Between 1946 and 1947, Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin, was editor of Iconograph, a non-profit quarterly magazine of art and literature. Beaudoin was also the founder and owner of Gallerie Neuf.
Issue #2, published in the summer of 1946, featured an essay by Beaudoin titled 6 Young Female Painters. This essay included his observations about Ruth Lewin.
The Ruth Lewin Estate was able to obtain an original copy of that issue. Photos appear below along with a transcript of the text. What Beaudoin saw in Lewin then was insightful, accurate, and compelling. The qualities and characteristics he noted in the then young-lewin was indelible and would remain true for her entire life.
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Transcription
6 Young Female Painters
by Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin, editor
Upon visiting galerie neuf some months ago, and after examining the holdings of the gallery Yvan Goll saw fit to say in Franco Amerique, of the gallery and of me “on dirait qu’il se specialize dans les oeuvres des femmes, et qu’il trouve chez elles un expressin de la vie beaucoup plus directe et naïve que chez les hommes, qui trichent davantage, ne s’abondonnant jamais jusqu’a l’ame, ni dans la peinture.” I do not know if I am entirely content to accept M. Goll’s judgement of my taste, but I do know that I am sufficiently interested in “les femmes” as painters to say my say about half a dozen of them right here and now. They are Sonja Sekula, Ruth Lewin, Gertrude Barrer, Ruby Barco, Ruth Dennis, and Nell Blaine.
Ruth Lewin, a young Brooklyn painter, shown recently at Galerie Neuf in the Semeiologist show, 8 and a Totem Pole, has shown one of the most interesting developments as an artist of any I have seen. Having confined herself to graphic work (black and white) for many years, she approaches her canvas as a surface into which color can be admitted perhaps, but only a little fearfully. Of three paintings shown at Galerie Neuf in April, 1946, one (Kenny’s Truck) is in two colors, one (Shut Your Mouth) is in three colors, and only the third (The Dreamer) admits as many as five. Texture in the Lewin picture is more often the result of lineal intracity instead of color and brush stroke treatment, modulation in the actual paint. But always in the Lewin picture there is that faultless draftsmanship which becomes almost exciting.
Ruth Lewin
The statement in the Lewin picture, however, is another matter and possibly even more confusing for it exists equally in sections of unusual formal clarity, and sections as abstruse as any I have found in any paintings in contemporary times. The total effect of the Lewin picture is, of course, not only an interesting and inescapable personal pictorial confession, but equally the result of faultlessly composed surface, executed with sometimes, I believe, brilliant restraint of color. In an era of colorists I find Ruth Lewin’s pictorial method most refreshing. I like her restraint, which in no way takes from the immediate impact of her pictorial statement. I am waiting eagerly for more Lewin canvases.