Retrospective showcase honors life, work of Chicago sculptor

CHICAGO -- Sculptor Ruth Duckworth has been creating and selling art for over half a century, but each piece still holds a place in her heart. When a ceramic wall mural was broken during a move by the architecture firm that commissioned it, Duckworth asked for the mural back, restored it and now displays it in her North Side studio. Other pieces that emerged from the kiln with flaws rest on shelves, like an Island of Lost Toys. Duckworth, still working at 86, picks them up when she needs inspiration.\nFor the next two months, she'll be able to visit some of her most famous pieces close to home. A career retrospective, "Ruth Duckworth: Modernist Sculptor," opens this weekend at the Chicago Cultural Center with more than 80 ceramic murals, vessels and sculptures by the refugee from Nazi Germany.\nThe retrospective also features her work in metal, stone and bronze, but Duckworth is most acclaimed for her creations with clay in its fired ceramic form. Her works often include organic shapes resembling eggs, mountains, bones, birds, bulbs and female figures. When they contain colors at all, the hues are subtle. Duckworth is a tiny, impish-looking woman who has lived a life to match her daredevil grin.\nBorn Ruth Windmuller in 1919 in Hamburg to a Jewish father and Lutheran mother, Duckworth and her family fled Hitler's Germany when she was a teenager. She studied art in England and picked up odd jobs to support herself, from carving gravestones to creating film sets. She also suffered bouts of depression while working at a munitions factory during World War II. Art helped her heal.\n"It was Rilke's poetry, and Rembrandt and Michelangelo and Durer were my three favorite artists," she said. "And I thought, if they can make me feel better, that maybe I can make myself feel better -- or even other people."\nDuckworth's early artistic ambitions included painting, drawing and graphic design, but she was drawn to sculpture after visiting the Royal Academy in London in the late 1940s.\n"There was a huge room full of sculptures and another one of paintings and miniatures," she said. "I reacted so much more strongly to the room with the sculptures. And that was it."\nShe married fellow sculptor Aidron Duckworth in 1949. By 1960, she was teaching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and had become an important figure in the English ceramics community. In 1964, she was invited to teach sculpture for one year at the University of Chicago. Instead of just a year, she decided to settle in Chicago after receiving a major commission to create a huge mural in the school's Geophysical Sciences Building. She retired from teaching in 1977.\nDuckworth would rather talk about her art than her turbulent younger years, but reminders of her past surround her. On a wall in her home above the art studio, a collage holds pictures of the family home in Hamburg and her siblings dressed up for a walk with their nanny. She speaks lovingly of her older brother who died during World War II. Duckworth still returns to England each year to visit family, but she says staying in Chicago was good for her career, calling America "more stimulating."\n"You have more scope. You can work large or larger or small," she said. "In England, 12 inches is tall."\nThe curator of the retrospective, Thea Burger, said the exhibit demonstrates the diversity of Duckworth's work- with items ranging from diminutive bowls to a larger-than-life bronze work of a couple sitting on a bench with birds on their heads. She hopes it will shed light on the important influence that Duckworth's early years as a stonecarver had on her ceramics.\n"Most ceramic artists begin by throwing clay on a wheel and work building something up. Why Ruth is different is because she takes away in her mind. She takes a block of ceramics and visually and mentally takes away from the work, rather than building it up," Burger said.\nSince the early 1980s, Duckworth has worked and lived in an old brick building she rehabilitated in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood.In her upstairs living space, plants fill ceramic pots that Duckworth fashioned over the decades. Even the dinnerware and ceramic tiles of her kitchen floor are her creations. Duckworth still works five days a week and is planning a trip to the Nile River this year, despite breaking her leg on a 1999 cruise to Antarctica "to see the colors of the ice." She had to wait six days before the bone could be set at a naval hospital in Chile. She is so busy, she hasn't found time to finish a huge bowl she plans to place upside down on her living room carpet to remind her of the mountains she loves. Just getting her to refer to the bowl as a mountain is a change for Duckworth. Most of her works are untitled.\n"I like people to have their own ideas and not my idea of what something is," she said. "Some people are very clever at thinking of intriguing titles. That's not really my cup of tea."\nThe retrospective will be in Chicago until July 10, then travel to Sedalia, Mo.; Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Minneapolis; and Long Beach, Calif. Its final scheduled stop is the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.