Louis Rorimer (American, 1872–1939)

b. 1872 — d. 1939

Louis Rorimer was born Louis Rohrheimer in Cleveland to a German immigrant family. In the mid-1880s he studied at Cleveland’s Manual Training School with sculptor Herman Matzen. Around the age of 16 Rorimer began taking classes at the Cleveland School of Art and later studied in Munich at the Kunstgewerbeschule, 1890–93, and in Paris at the École des Arts Décoratifs and the Académie Julian, 1893–95. He returned to Cleveland in 1895, opening a design studio for handmade furniture and interior design the following year. From 1898 until his retirement in 1936, he taught decorative art and design at the Cleveland School of Art, where his students included Horace Potter, Max Kalish, Abel Warshawsky, Grace Kelly, and Charles Burchfield. Rorimer merged his studio with another interior design company in 1910 to form the Rorimer-Brooks Studios, a commercial workshop and gallery. He encouraged progressive artists to meet and display their works at his gallery, which from 1910 to 1912 mounted early exhibitions by Warshawsky, William Zorach, and the Cleveland ”secessionists”. In 1913 Rorimer was promoted to head of the design department at the Cleveland School of Art, and his work appeared in May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1919–28). Transformations in Cleveland Art. (CMA, 1996), p. 235