Draft:Betty Ryan

Summary

"an American girl of exceptional charm and insight...a rather lovely creature, with an aura of purity which found corroboration in her voice, a soft and mysteriously caressing voice, borrowed from the folklore of some forgotten country". - Alfred Perles

Betty Ryan, born Elizabeth Bartlett Ryan (1914-2003) in New York City, was a talented and accomplished painter and grammarian of Russian, French, Greek, and English. She attended Spence School “part-time while steaming between Europe and the U.S.”.. In her early life, she attended lessons at the Romanowski studio and Ozenfant atelier in Paris.

Betty, in the late 1930s, moved to the then world cultural center of Paris where she took an apartment at the Villa Seurat. Henry Miller, who would become a lifelong friend and correspondent, and a world famous writer, lived in the apartment above hers. The "famous Soutine", as she put it, was living in an apartment down the hall. During her time in Paris, she befriended Lawrence Durrell, Alfred Perles, and painter Hans Reichel. She once hosted an exhibition of Reichel's paintings which was attended by many prominent artists including Pablo Picasso.

Her life, which would come to reflect an unusual combination of two often contradictory aptitudes - for both solitude and for friendship, is documented through her oil paintings, water colors, and her extensive correspondences, and Betty Ryan: Recalls & Reflects (2013 by Sonny Saul), a compilation of her literary pieces, also featuring an introduction and obituary written by friends she made towards the end of her life as she was living in Vermont.

Relationships

Henry Miller acknowledged and thanked her for her “luminous accounts of Greece” in his book Colossus of Maroussi, also dedicated to her: "I would never have gone to Greece had it not been for a girl named Betty Ryan who lived in the same house with me in Paris. One evening, over a glass of white wine, she began to talk of her experiences in roaming about the world. I always listened to her with great attention, not only because her experiences were strange but because when she talked about her wanderings she seemed to paint them: everything she described remained in my head like finished canvases by a master. It was a peculiar conversations that evening: we began by talking about China and the Chinese language which she had begun to study. Soon we were in North Africa, in the desert, among peoples I had never heard of before. And then suddenly she was all alone, walking beside a river, and the light was intense and I was following her as best I could I the blinding sun but she got lost and I found myself wandering about in a strange land listening to a language I had never heard before. She is not exactly a story teller, this girl, but she is an artist of some sort because nobody has ever given me the ambiance of a place so thoroughly as she did Greece. Long afterwards I discovered that it was near Olympia that she had gone astray and I with her, but at the time it was just Greece to me, a world of light as I had never dreamed of and never hoped to see."

Due to the war in Europe, Betty returned, and for a time settled back in New York, where she then married Harry Gordon in 1940. Shortly after their marriage, America entered the war and Harry joined the navy. Betty, who had developed a proficiency in both German and Russian, followed her husband to San Francisco, using her proficiency to aid transfers of “Liberty Ships” to the Russians- ships that later “became the foundation of the Greek mercantile fleet,” .

As reflected upon in "Betty Ryan Recalls & Reflects", "The Strongest Thread in Elizabeth Ryan Gordon's life began with her visit to Greece in 1934. She was ever the believer in Greece for its modern attributes; the light, the sea, the people and the literature." Upon visiting Greece on a school cruise led by M. Ozenfant, she “jumped ship” and remained in Olympia, Greece for several months painting and learning Greek.

Ryan returned to and remained in Greece (more specifically Andros), until 1990, when she to Vermont. There, she continued to find and create new and interesting friendships, to paint, and to keep up her literary correspondence with her many friends around the world. Towards the end of her life, she donated her collection of letters and paintings to the library in Chora on Andros.

Work

"'Tell us how it was,' asked Jean Francois Jaeger. 'The people whom you had the privilege of knowing in Paris in the thirties enjoyed a freedom of thought an action which, under present pressures, we are losing'.

"There was ecstasy and doldrums, there were lost days and days of hard work. There was at times a confluence of thought and being so that experience gave out its full aroma like a flower." answered Betty Ryan, from "Nous Faisons de l'Histoire"

At the end of her life, Betty Ryan invented a new genre of memoir writing, composing essays about her friendships from this early period in Paris. These friendships included Chaim Soutine, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, and Hans Reichel. "Betty Ryan Recalls & Reflects" is a compilation of these essays.

Ryan’s work as a painter was exhibited on occasion in Europe and in the States, but perhaps most famously in an exposition put on by the Hellenic-American Union in Athens in 1978, where she met Bertrand Mathieu, which led to his creation of the piece “La Dame d’Andros”.

Today Ryan’s paintings are held in private collections around the world and may be seen at the library on Andros in Greece. Her vast correspondence remains uncollected.