Robert Rutman

Robert Rutman (15 May 1931 – 1 June 2021) was a German visual artist, musician, composer, and instrument builder. Best known for his work with homemade idiophones in his Steel Cello Ensemble, Rutman is regarded as a pioneer of multimedia performance in his mixing of music, sculpture, film, and visual art. When the Nazis came to power, he and his mother fled Germany, moving to Warsaw in 1938 and then to Finland just before Hitler invaded Poland. By way of Sweden, Rutman arrived in England in 1939 where he attended refugee schools throughout the Second World War. In 1952 Rutman returned to the U.S. and worked as a traveling salesman in Dallas, Texas, before moving to Mexico City to enroll in art school. He married in Mexico, and the couple had a son, Eric. In 1962 Rutman returned to New York where he opened a gallery on West Broadway in Greenwich Village called “A Fly Can’t Bird But A Bird Can Fly”, which presented poetry, theater, music, and visual art as multimedia events. and sculptor Constance Demby, with whom he made his first sound sculptures in 1966. He named one of his creations the steel cello, and another the bow chimes, describing both as “American Industrial folk instrume