George Rickey was born in 1907 in South Bend, Indiana. In 1913 the family moved to Scotland, where his father, an engineer for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, had been transferred. While studying modern history at Oxford, Mr. Rickey also took courses in painting and drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. After graduation, he went to Paris to study art at the Academie Lhote and at the Academie Moderne, where he worked under the Modernist painters Fernand Leger and Amedee Ozenfant.
After teaching history briefly at Groton School in Massachusetts, Mr. Rickey devoted himself to painting full time. He had his first solo exhibition at the Caz-Delbo Gallery in New York in 1933, and a year later he moved to New York and set up a studio. His early paintings reflected the influences of Cezanne and Social Realism. During the late 30's, Mr. Rickey taught art at several schools, including Olivet College and Kalamazoo College in Michigan, Knox College in Illinois and Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Rickey served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. He was assigned to work with engineers in a machine shop to improve aircraft weaponry, an experience that reawakened earlier interests in science and technology. After the war, he resumed his peripatetic teaching career. A year studying Bauhaus teaching methods at the Chicago Institute of Design in the late 1940's was decisive, for it was there that he seriously began to consider the idea of bringing together geometric form and movement. In 1949, while working as an associate professor at Indiana University, he made his first kinetic sculpture using window glass.
In 1960 Mr. Rickey moved to East Chatham, N.Y., which remained his home base until the end of his life. He retired from teaching in 1966 after five years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., but continued to make sculpture and to travel incessantly. He passed away in 2002.
Source: New York Times
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