A unique biography and a unique set of influences shaped Ruta's artistic development. His father was a rebel, a German who loved France and Italy. Walther Franke-Ruta was the only German ever admitted to the narrow circle of Provencal poets around the great modern troubadour Mistral, active in southern France, before the First World War. In the 1920s, Walther Franke-Ruta founded a Dada cabaret in Leipzig. In 1923, at the time of Hitler's first failed attempt to seize power, Franke-Ruta moved his family from Germany to Italy. They never went back.

Thus Ruta grew up on the Italian Riviera, among some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. But he hated the politics of Fascist Italy, and in 1936, all on his own, he emigrated to the US. Within a few days of his arrival in New York, he began working as a stockroom clerk for the American agent of a noted German art publisher, Seemann & Co. Surrounded by state of the art reproductions of great paintings, he was inspired to study painting himself and enrolled, as a night student, at the venerable Art Students League.

His teachers there included Will Barnett and Jean Charlot, the man who taught the Mexican muralists their craft. Charlot sent Ruta to Mexico in 1939, to study at the Academy San Carlos and to work with the Taller de Gráfica Popular. Back in New York, Ruta painted part of a mural in the Art Students League basement (still visible today) and helped complete a mosaic (also still visible) for the St Thomas More chapel at Yale University.

In those days, pre World War II, the small New York art world was divided into surrealists, many fresh off the boat from Europe, and Neo Romantics, ditto. Ruta was drawn to the baroque inspired Neo Romantics. Russian born painters Leonid and Eugene Berman, newly arrived from Paris, became his teachers and friends.

Ruta served in the US infantry in the Second World War. Offered a position as regimental artist, he asked for a combat assignment instead. He was naturalized in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in summer 1942, and attached to the Indiana National Guard. His outfit was sent to the Pacific. In 1945, he was badly wounded in the retaking of Bataan. Lying near death in a field hospital on Luzon, he vowed that if he recovered he would devote his life to painting. And so he has.

At war's end he hurried back to Europe to see his parents. His anti-Nazi father and his Jewish mother had made a miraculous escape from German occupied Italy to Switzerland during the war. Ruta returned to Italy and remained there for over a decade, studying, under a Fulbright grant, at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome and Venice. He received a diploma from the Venice Academy in 1948. He was close with Peggy Guggenheim's Venice circle of artists. Other friends of that period were the Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta and the great art collector Leo Stein.

Perhaps as a reaction against Guggenheim's surrealist crowd, Ruta pursued his interest in baroque painting. In Venice he shared studios with young American painters who would also turn to landscape later on, notably Paul Resika and Wolf Kahn. In the 1950s, Ruta moved south to Positano, then a quiet fishing village on the Bay of Naples, where Pompeian wall painting and his association with a group of German Bauhaus expatriate painters influenced his work. His paintings became more simplified and austere under contact with Italian fresco and Mediterranean light.

Between spells in New York, in the early 1960s Ruta painted in Greece and on the London docks and bridges. His work was shown in Rome and London and New York. He traveled to Europe and Asia, as assistant photographer for a series of books on Asian art (1963) Byzantine art (1965) and European architecture (1967). From l967-7l he took over as editor of ARTS magazine, publicizing the many new trends of the period: op, pop, conceptual art. His own painting in those years veered in a Pop direction. He painted crowd scenes, based on news photos.

In 1970 he returned to his first love, landscape painting. He worked in Spain and Provence in 197l and 1972; in southern Mexico from 1972 to 1978 - in woods and fields surrounding the colonial town of San Cristobal Las Casas, Chiapas. In New York from 1977 to 1981 he painted many views of the lower West Side, including the twin towers. In fall of 1981 he and his family made a brief trip to New Mexico. Ruta continued to work in New Mexico off and on, for nearly twenty years, painting in arroyos and on hillsides so steep he sometimes tied himself to a tree on the downslope, on the outskirts of Santa Fe.

Ruta has always been a plein air painter, working outdoors, from the motif, in all kinds of weather. When he finds a promising site or subject, he explores it for a year or two, from many different angles. Most recently, in his New York studio, he has been painting indoor landscapes, heaps of fruits and vegetables and spaghetti boxes eerily juxtaposed with the view from the studio window.

Ruta has won a number of prestigious grants and fellowships, and has shown his work in over twenty solo exhibitions on three continents as well as in many invitational exhibitions. The latest, an exhibition of World Trade Center painters, titled "Reimagining New York," opened mid August 2002 at the North Dakota Museum of Art, in Grand Forks, North Dakota.