Biography: Ruth Fine
Ruth Fine, curator of special projects in modern art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, is the lead author of Mark Rothko: The Works on Paper, a multi-volume catalogue raisonné projected for publication by the National Gallery in 2013. She is also engaged with research on Jasper Johns’ personal archive of proofs for his prints, recently acquired by the National Gallery. Selections were on view in the 2010 exhibition Editions with Additions: Working Proofs by Jasper Johns.
As a curator of prints and then curator of modern prints and drawings at the National Gallery from 1980 through 2002, Fine organized exhibitions of work by American artists including Romare Bearden, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe; contemporary print-publishing workshops Crown Point Press, Gemini G.E.L., and Graphicstudio, U.S.F.; and the collections of Lessing J. Rosenwald and Dorothy and Herbert Vogel.
Fine coordinated The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States project, by which she assisted the New York collectors in making gifts from their collection to one museum in each of the fifty United States, following their generous donations to the National Gallery She was coordinator of the 1994 catalogue raisonné of Roy Lichtenstein’s prints (revised 2002) and co-coordinator of the 1999 Georgia O'Keeffe catalogue raisonné, a project undertaken in concert with the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. Fine has contributed essays to catalogues for exhibitions of the art of Mel Bochner, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, and James McNeill Whistler, and about Tyler Graphics, Ltd. and The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, among others. From 1972 to 1980, Fine served as curator of Lessing J. Rosenwald's collection of prints and drawings, a major gift to the National Gallery that was housed at Alverthorpe Gallery, Rosenwald’s home in Jenkintown, PA, until his death in 1979.
Fine sits on the boards of the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. She lectures frequently about modern and contemporary prints and drawings.
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