Oil and Egg Tempera on Canvas on Panel, 102 x 100 cm, 2011

Maybe painting isn't so pointless after all

In 2004, I first saw Ruth Rupp on the stage of the St. Pauli Theater in the Threepenny Opera with Ulrich Tukur as Mackie Messer. She sang, after an idea of ❯ Katharina John, in the role of an old whore the final scene and reaped thus alone standing on the stage the dangerous final applause of the play. Half of the audience howled with emotion. Me too. And I swear, if this little lady comes across my way one day, I'll address her.

Six years later, at the Hamburg St. Pauli Theater, I heard a laughing adult woman's voice call as I walked: Damn, now one of these types of red wine tilts into my cleavage just because I'm so small. My glass stopped just a few millimeters in front of her. I looked at a 144 cm tall woman. We sat chatting in the empty theater for a long time. Others were celebrating the opening of the new season at the bar and we made an appointment. Ruth's words: If you've been after me for six years, then we have to do that with this portrait.

After a week she sat with me for the first time in the Blankenese studio. Ruth is now 85 years old. After nursing her sick mother for eight years, she discovered the spectacle at the age of seventy-seven. First the stage and occasionally film.

Before the war, she studied music and singing. During World War II she was a girl in Hamburg on the flak. Inconceivably. Later, she was a nanny for Map Falk in Blankenese. His daughter Karin found her, after 49 years, through my painted portrait of Google again. That's Ruth, my nanny of yore. A telephone call: Can it be? Yes! Now they visit from time to time and are friends for the second time.

So painting is not quite so pointless.

❯ The genesis of the painting

❯ To the podcast in German

Text © MWJ, Hamburg, 04/01/2012

Ruth Rupp died on October 31, 2025, in Hamburg at the age of 99.

Ruth Rupp

* 13. April 1926 - † 31. Oktober 2025