Artist Biography & Facts

Ruth Blanchard Miller Kempster

Kempster, Ruth Miller 1904–1978

Ruth Blanchard Miller was born on January 17, 1904, in Chicago, Illinois. She was the third and youngest daughter of Kempster B. and Antha (Knowlton) Miller, a couple who valued education. Ruth was interested in art as a child, and while she was in high school her father bought her a correspondence course in art basics from the Kansas City Art Institute, which she eagerly completed. The family assumed that after Ruth finished high school, she would attend Vassar College, as her mother and sisters before her had done, but Ruth had what she later referred to as “a tiny little nervous breakdown,” which convinced her parents to forget Vassar and send her directly to art school.

In 1922, the family were residents of Pasadena, California, and Ruth began her studies at the Stickney Memorial Art School in Los Angeles, California, and continued at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. At about age twenty-one, Ruth moved to the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied sculpture, her first love, along with painting and lithography.

About 1925, Ruth, twenty-two years old, went to Paris and enrolled at L’École des Beaux-Arts accompanied by a fellow woman art student, perhaps who served partially as a chaperone. The Beaux-Arts did not allow unmarried female students to work from the nude model, which Ruth had enjoyed in New York, but she worked on oil painting techniques, and spent days in the museums, especially with the Dutch and Flemish masters.

Disappointed with the Beaux-Arts, the two Americans took a trip to Spain; after that, Ruth left her companion and went to Italy. She spent a year or more in Florence studying mural and fresco techniques at The Florence Academy of Art, where she assisted with public frescoes already in progress while continuing to paint in oils. Ruth was happy in Florence, and while there, she met a young Italian artist and eventually she moved with him to Rome. After her parents arrived in 1928, Ruth and her family returned to California, without the Italian artist. Of her work in Europe, Ruth brought home only one large canvas, Gypsy Woman.

Back in Pasadena, Ruth lived with her parents, using a spare bedroom as a studio. Then, in 1931, at age twenty-seven, Ruth married Henry Fracker, an electrical engineer from Pasadena’s California Institute of Technology. The marriage ended in divorce sometime later.

In 1932, one of Ruth’s portraits won a first prize in figure painting at the California State Fair. Ruth signed it with her married name, Ruth Miller Fracker. Also in 1932, the Olympic Games were held in Los Angeles and the Olympiad included a fine arts competition: Ruth entered the painting Struggle, for which she won a silver medal.

Ruth came from a family of Republicans, and while it is not known how she voted, on the evidence of a few of her paintings, one can see she had empathy for the social concerns of her time. In Working Stiff, the tragedy is unemployment. The subject’s hands carry much of the message: wasted strength, emptiness, and hopelessness.

From 1934 to 1950, Ruth exhibited under her married name, Ruth Miller Fracker. She exhibited regularly in group shows and won awards, earning a reputation as a realist painter. Ruth identified herself as a portrait painter, but she was also a master of hands, general anatomy, and the technique of foreshortening, all of which are very difficult. The quality in the picture is reminiscent of something that Ruth wrote in a letter home while
on a trip to Peru: “I’ve often wondered why the humble and lowly always appeals to the artist . . . There isn’t a superfluous or ‘arty’ note anywhere. . . The effect is beautiful.” She once advised a young relative that in order to see a new country, “he should look into the eyes of the people who lived there, not as a tourist, but as a participant”; she said that was what she did when she painted.

Ruth’s training as a muralist in Italy did not go to waste; she did six murals based on nursery rhyme themes for the children’s ward at Pasadena Hospital (later renamed Huntington Hospital) in Pasadena in 1934.

The beginning of World War II brought an ironic and gloomy response from Ruth, best demonstrated in her work Death of a Christmas Tree, which shows a Christmas tree in the trash along with newspapers announcing “This is War.” Perhaps too explicitly, the painter shows the mockery that war makes of Christian symbols, though she herself was not very religious. The war also brought an immediate move for Ruth and her husband Henry, a sonic engineer. Henry was drafted to do classified research at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he and Ruth spent the war years. After the war, back in California, the Frackers built a modern house in the Hollywood Hills.

