Painting: The Flip Side

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Anne Ryan, a New Jersey collagist who died in 1954, at the age of 65, sometimes framed—or rather, mounted—her tiny, exquisite collages of fabrics and colored papers upon other bits of paper. Like visual haiku, they proclaim their sureness and their charm with an absolute economy of means. A sometime poetess and six times a grandmother, Ryan took to collage in 1948 after seeing an exhibition of the collages of the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Her own instincts led her toward ladylike materials: failles, polka-dot ginghams and tulles. Betty Parsons, the pioneering dealer whose gallery introduced abstract expressionism to Manhattan in the late 1940s, has also at one time or another represented Jackson, Kulicke and Ryan. "It's amazing," says Parsons of Ryan, "how she would capture light with material and shape. Her collages were sensitive and so esthetic that they will captivate forever."