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Frank Rutter Quotes

Francis Vane Phipson Rutter was a British art critic, curator and activist.

In 1903, he became art critic for The Sunday Times, a position which he held for the rest of his life. He was an early champion in England of modern art, founding the French Impressionist Fund in 1905 to buy work for the national collection, and in 1908 starting the Allied Artists Association to show "progressive" art, as well as publishing its journal, Art News, the "First Art Newspaper in the United Kingdom". In 1910, he began to actively support women's suffrage, chairing meetings, and giving sanctuary to suffragettes released from prison under the Cat and Mouse Act—helping some to leave the country.From 1912 to 1917, he was the curator of Leeds City Art Gallery. In 1917, he edited the cultural journal, Art & Letters, with Herbert Read. In his writing after World War I, Rutter observed that advertising imagery was seen by far more people than work in art galleries; he noted a new realism after the period of "abstract experiment"; and he praised the work of Dod Procter as a "complete presentation of twentieth century vision". Wikipedia  

✵ 17. February 1876 – 18. April 1937
Frank Rutter: 4   quotes 0   likes

Famous Frank Rutter Quotes

“Where, oh where was Mr. Roger Fry in 1905, and why was his voice not heard in the land? How could he allow anybody to call Cézanne an "amateur" with impunity?”

Frank Rutter

Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time, pp. 112–113. Rich & Cowan, London, 1933.

“That, by the accident of an illegality in the codicil to his will, it should have been possible for Hugh Lane's pet collection to be snaffled by the British Government, is a fitting conclusion to the shabby story of England's appreciation of French impressionist painting.”

Frank Rutter

Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time, p. 120. Rich & Cowan, London, 1933.

“When I think of the thousands and thousands of pounds which have been spent by the National Art Collections Fund on the purchase of paintings—some of questionable merit and dubious condition—by Old Masters already represented in the National Gallery—it makes me boil with rage to think that in 1905 it would not contribute one halfpenny towards the purchase for the nation of a picture by one of the Great French Masters of the late nineteenth century. It was a short-sighted policy, but the Fund's inertia and snobbish ineptitude are entirely characteristic of the habits of art-officialdom in England.”

Frank Rutter

Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time, pp. 118–119. Rich & Cowan, London, 1933.
The National Art Collections Fund is now called The Art Fund.

“Hullo! What's this? What are these funny brown-and-olive landscapes doing in an impressionist exhibition? Brown! I ask you? Isn't it absurd for a man to go on using brown and call himself an impressionist painter?”

Frank Rutter

Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time, p. 111. Rich & Cowan, London, 1933.
Rutter satirising the reaction of fans of impressionist art on seeing Cézanne's work in London in 1905.

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