Shortly after the war, Ruth and Henry took an extraordinary car trip, driving a Ford station wagon through Mexico, Central and South America, into remote parts of Peru, and finally to Chile. When they returned, Henry Fracker found himself in trouble; his security clearance was under investigation by the FBI. The full story, a subject of shocked family whispering, was never completely revealed, but apparently, Henry was gay or bisexual, and until then, extremely closeted. In 1950, Ruth went to Reno, Nevada, to obtain a divorce.

For years, Ruth Miller Fracker had been known as an accomplished painter. But now, divorced and on her own, she renamed herself, taking her beloved late father’s first name, Kempster, for her last. She also re-signed all her old work with the new name, a somewhat unusual step since name recognition sells. In 1953, paintings, she re-signed even the gift tag on Death of a Christmas Tree: “Merry Christmas from Ruth Kempster.”

On many of Ruth’s canvases, a ghostly “Fracker” remains under a layer of more recent paint. To her, the fresh identity was worth whatever it cost. Ruth loved the desert, and she had a small house near Palm Springs where she often retreated. From the beginning of her career, she enjoyed working on etching and lithography, and she produced some wonderful images, particularly on subjects found in the desert or on her frequent trips to Mexico.

Early in her career, Ruth was invited to show at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco and at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. She received prizes at group exhibitions at the California State Fair, 1931, 1932, and 1936, and the Pasadena Society of Artists in 1936, 1040, 1944 and 1951, and then in 1953 she was offered a one-woman show at the Pasadena Art Institute.

For twenty-five years Ruth painted steadily, regularly submitting work to juried and non-juried Southern California exhibitions and yearly at the California State Fair in Sacramento. She won many other awards and was mentioned in the art columns of numerous newspapers. She was a member of the California Art Club and the Pasadena Society of Artists and Women Painters of the West

In 1953, Ruth had her first solo exhibition at the Pasadena Art Institute, and rather than attend, she left on a six-week volunteer tour to wartime Korea with the Armed Forces Far East Command. A small group of artists, including Ruth and a couple of Disney Studio cartoonists, entertained soldiers in hospitals and rehabilitation centers by drawing and giving away portraits of the men; they also gave advice on sketching and painting.

In 1959, through friends, she met Fred Clapp, a Los Angeles lawyer and a widower. In 1960, when she was fifty-six, Ruth married Fred and the couple moved to Ojai, California. She didn’t quit painting, but she never again showed her work in any major venue. She learned pastels and signed her work Ruth Kempster Clapp. She entered a contest for a design for a pubic fountain; she didn’t win but did create a drawing and clay study that was later cast in bronze.

Then, in 1970, at the age of sixty-six, Ruth was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a radical mastectomy. As she was recovering, she returned to her first love, sculpture. After some years, the cancer recurred, and on May 21, 1978, Ruth Kempster passed away at the age of seventy-four in Santa Barbara, California.

Biography submitted by Maurine St. Gaudens  

Source:
Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860-1960, Maurine St. Gaudens, Editor, 2016

Born in Chicago, IL on Jan. 17, 1904, Ruth Kempster studied at Los Angeles County Art Institute, Art Students League, Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and the National Academy in Florence, Italy.

By 1930 she had settled in Pasadena where she taught at the School of Fine Arts for several years and won many awards in local shows. In 1953 she toured Korea as a portrait painter for the Armed Forces Far East Command.

She died in Santa Barbara, CA on May 21, 1978.

Exhibitions:
International Olympic Games, 1932; California State Fairs, 1931-36; Pasadena Society of Artists, 1936-58; Women Painters of the West, 1951-54; Los Angeles Art Association, 1951; Pasadena Public Library, 1952; Pasadena Art Institute, 1953 (solo).

Collection:
Pasadena Art Institute; Huntington Hospital (Pasadena).

Edan Hughes, "Artists in California, 1786-1940"
Who's Who in American Art 1953-62.

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