Ruth Duckworth is having quite a year.
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A career-long retrospective of her sculpture has appeared in New York and now has come to the Chicago Cultural Center, where it opened close to dedication day for a new bronze — her first permanent free-standing piece in the city — at Northeastern Illinois University. The catalog for the show, “Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor,” is her first in-depth monograph, and covering some of the same ground informally is “Ruth Duckworth: A Life in Clay,” her first video documentary.
It’s about time, some might say, for the Hamburg-born Duckworth moved to Chicago from London more than 40 years ago, and although she recently received several awards from local institutions, she has not exhibited with a Chicago gallery for decades. So it’s about time the city should renew its acquaintance not only with some of the finest, most wide-ranging work by a living artist but also with the remarkable 86-year-old who overcame extraordinary obstacles to create it.
We spent a recent morning in conversation at Duckworth’s Ravenswood home and studio, a former pickle factory for which she — with typical intrepidity –served as contractor during rehab more than 20 years ago. The two-story building is as unusual as its inhabitant, for Duckworth cut away part of the second floor and added a walkway around the opening, which allows her to see works from high above. A famous poem by John Donne envisioned God as a potter. Our diminutive ceramist — Duckworth is 5 feet tall — gave herself something of his viewpoint.
She radiates calm
Seated at a long wooden table in the loftlike living space above the studio, she radiated a calm, “centered” quality in line with the serenity of her art. Several of her sculptures were in the space, as were some of her small drawings for sculpture, which Duckworth impishly showed collecting on the table under her placemat. However, much of what she recounted about early life was anything but tranquil, suggesting that her quiet, decisive, gently wry manner developed over many years and was hard-won.
“I feel that I’ve always fallen between two stools,” Duckworth said. “In Germany I was too Jewish. In England [World War II] was on, and I was too German. And here I’m too white.”
But that was the smaller part of it.
She was born to a woman who wanted only boys and let her four daughters know it. She was a tiny, weak baby who for her first three months a doctor ordered to be confined alone. She refused to eat and at age 4 was sent to a children’s home to learn. From age 6 she wanted to be an artist in what was then predominantly a man’s world.
“I was always thinking, I wonder what’s wrong with me,” Duckworth said. “Then my older sister developed schizophrenia and felt from a very young age there was something different about her. So there were two of us thinking, always, what’s wrong with me?”
Duckworth did badly in school in everything except gymnastics and art. Her anger led to defiance. She wrote in her diary, “I want my life to be a spit against the wind.” Her only brother told her not to worry, he would look after her. A year later, as he sailed from the Dutch East Indies to join the family in England, his ship was torpedoed and he was killed.
Sink or become strong
Did all this give Duckworth self-reliance?
“I feel that must be the other side of it,” she said. “Either you’d go under or you’d become stronger. I think the latter happened.”
Two things saved her: psychoanalysis and a belief in the power of art. She was in deep analysis for seven years, first going five days, then three a week. This was unusual in London in the 1940s. But it was equally unusual for a girl to have declared to a school principal that she wanted to study drawing, painting and sculpture because “Michelangelo did it” and then, because of being moved by an exhibition of Indian sculpture, take to stone carving, earning a living for years carving decorations on tombstones.
“I was a very depressed woman,” Duckworth said. “But there was Rilke, Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Those are the people that fed me. They made me feel I wanted to do what they were doing. And if they helped me, maybe I could help other people. That was quite important.
“I think art has a healing capability. There is a poem by Rilke that expresses it very clearly. And I really believe that. I’m careful about saying it too loudly because it makes me sort of an old-fashioned person, but I have never abandoned that idea.”
Her first sculptural commission was for limestone bas reliefs of the Stations of the Cross. Her assistant was another young sculptor, Aidron Duckworth. They worked together four months. He cooked one night, she the next, and the time passed happily. She thought they might as well be married, and so they were. Marriage, she says, immediately changed him. They stayed together 16 years, she waiting for him to change back, but to no avail.
Back to school
Withal, she continued to work — in stone, metal, wood and clay. Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, ancient art and forms found in nature were major influences. Equally important was her friend, ceramist Lucy Rie, who one day answered Duckworth’s questions about glazes by suggesting that she go back to school to study ceramics, which she did. While at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts she began to sell her works in clay and within five years was recognized as a ceramic artist of potential. She was 40.
“I started quite late,” Duckworth said. “I had done some ceramics while still a child; I made a portrait of my schoolteacher from memory. So I had worked with clay before but without any lessons or learning about throwing and firing. What attracted me to working with it [later] was that it involved touching and touching something that responded. It was a material that responded to you more than stone, in a way. For stone you had to use force. With clay it was different, and I found it felt good to me.”
The old argument of ceramics being craft rather than art meant nothing to Duckworth. She repeatedly demonstrated, in fact, that clay was a legitimate medium for sculpture. Solo exhibitions in London plus group shows in Western Europe and Japan solidified her reputation, and in 1964 she was invited to teach at the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios.
“My mother was very clever,” Duckworth said. “She thought I should live in the United States, where rich Americans could look after me better than the English. The reason I stayed was a mural for the Geophysical Sciences Building. I had never made a mural when I had a conversation with Julian Goldsmith, chairman of the department who had bought a little piece from me. He said they were going to ask a Canadian potter to do a mural for the new building. I said, `With me on the campus?’ He said, `You want to do it?’ And that was our total conversation. I had two dogs in London, so I brought them over, and that was it.”
Since then she has created several murals along with freestanding pieces both representational and abstract. Some visitors to the exhibition, which contains 60 years of art, have told her that because of its variety it looks as if two or three people did the work. But she’s firm about not wanting to do the same thing over and over. The reason for continuing to create, she says, is not to be bored, so she does whatever she wants, as the spirit moves her.
`Just let it happen’
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“When I make something,” Duckworth said, “I try not to think. I try to just let it happen. Then, afterward, in the evening, I start thinking about it. I’m not a really analytic person. I have been analytic about my life, but I’m not about my work. In psychoanalysis I talked without thinking. I try to do [something similar] with my work.
“I’m a 9-to-5 person. Nowadays I don’t start until about 9:30 or so. At 5 o’clock I tend to come upstairs. When I’m under real pressure, I’ll go down again at 10 and work until midnight. Having a marriage that fell apart gave me a lot of time. When we finally broke up, I decided what I wanted was peace. It was a very conscious decision. I’m a person that’s easily dominated, and I did not want to get into another situation where that would happen. I wanted my own life and felt this was the best way to do it.”
When she retired from teaching in 1977, she was advised to move away from Chicago, though she stayed and believes her career did not suffer a bit. Likewise, she does not say her life as an artist was more difficult for being a woman. She recalls receiving letters from young women who were encouraged because of her example though gives little indication she enjoyed being a role model.
Thoughts of mortality, she says, do not bother her. She believes in reincarnation and were she to come back would like to have something to do with animals. She also would like to have a child. It is one of the things she hasn’t done that she says she has missed.
Her work is known and admired the world over, but characteristically, she sees her acceptance from a different angle.
“That people want to live with what I make,” said Duckworth, “that, to me, is success.”
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“Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor” continues at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., through July 10; the artist will give a free lecture on her work at 1 p.m. June 11. 312-744-6630.