Frank Rutter

Who was Frank Rutter?

Francis Vane Phipson Rutter was a British art critic, curator and activist.

In 1903, he became art critic for The Sunday Times, a position which he held for the rest of his life. He was an early champion in England of modern art, founding the French Impressionist Fund in 1905 to buy work for the national collection, and in 1908 starting the Allied Artists Association to show "progressive" art, as well as publishing its journal, Art News, the "First Art Newspaper in the United Kingdom". In 1910, he began to actively support women's suffrage, chairing meetings, and giving sanctuary to suffragettes released from prison under the Cat and Mouse Act—helping some to leave the country.

From 1912 to 1917, he was the curator of Leeds City Art Gallery. In 1917, he edited the cultural journal, Arts and Letters, with Herbert Read. In his writing after World War I, Rutter observed that advertising imagery was seen by far more people than work in art galleries; he noted a new realism after the period of "abstract experiment"; and he praised the work of Dod Proctor as a "complete presentation of twentieth century vision".