b'Matisses Joy of Life. In a fundamental way, Ruttenbergs park murals are a revival of this great tradition. It seems incredible, but Ruttenberg is among the first serious painters to make Central Park a major theme. As she told me once, people spend time in Central Park because it is abso-lutely the in place in New York, and she is obsessed with watching them as the collective soul of the city. Seurat needed to return to his park landscape on a daily basis to make dozens of portable studies, transposing these on-the-spot observations in his studio for the monumental Art Institute of Chicago painting. Rough-ly speaking, Ruttenberg is obliged to work this same way, but she has tools and art supplies unknown in Seurats time, with the result that, aside from countless small preliminary works, she has also managed to Left: Detail from Roller Blades.Right: Classical detail from The Sacred Grove, Beloved of the Arts and the Muses, by Pierre Ccile Puvis de Chavannes, 1884-1889.'