Ruth Rogers-Altmann

Ruth Rogers-Altmann (December 31, 1917 – October 11, 2015) was a Vienna-born painter and fashion designer who lived most of her life in New York. She is the mother of Susan Costello Friedman, former editorial director of Abbeville Press, and Art Historian and Sculptor Victoria Thorson.

Rogers-Altmann is the daughter of Arnold Karplus, a well-known architect of Red Vienna, and his wife Else. From 1933 to 1938 her parents and she lived in the Steiner House in Vienna's 13th district, Hietzing, designed in 1910 by Adolf Loos for Lilly and Hugo Steiner, who lived here until 1927 when they moved to Paris. At a young age Ruth studied dance, directing and music at the Kunsakademie and performed professionally in Vienna. Her fine arts training began at the Frauenakademie and continued at the Kunstgewerbeschule as a student of professor Albert Paris Gütersloh, a well-known exponent of Jugendstil (Art Nouveau). Her fashion training was under professor Wimer, an international authority in the fashion world. Her passion for spontaneity of performance, rhythm in dance, and artists of her period like Schiele, Kokoschka and Klimt - as well as Picasso, in some of her later African-themed work - are continuing influences in her painting. She was an enthusiastic skier up until she was 90 years old, learning to ski at the Mathias Zdarsky school of skiing, where the one-pole method was taught. Due to the notoriety of her father, Rogers-Altmann had many contacts with architects and artists throughout her childhood and youth.

Visiting Prague for her grandmother's birthday in March 1938, she learned that the Anschluss was imminent. Instead of returning to Vienna she fled to New York. Shortly thereafter her immediate family emigrated to New York, except for her brother Hans, who went to Caracas.

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