Frank Rutter - 1920s and 1930s

1920s and 1930s

After leaving the Admiralty, Rutter opened the Adelphi Gallery to exhibit small pieces by Ginner, Edward Wadsworth and David Bomberg. Finding this a restriction on his "liberty and leisure" he returned to writing and completed in the region of 20 books, as well as a considerable number of contributions to The Burlington Magazine, Apollo, Studio Magazine, The Financial Times and The Times.

In his writings he emphasised both the spiritual and social role of art. He also commented on the visual power to be found in the London Underground: "The whole nation is much less affected by what pictures are shown in the Royal Academy than by what posters are put up on the hoardings. A few thousand see the first, but the second are seen by millions. The art galleries of the People are not in Bond Street but are to be found in every railway station."

On 28 March 1920 in The Sunday Times, Rutter reviewed the short-lived Group X (a reforming of the Vorticists), "the real tendency of the exhibition is towards a new sort of realism, evolved by artists who have passed through a phase of abstract experiment.".

He divorced his wife around this time, and on 29 March 1920 married Ethel Dorothy (born 1894/5), the second daughter of William Robert Bunce, a coal merchant.

In 1927, he said of Newlyn artist Dod Proctor's painting, Morning, exhibited in the Royal Academy that it was "a new vision of the human figure which amounts to the invention of a twentieth century style in portraiture" and "She has achieved apparently with consummate ease that complete presentation of twentieth century vision in terms of plastic design after which Derain and other much praised French painters have been groping for years past."

1928–1931, Rutter was European Editor of International Studio, New York. He was also the London Correspondent for the Association Française d’Expansion et d’Echanges Artistiques. In 1932, he praised advances in the Tate Gallery's attitude towards art since its foundation (although others, notably Douglas Cooper, considered it "hopelessly insular").

He suffered from a bronchial complaint for a number of years, as a result of which he periodically sojourned on the South Coast, visiting London exhibitions when he felt in good enough health to do so. In April 1937, he had an attack of bronchitis and died, aged 61, a fortnight later on 18 April in his home at 5 Litchfield Way, Golders Green, London; the funeral service was at 12.30 p.m. on 21 April at Golders Green Crematorium. He wrote his Sunday Times article up to a week before his death. He left his estate, which included around 80 paintings by the likes of Gilman, Ginner, Gore and Lucien Pissarro, to his wife. He had no children.