Jean Rudolph

Jean Rudolph is a native of Windsor, Ontario, born in 1952 of a family of Protestants. She showed an early precocious talent for the violin which was later superseded at age fourteen by poetry only coming to be a painter after obtaining a masters degree at the University of Toronto in literature. She then undertook a wide discipleship to many of the memorable Canadian artists of the late seventies and eventually settled in New York in 1979, where she was known for her artistic parties (she was sometimes dubbed the "Gertrude Stein of New York") and her much celebrated exhibitions which often verged quite heavily into theatricty. After her artistic circle came to an end in the middle of the decade she fled to the western part of the States, both Arizona and California before reestablishing herself in the 90's as an important art critic and collector in her own right. She is often seen as a defender of contemporary art against charges of obscurity and also as a critic of the Museum of Modern Art itself in many ways for their "blunt association with decayed forms of art". Her detractors claim that Rudolph often resorts to hyperbole to make her statements, while her supporters claim the she is really doing a benefit to art by seizing it from the tyranny of the old critical approach where "old" is meant to indicate some thirty or forty years. She continues to work out of Manhattan, though she makes occasional visits to both Canadian and American universities as a part of a lecture series.