Monahan, Gene Ritchie (1908‒1994)

Gene Ritchie Monahan was a northern Minnesotan portrait and landscape artist. She is best remembered for the character and mood she conveyed in her portraits and for the realism in her pen-and-ink drawings for the Rainy Lake Chronicle, a weekly Minnesota newspaper with an international readership.

When Genevieve (Gene) Ritchie graduated from Duluth’s Denfield High School in 1927, her dream was to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She passed the Institute’s entrance exam, but the cost was too expensive for an electrician’s daughter. She aimed, instead, for a more rounded education and signed up for art lessons with local painters A. E. Schar and David Ericson.

One of Ritchie’s earliest works, a self-portrait, earned a first-place award in the Duluth Art Institute’s annual Arrowhead Art Exhibition. The painting drew the attention of national art critics, and her portrait was featured on the cover of the prestigious Art Digest. The magazine described her as “the find of the year” in 1930.

Ritchie earned a teaching certificate from Duluth State Teachers College before transferring to the University of Minnesota. In Minneapolis, she taught art at the Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House. She also gave private lessons and opened a studio to paint and sell portraits. One of her first customers was university student George Monahan. A year and a half after she finished his portrait, Gene and George were married.

Just before World War II, George was called up by the Army. As a form of insurance in case something should happen to George, Gene enrolled in the University of Minnesota’s graduate program in art education. She supported the couple’s children during the war by working as supervisor of art for Faribault public schools.

In 1955, the family moved to New York City, where Gene opened the Studio Gallery in Greenwich Village. She received a scholarship to study and teach at the National Academy School of Fine Arts. Although pressured by other Village artists to work in the abstract style, she refused. Her paintings were praised by Village Voice art critics for their light-filled natural tones and confident brushwork.

Friends and family drew the couple back to Minnesota in 1960. They bought a home in Ranier in 1963 and spent time on the Rainy Lake islands of conservationist Ernest Oberholtzer. Gene continued her work as part of a colony of local artists. She expanded her portfolio to include silk screening and bookbinding, and experimented with sculpture and pottery using local clays.

In the early 1970s, Time magazine’s bureau chief, Ted Hall, left New York City and moved to Ranier to establish the Rainy Lake Chronicle. He called on Monahan to illustrate stories and create cover art. Monahan’s drawings and paintings came to represent the people, places, and natural elements of the border lakes region. Author and environmentalist Sigurd Olson said her work “caught the details of the changing seasons, the little things that appear almost without expecting them, the flash of a gull’s wing in the early spring, the freezing of the lake, the sounds and rumbles, the thawing in the spring.”

Throughout her career, Monahan received national acclaim. In the late 1950s she was elected president of New York City’s branch of the National League of American Pen Women. She won first prize in portrait art at a Smithsonian National Gallery of Art exhibition in 1962. She was invited to present the first one-woman show in the Little Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1964). For two summers in the late 1960s she was invited to paint and teach art to members of the Sandy Lake First Nation in Ontario.

Among those who sat for Monahan’s portraits were pianist Van Cliburn, Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich, conservationists Ernest Oberholtzer and Frances Andrews, and Canadian First Nations artists Norval Morrisseau and Carl Ray. Her work is held in public, corporate, and private collections worldwide.

Monahan died in 1994 at the age of eighty five. Her work continues to be exhibited, most recently in Duluth in 2015; Grand Marais in 2016; and International Falls in 2017.