Kenneth Hayes Miller was an American painter and teacher.
Background
Kenneth Hayes Miller was born on March 11, 1876, in Oneida, New York. He was the son of George Noyes Miller and Annie Elizabeth Miller, who were among the original settlers of the Oneida Community, a Christian Perfectionist commune. The founder of Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes, was a brother-in-law and close associate of the elder Miller's father. The circumstances of Miller's upbringing were exceptional, since common ownership of property, equal labor, centralized child care, and "multiple marriage" were practiced by the community. His father managed the business operations of the community with success, but in 1881 increasing moral censure from without forced a return to monogamy and private ownership of the assets.
Education
Miller's very early education consisted of schooling within this utopian framework; and during adolescence he attended the Horace Mann School while his father managed the New York City office of the community. His first formal art training occurred about 1892, when he studied drawing and painting at the Art Students' League under H. Siddons Mowbray and Kenyon Cox. He did work at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase. From both Cox and Mowbray, who was a friend of the architect Charles Follen McKim, Miller probably learned the deep respect for the artistic achievements of the Renaissance that later characterized his own mature style. He completed his art studies in 1898, and the following year he began to teach a course in illustration at the New York School of Art. In 1911, he left the New York School of Art and took an appointment at the Art Students' League, where he taught until 1951.
Career
The style of Miller's early period was influenced especially by Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose friendship Miller had sought and whose portrait he completed in 1913. Miller's early paintings were mostly idyllic images of nudes in generalized and atmospheric natural environments. Besides being indebted to Ryder's poetic moods and his dramatic use of light and shadow, these works were related to the pastoral fantasies of Arthur B. Davies. In 1918-1919, evidence of a deep interest in Renoir's "dry period" paintings of the 1880's was visible in Miller's work. His nudes were now bounded by firmer and more definite linear contours and showed much less contrast of light and dark. Although an article by Miller's friend Garet Garrett concentrating praise on the early idyllic paintings had appeared in the New Republic in 1921, Miller had already turned toward a new manner employing voluminous female forms in urban genre settings. From about 1922 until illness forced him to stop painting in 1951, he continued to combine urban genre subject matter, observed firsthand from his studio on Fourteenth Street, with the High Renaissance principles of balanced composition and full, sculpturesque treatment of form. During the Great Depression, an attempt was made to remove him from the faculty of the Art Students' League on the grounds of excessive conservatism. However, the attempt failed and Miller continued to teach. In 1949, the Art Students' League mounted a retrospective show in honor of his thirty-eight years of service. Miller died in New York City and a memorial exhibition of his work was held by the League in 1953 in the galleries of the National Academy of Design.
Achievements
Miller's great significance as a teacher was in part due to his systematic rationality, which must have enabled him to communicate his point of view with considerable authority. Another factor underlying his significance was his development of a style of urban realism some seven years before the Great Depression turned the attention of many artists to the realities of the city.
In the 1930's Edward Hopper, Isabel Bishop, and Reginald Marsh, all pupils of Miller, followed his formula of tempering urban genre with the discipline of classical composition or figure drawing. Miller's insistence on clarity and structure can be seen in his pupils' art as early as the lithographs of George Bellows in the 1920's and as late as the bizarre paintings of George Tooker in the 1950's. Like Robert Henri in the first years of the twentieth century, Miller inspired a generation of urban genre painters; actually, it was the influence of Henri that Miller supplanted by changing the idiom of American genre painting from the painterly to the linear mode. The three-dimensionality of his forms is extremely well developed. Yet despite Miller's belief, that allegiance to the Renaissance would be the basis of quality in his art, the intense topicality of his pictures is their greatest strength.
Quotations:
"The most important quality a painting can have is plasticity: painting as a form of sculpture. "
Connections
In 1898, Miller married Irma Ferry, a resident of Oneida but not of the community; they were divorced in 1910. On January 19, 1911, Miller married Helen Pendleton, a former student; the couple had one child.
Father:
George Noyes Miller
1845 - 1904
Mother:
Annie Elizabeth Kelly Miller
13 December 1852 - 5 June 1931
Student:
Rockwell Kent
June 21, 1882 – March 13, 1971
Was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor, adventurer and voyager.
Student:
George Lovett Kingsland Morris
November 14, 1905 – June 26, 1975
Was an American artist, writer, and editor who advocated for an "American abstract art" during the 1930s and 1940s, and is best known for his Cubist sculptures and paintings.
Student:
George Wesley Bellows
August 12, 1882 – January 8, 1925
Was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City, becoming, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".
Student:
Yasuo Kuniyoshi
1 September 1889 – 14 May 1953
Was an American painter, photographer and printmaker.
Student:
Russel Wright
April 3, 1904 – December 21, 1976
Was an American Industrial designer during the 20th century.
Student:
Helen Winslow Durkee
1880–1954
Was an American painter of portrait miniatures and still lifes.
Student:
George Clair Tooker, Jr.
August 5, 1920 – March 27, 2011
Was an American figurative painter.
Student:
John McCrady
September 11, 1911 – December 24, 1968
Was a painter and printmaker.
Student:
Thelma Somerville Cudlipp
October 14, 1891–April 2, 1983
Was an American artist and book illustrator.
Student:
Walter Tandy Murch
August 17, 1907 – December 11, 1967
Was a painter whose still life paintings of machine parts, brick fragments, clocks, broken dolls, hovering light bulbs and glowing lemons are an unusual combination of realism and abstraction.
Student:
Edward Middleton Manigault
June 14, 1887 – August 31, 1922
Was an American Modernist painter.
Student:
Margaret Frances "Peggy" Bacon
May 2, 1895 – January 4, 1987
Was an American printmaker, illustrator, painter and writer.
Student:
Patrick Henry Bruce
March 25, 1881 – November 12, 1936
Was an American cubist painter.
Student:
William C. Palmer
1906–1987
Was an American painter who created public murals.
Student:
Isabel Bishop
March 3, 1902 – February 19, 1988
Was an American painter and graphic artist who depicted urban scenes of Union Square, New York, from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Student:
Albert Pels
Student:
Emma Fordyce MacRae
April 27, 1887, Vienna – August 6, 1974
Was an American representational painter.
Student:
Lloyd Goodrich
July 10, 1897 – March 27, 1987
Was an American art historian.
Student:
Reginald Marsh
March 14, 1898 – July 3, 1954
Was an American painter.
Student:
Arnold Blanch
June 4, 1896 – October 3, 1968
Was an American modernist painter, etcher, illustrator, lithographer, muralist, printmaker and art teacher.
Student:
Arnold Friedman
February 23, 1879 – December 29, 1946
Was an American Modernist painter.
Student:
Louise Emerson Ronnebeck
25 August 1901 – 17 February 1980
Was an American painter best known for her murals executed for the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Student:
Horace Day
3 July 1909 – 24 March 1984
Was an American a painter of the American scene who came to maturity during the Thirties and was active as a painter over the next 50 years.
