Rolph Scarlett

Rolph Scarlett was born in Guelph, Ontario.  By the time he moved to the United States in 1918, he had gained experience in the techniques of painting, execution of jewelry settings, and designing for the stage.  Each of these interests helped shape his career.  As a painter, Scarlett was deeply involved with geometric abstraction during the 1930s and 1940s when he was associated with New York’s Museum of Non-objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).  A geometric sensibility also inspired his innovative, cubist-inspired stage designs for plays such as George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1929).  As a commercial designer during the 1930s, he produced a remarkable body of design drawings on a wide range of subjects from household objects to the 1939 New York World’s Fair amusement rides.  Much of his work followed the streamlined, machine age sensibility of the period (the shape of the times), a design vision that Scarlett applied to a cocktail shaker (1930s), a guided missile (1937), and the “headgear” for theatre costumes (see studies No.31-35).  Throughout his life Scarlett made unique jewelry in the tradition of American modernist jewelry, with shapes and forms that relate to his morphed geometric abstract works of the 1940s.  After he retired to Woodstock, New York in the late 1960s, jewelry increasingly became his focus.  He was actively making jewelry until a few years before his death at age 96.

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Department of Canadian Heritage, through the Exhibition Circulation Fund, Museums Assistance Program, in bringing Rolph Scarlett: Art Design Jewelry, circulated by the McDonald Stewart Art Centre, to the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Installation Photos

[Roger Fry]

[Margaret Priest]

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