Ida Kohlmeyer

B. New Orleans, LA, 1912
D. 1997

Ida Kohlmeyer, the daughter of Polish immigrants, was a painter and sculptor who achieved international acclaim while living and working in New Orleans throughout her life. The artist only began her career as an artist in her thirties, reflecting the freedom and creativity of her city. After completing her MFA at Tulane University in 1954, Kohlmeyer studied with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A year later, she met the painter Mark Rothko, who came to New Orleans as a visiting artist at Tulane and he set up his studio at Kohlmeyer’s family home. These encounters – as well as the aesthetic influence of her collection of pre-Columbian, Mexican, and African sculptures – informed her unique style of abstraction, spanning expressionist compositions of the 1950s, organic and geometric frameworks of the 1960s, and contributions to the Pattern & Decoration movement.

Kohlmeyer initially pursued literature studies, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane University’s Newcomb College in 1933. She enrolled in art classes with John McGrady and studied further under abstractionist Patrick Trevino.

In the 1960s, Kohlmeyer experimented with abstract art and became affiliated with the Ruth White Gallery in Manhattan where her work was shown on a regular basis. She was also represented in the Twenty-Eighth Biennial of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1963. By the 1970s, Kohlmeyer had abandoned figurative elements completely for non-objective subject matter. Her admiration of the Spanish modern artist Joan Miró (whom she had met in Paris in 1956) influenced her decision to develop her own code of schematic symbols, which she employed–often in grid pattern–throughout the rest of her career. Kohlmeyer’s mature work is the result of years of self-examination and continuous reduction of forms. Her paintings speak to the arbitrariness of symbols as well as to the universal desire to communicate. Later in her career, Kohlmeyer would earn acclaim for her sculpture, often quite large in scale and characterized by bold color and striking profiles.

Kohlmeyer’s work drew from non-Western art, incorporating elements from her collection of pre-Columbian, Mexican, and African sculptures. Throughout the 1990s, her large-scale paintings featured bold, decorative forms, connecting her work to the Pattern and Decoration movement. Kohlmeyer also explored sculpture, creating installations like Louisiana Prop Piece with Lynda Benglis, and later, playful, emblematic forms.

Kohlmeyer's work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.