mentor. Like Rothko, Kohlmeyer had an affinity for color and adopted his method of bathing canvases in thin veils of pigment, sometimes in luminous but often somber hues.
Long before her artistic revelation, Kohlmeyer and her husband went on an enchanting honeymoon in Mexico in 1934. This trip planted the seed for her interest in Pre-Columbian art which she would revisit more seriously when she began painting. As Kohlmeyer continued to develop her own aesthetic style, she drew upon her interest in non-Western art as well as Surrealism à la Joan Miró. The result was a unique visual language of pictographs and ideograms that came into focus by the 1970s and continued to appear in her work for the rest of her life. She explored this language through various distinct series, beginning with simpler Clusters, grouping just a few ideograms together over large swaths of color. The compositions grew more intricate as she experimented with the placement of signs and symbols within a grid system. By the 1980s, she broke free from the grid altogether in an organic and playful series of Synthesis paintings followed by the Mythic series of the late 80s to early 90s. The Collection of Gene Hackman presents a survey of Kohlmeyer's work with four spectacular examples from these distinct moments of her career. This includes Horizontal Rectangles 81-A, one of the largest canvases by the artist to appear at auction.
As a teacher at Newcomb, Kohlmeyer most notably taught fellow Louisiana native Lynda Benglis and the two went on to collaborate on a site-specific installation for The New Orleans Museum of Art in 1977. Already a well-established figure in the New Orleans artistic community, her work was exhibited in museums and galleries across the country within her lifetime. Today, her work is held in the collections of numerous notable institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum in New York City, The New Orleans Museum of Art, and the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.