Rudolph Lewis Teague was born November 30, 1917 in Jamaica, Queens, a neighborhood in the New York City to Cecilia Fehon Teague and Walter Dorwin Teague, he was their youngest son. He attended P.S. 1 elementary school, then Gow School for Dyslexia and Learning Disabilities boarding school in Upstate New York. Teague was left-handed and while he was attending the Gow School, he learn to write with his right hand, at least partially. Teague married fellow Art Student's League painter, Mary Lee Abbott in 1943, while home on leave from the United States Army, where he served as a gunnery sergeant at a range in New Mexico. Teague left the Army in 1945 at the end of the war, and he and Abbott separated in 1946. Teague attended Pratt Institute briefly to study architecture but, while in New Mexico on a painting excursion near Taos, instructor Tom Benrimo told the architecture student that he had a "painters eye", and perhaps he should focus on painting, instead. Teague took his Benrimo's advice, and returned to the Art Students League of New York, where he met and fell in love with Virginia Grinnell Vanderbilt. At the Art Students League of New York he found Morris Kantor as a mentor and teacher. In 1948, Teague contracted polio affecting his thigh and stomach muscles, as well as losing the use of his left arm, his painting hand. Following a long recovery from which he was not expected to survive let alone learn to walk again. He and Mary Abbott finalized their divorced early in 1950, and he and Virginia Vanderbilt were married in May 1950. Learning to walk following the serious bout with polio, Teague and his wife Virginia Vanderbilt left New York City and moved to Norwich, Vermont in 1954. Together they raised four children in Vermont. Teague learned to paint and draw again, in his studio in Norwich, this time using his right hand. In 1959, Teague was photographed by Hanson Carroll for Life magazine. He delivered a body of work that was shown at the New York World's Fair in the Gas Pavilion restaurant in 1960, at the Port Authority in 1964, and through the BermudaSociety of Arts in Bermuda, with Henry Moore in 1965.
Death and legacy
Teague died in 1978. Numerous shows in Vermont and New York City punctuated his career - however he had a reclusive lifestyle and did not show his work as much as other artists. A show was held posthumously in 1983 at the Unicorn Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, from artwork found in a barn by his nephew. From that exhibition, his work purchased in its entirety by a single Texas collector. It is unknown what happened to these, some 22, paintings which include some of Teague's most definitive pieces of abstract expressionist and color field paintings. Teague leaves a remaining legacy of paintings and drawings that have essentially not seen the light of day since his death.
