Ida Kohlmeyer, within a fifty year career as a painter, has become a New Orleans institution, much like Mardi Gras itself. Her work is not only prominent among collectors and museums around the country, it proudly surrounds the New Orleans community with several examples of grandiose sculptures of abstract shapes and forms. These works are monumental, three-dimensional apparitions of her paintings and their public display not only highlights the festive New Orleans milieu but is enjoyed by all who come and go there. It has become part of the local ambiance from the immense outdoor works to the most private of collections. And, her bright colors and pictographic symbols mimic the jubilant spirit of her native home.

This "Grand Dame" of color was not always an artist. In fact, she didn't take up study in art until later in life. She was born Ida Rittenberg in 1912. Her parents were Jewish immigrants who came to New Orleans from Poland in 1900. Growing up in privileged and comfortable surroundings, she was educated in private schools. Later this beauty queen and cheerleader attended Newcomb College of Tulane University earning a Bachelor's degree in English Literature in 1933, In 1934 she married Hugh Kohlmeyer, a successful New Orleans businessman. It was not until 1947 at the age of thirty-seven that Kohlmeyer took her first painting class. And thus began her journey into the unique contributions which she would eventually give to our artistic heritage. Her increasing commitment to art eventually developed into an original form of expression through her own creative self-discovery.

Her earliest works were the "World of Aloneness in Children," a group of works upon which her Master's thesis was based in 1956. Shortly thereafter, she went to Provincetown, Massachusetts to study with Hans Hofmann for three months. A significant influence, that seventy-five-year-old giant of twentieth century abstraction awakened her to his theory of painting as invention. She adopted his "push-pull" philosophy in which various oppositions and active elements within a painting become resolved and balanced. Kohlmeyer emerged from figurative painting into her first stages of chromatic abstraction.

The following year and during the height of Abstract Expressionism, Mark Rothko came to Newcomb College as a visiting artist and Kohlmeyer responded to him with an even greater enthusiasm. His techniques and ideas were so influential that Kohlmeyer favored his style in her own work for the next seven years. The imprint of his theories established a profound breakthrough in her journey of creative self-discovery which eventually led to the evolution of her unique style. Where she differed from him in stylistic attitude was the innate playfulness of her stroke and composition. This playfulness was a completely foreign attitude for Rothko in the serious and heavy nature of his own work.

She had her first New York exhibition at the Ruth White Gallery in 1959. But in 1966, the gallery closed and Kohlmeyer made no attempt to contact another New York dealer. Ultimately she met David Findlay and became affiliated with his gallery in 1975. All the while, she received numerous accolades from other sources around the country. Most prominently, in 1963, she was included in the 28th Biennial of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. for which she was given a Purchase Award through a Ford Foundation Grant. These early accomplishments eventually led her into the critical spotlight of success with exhibitions, honors and awards. The most recent of these are the "1st Annual Honoree" of the Delgado Society of the New Orleans Museum of Art and " Women of Distinction" award by Birmingham-Southern University in Alabama.

After having taught at Newcomb College and Louisiana State University, Kohlmeyer gave up teaching in 1975 to focus entirely on her own work. She did her first experiments in three-dimensional works in 1969 but did not seriously return to these efforts until the mid 1970s. She completed her first important sculptural piece in 1983 with the commission of the Krewe of Poydras through James J. Colemon, Jr., Lee H. Schlesinger and the Equitable Life American Society of the United States to be located in front of their building on Poydras Street in New Orleans. This project established a new and exciting challenge, one that launched a multitude of possibilities in her creative search not only for future avenues in paintings but for painting in three dimension as well. Sculpture become a continuous outlet and a perfect resolution for the incorporation of visual space and perspective in her work. Kohlmeyer could literally transfer her witty and playful symbols into solid, physical forms which were free of the psychological space of her paintings. These works are innovative, clever and whimsical constructions which create amusing trinkets of contemporary existence and strongly parody her interest in folk and primitive art.

Although Kohlmeyer was greatly influenced by her contact with two of the most prominent abstract theoreticians of the twentieth century, she was able to digest and reformulate their ideas to suit her own personal needs. Additionally, she allowed a lifetime of interests and pursuits to play a role in developing her own personal style. Hofmann, as the most influential teacher of abstraction in America, inspired Kohlmeyer's initial vision of nonrepresentational imagery through automatism, or the technique of drawing without reason, logic or conscious direction. He was able to imbue in his students a rich sense of color and form. Hofmann with his direct contact with some of the most prominent forerunners of European Modernism, such as Matisse, Picasso and Kandinsky, introduced the most advanced concepts of European painting to his American students. With his own theory of synthesizing surrealism and cubism, Hofmann formulated the conditions which founded the first New York School, the American Abstractionists which eventually developed Abstract Expressionism. He stressed oppositions of formal elements within the composition such as active line, intense color and assertive paint application. His theories, his teachings intently led an entire army of American artists including Ida Kohlmeyer to abandon representationalism, imitation and the figurative in art in order to pursue "higher truths" in self-expression.

