Sam Ben-Meir, Around and Round, 2020
“The bountiful new book, Rita Blitt: Around and Round (Tra Publishing, 2020), looks back at the long and prolific career of this notable American artist. If Blitt’s work is about anything then it is about the exuberance, the joy, the sometimes almost mad ecstasy of creative spontaneity. Much of her work is suffused with a kind of wild and kinetic extemporaneity, which seems to resound with a forceful but unforced “Yes!” – a Yes to life, a Yes to the world, a Yes to the here and now, the living moment pregnant with infinite possibility. Her gestural art is dynamic, uninhibited, and no less sensuous for being abstract. In the improvisational, rhythmic musicality of her paintings, Blitt expresses with unerring directness the energy and intensity of embodied imaginative experience...
Rita Blitt paints with two hands – which is not to say she can paint with either hand; but that she paints with both hands simultaneously. Just as a musician uses two hands to play an instrument. And the comparison is both telling and illustrative. Music, and dance, are extraordinarily important for gaining a full understanding of Blitt’s work and her achievement as an artist and a painter. One of the ways in which Blitt is perhaps most indebted to Pollock is that, like Pollock, her paintings record not an experience so much as an event, an action – or, if you prefer, a dance. A choreographer recalls being in the studio with Blitt and “she was moving as fast as the dancers, sweating too, whipping out drawing after drawing.”...
Rita Blitt: Around and Round is a richly satisfying book, not least because it spans seven decades in the career of this artist, from the 1950s up until the present, including paintings from 2019. At nearly 90 years of age, Blitt has revealed herself to be a prolific, dynamic and varied artist, comfortable working with different media and on vastly different scales. What unites her body of work is first and foremost that she is essentially an affirmative artist. Her work is joyous, celebratory, and even “a search for the sublime.”...
For Rita Blitt, art is music, art is dance – which is just to say, art is life. Drawing, painting, and sculpture are ways that we remind ourselves of what it feels like to be alive, to be truly and immensely alive...”
In a word, this is a marvelous book which I cannot recommend highly enough!
Barbara A. Glanz, Around and Round, 2020
“Almost from the first moment I met Rita, she shared with me her desire to “give” her art to the world to help spread the spirits of peace, love, and joy. In this beautiful coffee table book, “Around and Round,” she has done just that! I have been amazed at the scope and creativity as well as the magnitude of her work and the various mediums in which she excels. But most of all, I have been deeply touched with the depth and compassion of this dear woman to use her time on this earth to bring so much joy to others through her art. You will treasure this book, both for her art and for her humanity."