Ruth Thomas Todd, who died Tuesday at age 96, established herself as one of abstract expressionism’s pre-eminent artists, with a career that began in New York City galleries and flourished when she relocated to Denver in the 1970s.
Born in North Carolina, she arrived in New York City during the 1930s, but her career there as a fashion model ended when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She moved to Colorado Springs, then famous for restoring tubercular patients, and taught herself to draw as she recuperated.
She began studying under Robert Motherwell, who was a visiting artist teaching at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and her career as an avant-garde artist blossomed.
By the 1950s, Todd’s paintings were hanging in prestigious Manhattan art galleries as well as in Colorado shows. Among cognoscenti of the visual arts, her name was as familiar as Georgia O’Keeffe’s.
“I remember looking at one of the pieces from that period, ‘Barrier,’ from 1944, a small painting in physical size but giant in what it accomplishes,” said Hugh Grant, director of the Kirkland Museum, where several of Todd’s most significant works hang.
Todd famously incorporated sawdust, gravel and other found objects in “Magma Rising,” “Vacated” and other paintings from her celebrated works of the 1950s and 1960s. Reviewers loved it. They compared the effect to Navajo sand paintings and raved about her textured, evocative abstract landscapes.
“It’s riveting,” Grant said enthusiastically. Then he added, “In fact, you can probably find rivets in some of them.”
The sawdust usually came from Todd’s husband, woodworker and poet Littleton Todd. She found other materials when she walked around her neighborhood. Once, she gathered broken asphalt shingles that a windstorm knocked from a neighbor’s roof.
Todd incorporated the pieces into “Bird’s Eye View,” an arresting, witty 1970s collage that arranged the asphalt fragments on a wood panel, partly overlaying a hunk of bark. The spare, strong “Bird’s Eye View” hung in the Sandra Phillips Gallery in March for a retrospective of Todd’s work.
“She could see beauty in destruction, and beauty in your common ordinary debris on the street,” Phillips said. “One of the really beautiful pieces from the show is ‘The Silences.’ She took a charred piece of wood from a building that had burned on Colfax, added some of her own materials and framed it. This piece is breathtaking. The burnt wood forms a sort of mosaic.”
Todd reigned at the opening of her March show. Not once did she sit in the comfortable chair that Phillips foresightedly provided. Instead, Todd threaded through the crowd, her gold slippers winking under the gallery lights, accepting the adulation as her due.
Her husband and six siblings preceded her in death.
A memorial service is pending.
Staff writer Claire Martin can be reached at 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com.
