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I ngrid Hutton was raised in Hamburg, Germany and crossed the Atlantic for New York in 1960. Always curious and adventurous, she immediately immersed herself in the exciting cultural offerings and lively social scene the art capital presented.
“I wanted to see what it looked like around the corner. I wanted to see more, to know more.”
In 1963 she met her future husband and business partner, Berlin-born Leonard Hutton, of the Leonard Hutton Galleries. At that time Leonard began to explore the artists of the Russian Avant-Garde. He gave Ingrid Camilla Gray’s book, The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863-1922, where she saw for the first time illustrations of work by artists she had never seen or heard of. She immediately was drawn to the creativity, inventiveness and dynamism of the images and was determined to see the original artworks.
The Leonard Hutton Galleries supported a myriad of modernists, a vast majority from the German-speaking world, including Gabriele Münter, Josef Albers, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Most significantly Leonard and Ingrid Hutton were the driving force in bringing the art of the Russian avant-garde to the American public with their ground-breaking exhibitions.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Ingrid scoured Europe, tracking down the last surviving artists and their circle, poring over photographs and exhibition catalogues and piecing back together the strands of this seismic moment in art history, so long neglected by American gallerists, museums and collectors. Thanks to her tireless efforts works by artists such as Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova and Ilya Chashnik were rediscovered and reevaluated.
Through her travels and the connections she made in Europe and the Soviet Union, Ingrid discovered the Moscow Non-conformists, the artists of the so-called second avant-garde, who were forced underground and often into exile by Soviet powers and broadened the gallery’s scope to mount exhibitions of their work.
Nearly 30 works from her personal collection are presented in Escape Artists 2.0: The Non-Conformists Online.