Awakened to the freedom of expression this type of painting released, Kohlmeyer began her journey of creative self-discovery with color and form. While she was still in the formative stages of her style, Mark Rothko lent the second most productive influence. She adopted his contemplative nature and incorporated it into the automatic gesturalism and physical involvement of the act of painting absorbed through Hofmann. Rothko used a unique staining technique to create large rectangles of color that radiated light from within the canvas. The results were paintings which induced a state of contemplation and provided dramatic impact. This technical influence is identifiable still in Kohlmeyer's work today. During the 1960s she began to incorporate symbolic gestures into the experimental color forms synthesized from Hofmann's and Rothko's theories. But, it wasn't until the early 1970s that she began to orchestrate her famous pictographic language of archetypal signs and calligraphic symbols which narrates Kohlmeyer's magical expedition into an enchanting, expressive and subconscious playground.

The gestural, symbolic nature of her work is directly integrated, not only from these two major artistic influences but from an outgrowth of her interests and experiences. After her marriage to Hugh Kohlmeyer, she had her first contact with folk art during their Mexican honeymoon which instilled a lifelong fascination with folk and primitive art. She appreciates the directness and lack of polish in such pieces. And, she has pursued collecting particularly those with Mexican, Oceanic and African influences. Kohlmeyer's unfeigned and spontaneous gestures, their symbolic nature, and the unfettered embellishments of color and line depict the some innate spirit of contemporary existence as the ritualistic creations and cultural objects portrayed by these primitive or naive societies. The impact on her painting from these sources is extraordinary masterpieces every bit as great as the giants of Western art she admired. Combined with her previous interest in literature and her own cultural heritage, Kohlmeyer has fused together a unique combination of aesthetic, spiritual, intellectual and cultural influences to invent her unique pictorial language.

Many artists eventually slow down, but Kohlmeyer has continued throughout her career to seek new avenues of her own creative expression. Once unveiled in her painting, the pictographic markings were first used within a grid-like format until they were eventually freed from structure and arranged randomly against an atmospheric background. Such a vision creates the illusion of depth as the isolated and individual markings float in a prismatic space. However, in her sculptures, the cubistic quality of shape itself enforces an optical illusion since the form changes while the viewer moves around it. Perspective and illusion inadvertently create an important role in her sculpture which does not intuitively appear in her paintings.

Among the invented, calligraphic pictographs are many recognizable symbols such as hearts and apple-shaped spheres. Each mark is a direct outgrowth of Hofmann's influence with regard to gestural and automatic painting techniques. Combined with the communicative spirit of Rothko, she portrays her experience and mood of the process of creativity. The carnival-like, good-natured and child-like renditions indeed portray her exhilaration for painting as well as her delight and happiness with life itself. The stacked shapes and surface embellishments of color in her sculptures emerge as subconscious toys, cheerful playthings of a serene and happy intellect. Each symbol, each mark is energized with a fresh and original sense of color and chromatic harmony. These animated elements are personal expressions of good humor and carry with them a unique personality. They tell psychological stories of the subconscious imagination while they describe a primitive vocabulary of intuitive symbols.

In both her sculptures and her paintings, surface is activated with detailed patterns. An immense sense of chaos exists amidst an innate, yet subliminal order. They are like bits and pieces of reality, suggestions of things from human existence that emerge from the subconscious with a delightful sense of freedom. They exist somewhere between abstraction and reality but stand for nothing but themselves clone in a magical and mysterious world of the unknown.

Kohlmeyer's chromatic abstractions, her sophisticated modernist approach and her refreshing yet child-like vision of form, all create an art that is provocative, aggressive, and personal. At the some time, it possesses a seductive nature which bears an expressive dynamic all its own. The chromatic abstractions of Ida Kohlmeyer are a testimonial of her lifelong commitment, her determination, her struggle, and her success in finding a unique expression of creative self-discovery. They are an inspirational and completely delightful highlight of this year's season at the Springfield Art Museum.