In 1974, executives of the German-owned Dresdner Bank commissioned sculptor Ruth Duckworth to create a mural for their Chicago office, resulting in Clouds Over Lake Michigan. This monumental wall relief, which many consider Duckworth's magnum opus, incorporates an aerial view of Lake Michigan and Chicago with a fluid, textural blend of representation and abstraction. In 2023, Clouds Over Lake Michigan was relocated to the entrance lobby of the Joseph Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, marking a homecoming for Duckworth, who had a significant relationship with the university.
After establishing herself as an artist in her native Germany and England, Duckworth moved to Chicago in 1964 to teach at the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios, intending to return to Europe after a year. However, Duckworth would end up teaching at the University of Chicago for twenty-three years and living in the city for close to fifty. While Duckworth’s early work is linked stylistically and formally with British studio potters like Lucie Rie and Hans Coper—Duckworth had assisted Rie early in her career—Duckworth blazed her own trail once she settled in America. In particular, from the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and beyond, Duckworth executed several stunning wall sculptures in response to her new environment.
During Duckworth’s first decade at the University of Chicago, she became acquainted with Professor Tetsuya Fujita, who was an expert on severe weather and developed the Fujita scale of tornado severity, which is still in use in the United States in a modified form. Fujita’s reports contained aerial views with masses of clouds and his slide photographs captured the fearsome funnels of tornados. Along with being exposed to these visuals from Fujita, Duckworth took an extensive trip all across America, Mexico, and Guatemela, gaining an appreciation for the immense, manifold landscapes of her new continent. En route, she also became enamored with clouds in all their variety.
After being awarded the Dresdner Bank commission to produce Clouds Over Lake Michigan in 1974, Duckworth only had about four months to execute the mural. The present lot is a maquette from the initial stages of Duckworth’s masterpiece. Measuring roughly a foot high by two feet wide, this ceramic and wood panel depicts a portion of the lakeshore near Chicago with a band of clouds in suspended animation above the water rendered via an ingenious succession of ridges of clay, which appear like clouds when viewed directly. The final version of Clouds Over Lake Michigan is comprised of sixty-five clay tiles with a height of nine feet and a width of twenty-three feet. Altogether, this grandiose work weighs in at 2,500 pounds.
After Dresdner Bank closed its Chicago office in 1984, Cboe Global Markets—which now owns both the largest American options trading venue, Chicago Board Options Exchange, and the stock exchange operator, BATS Global Markets—decided to donate Clouds Over Lake Michigan to the University of Chicago because the company lacked suitable wall space at its new headquarters and the university seemed like the rightful heir to Duckworth’s most substantial mural. Clouds Over Lake Michigan was permanently installed in 2023 at the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, whose original architect, Walter Netsch, had always wanted there to be more art in the building to foster inspired study and research across fields. Given the ambitious, interdisciplinary nature of Duckworth’s practice, and the exceptional achievement of Clouds Over Lake Michigan, it is perhaps the ideal piece of public art to complete the space.
When I am working, I try not to think. I may have feelings. I may have something going on, but I don’t want to think. I want it to happen by itself. I want it to flow out by itself and not interfere with it.
Ruth Duckworth
Ruth Duckworth 1919–2009
Ruth Duckworth was born Ruth Windmüller in Hamburg, Germany in 1919. She began drawing at a young age and left Germany for England in the mid-1930s, fleeing the Nazis. She attended the Liverpool College of Art from 1936 to 1940, studying painting and drawing. Throughout the 1940s, she took various jobs as a puppeteer, tombstone carver, working in a munitions factory and even spent some time working in Lucie Rie’s ceramic studio.
In the early 1940s, she enrolled in the City and Guilds of London Art School, shifting her focus to sculpture; explaining the change, Duckworth later said that “there’s no material that so effectively communicates both fragility and strength.” In the late 1940s she continued her studies at the Anglo-French Art Center in Kensington, where she met her soon-to-be husband, sculptor Aidron Duckworth. They worked on their first commission together in 1948, creating fourteen bas-relief limestone carvings for St. Joseph’s Church in New Malden, England.
Duckworth's early sculptural work was representational but she soon turned to abstraction and organic forms that were influenced by both prehistoric and modern imagery, as well as nature and human relationships. Inspired by a museum exhibition she saw of Indian pottery, she continued her studies at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1956 to 1958, turning more seriously to porcelain ceramics. At the time, ceramics in England were still quite traditional in style and functional in form, and her organic, hand-shaped, surrealist works were misunderstood by audiences at-large, but celebrated by fellow artists and ceramicists.
In 1960 she had her first solo show at Primavera Gallery, London and was shown in the exhibition British Studio Potters with Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. Her work was gaining attention and prestige among the ceramic community. In the early 1960s, she had several shows in Chicago, taught at University of Chicago in 1964 and in 1965 the Congregation Solel synagogue in Highland Park, Illinois commissioned her to design a menorah. After the positive reception of her work in the United States, Duckworth permanently relocated to Chicago in 1966 feeling there would be better opportunities for teaching and commission work.
During her twenty-three-year tenure teaching at University of Chicago, Duckworth brought some excellent public art to the university and the city, including the mural Earth, Water and Sky (1967-68) in the Geophysical Sciences Building, Clouds Over Lake Michigan (1976) at the Chicago Board Options Exchange Building, and large bronze works at various college campuses. Duckworth had proven that she was adept at making both monumental works and small, intimate pieces. She retired from the University of Chicago in 1977 but continued to actively show and teach around the world throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
In 2005, The Museum of Arts & Design in New York hosted a retrospective of her work, Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor and had solo shows at institutions such as the Cranbrook Museum of Art (2005), Bellas Artes Gallery, Santa Fe (2010, 2013) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2006). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. In 1993 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the gold medal from the National Society of Arts and Letters in 1996 and the gold medal for Lifetime Achievement from the American Craft Council in 1997. Duckworth passed away in 2009 in her adopted home of Chicago.
Auction Results Ruth Duckworth
