Walt Kuhn

(1877-1949)

Lady in Vest 36 x 23in (91.4 x 58.4cm)

Footnotes

Provenance
The artist.
Estate of the above.
Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Inc., New York.
Acquired by the late owners from the above, March 22, 1984.

Exhibited
Los Angeles, California, Terry Delapp Gallery and elsewhere, Walt Kuhn, February 1984.

Walt Kuhn was an aficionado of theatrical, vaudeville and circus performances, and he would often study his subjects backstage. Studying his subjects offstage, away from the fanfare of their performances, contributed a psychological directness to Kuhn's portraits. As is evident in Lady in Vest, his compositions focused on the sitter, often with an engaged gaze with the viewer. Portraits of performers became the most significant subject in the artist's oeuvre and his unique approach to portraiture was fresh and modern. Lady in Vest is a fantastically bold example of the artist's work, painted in Kuhn's assured, mature style.

Kuhn was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1877 and beginning at an early age, he developed an interest in drawing and theater. At the age of fifteen, Kuhn sold his first drawing to a magazine and in 1893 he decided that he would benefit from formal training and began art classes at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In 1899, he made his way to California and settled in San Francisco where he took a job as a cartoonist and illustrator for The Wasp, a weekly satirical magazine. After a year of working for The Wasp, he realized that if he was going to be taken seriously as an artist, he needed to further his studies and expose himself to the Old Masters and contemporary Modernists of Europe. In March of 1901, Kuhn traveled to Paris to study at the Academie Colarossi and later that year he went on to Münich to study at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste to study under Heinrich von Zügel (1850-1941), a member of the Barbizon school. During his two years abroad, he went on sketching trips to the Netherlands, toured the museums of Venice, and exposed himself to the works of the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists.

In 1903, Kuhn moved back to New York where he studied at the Artists' Sketch Class and began painting landscapes in an Impressionist style. For the next decade, he supported himself as an illustrator and cartoonist for local journals and publications including Life and New York World. Through his commercial illustration work, Kuhn became acquainted with Robert Henri (1865-1929), John Sloan (1871-1951), and other artists in their circle. He worked with Henri and Sloan to organize the Exhibition of Independent Artists in April 1910. The following year Kuhn and a small group of fellow artists founded the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), which aimed to promote contemporary artists through non-juried exhibitions. With Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928) as its president, the AAPS organized the International Exhibition of Modern Art, a major show that included representative works from avant-garde artistic movements in Europe. Serving as the Association's secretary, Kuhn, Davies and Walter Pach (1883-1958) traveled to Europe in 1912 to find the best and most progressive examples of fresh art to introduce to New York audiences. Known as the Armory Show, the exhibition opened in New York on February 17, 1913, and introduced Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and other styles of European Modernism to American audiences. Kuhn continued his work with the AAPS after the Armory Show and also began serving as an art advisor to prominent American collectors, such as John Quinn (1870-1924) and Lillie P. Bliss (1864-1931), a lender to the Armory Show and a founder of the Museum of Modern Art.

Over the next decade, Kuhn experimented with Modern styles including Cubism and Fauvism and tested a variety of mediums. In 1925, following a close call with death caused by a duodenal ulcer, Kuhn shifted his focus to developing a signature style of his own and by the end of the decade, his signature portrait technique of boldly rendering single figures against stark backdrops had emerged. By 1939 when Kuhn painted Lady in Vest, his style had matured and the subject of theatrical and vaudeville performers, circus acrobats, and clowns that he often studied backstage had become his most noteworthy subject. Despite the colorful costumes and staged poses of his sitters, Kuhn's portraits are dignified and psychologically probing. In his portraits, as seen in the present work, Kuhn omits the spectacle of the performance choosing instead a bare background. He often composed the sitters with a direct and engaging gaze with the viewer that imbues his works with a psychological intensity. Exhibiting its vibrant color palette, a lively costume design, and the arresting gaze of the woman's piercing blue eyes, the present work is a thoroughly modern and striking example by the artist.