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Walt Kuhn was an American painter. Although Kuhn painted a considerable number of landscapes and still lifes during his career, his portraits of circus performers, and clowns in particular, were his most successful artistic achievement. The melancholy of these lonely figures derived from the portraits of Goya and, ultimately, from Rembrandt.
Background
Walt Kuhn was born on October 27, 1877 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, United States. He was the fourth son and fifth of eight children, but only he and a younger sister survived infancy. His parents, Francis Kuhn and Amalia (Hergenhan) Kuhn, were Bavarian Catholic immigrants who had settled in 1861 in Brooklyn, where together they became hotel proprietors and food suppliers to the shipping trade. Amalia Kuhn, half Spanish and the granddaughter of a Spanish consul to the kingdom of Bavaria, encouraged her son's first artistic attempts, and as a result Walt drew throughout his childhood. His mother also interested him in the theater, which may partially account for the essentially dramatic character of his mature paintings.
Education
Kuhn left high school and in 1893 took art instruction at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Kuhn studied first at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, but his letters home reveal a distaste for both the academy and the city, and so he quickly left France for Germany. He spent the summer of 1901 at Dachau studying under Hans von Hayek, but his most intensive and sustained apprenticeship took place over the next two years at the Royal Academy in Munich as a pupil of the animal painter Heinrich von Zügel.
Career
At the age of fifteen Kuhn sold his first drawing to a magazine. After working briefly in a sporting goods store and as the owner of a bicycle shop, Kuhn set out in 1899 for California, where for a time he drew cartoons for the Wasp, a San Francisco newspaper. Soon, however, he felt the need for more formal training, and, financed by his father, he sailed in early 1901 for Europe.
Returning to New York in 1903, Kuhn earned his living as a cartoonist for Puck, Judge, and Life magazines and for several newspapers.
Two months after his marriage Kuhn quit his regular job as cartoonist on the New York World in order to devote more time to his painting. Despite his expressed dislike for Paris, Kuhn's art at this time was a derivative continuation of French impressionism.
In conjunction with his increased commitment to a career as a painter, Kuhn began to make social contact with the New York art world. He frequented the weekly studio receptions held by Robert Henri, taught in the winter of 1908-1909 at the New York School of Art, and about 1910 met Arthur B. Davies. He was given his first one-man show at the Madison Gallery during the winter of 1910-1911; and it was in this gallery in December 1911 that Kuhn and three other painters, Henry Fitch Taylor, Jerome Myers, and Elmer Livingston MacRae, met to discuss the possibility of creating a society to exhibit the works of progressive American and European painters. It was thus that the Association of American Painters and Sculptors was established, and its one exhibition, the Armory Show of 1913, was a significant turning point in the history of American art. Kuhn, as executive secretary of the association, traveled to Cologne, The Hague, Munich, and Berlin in the autumn of 1912 selecting examples of the most advanced European painting and sculpture for the show. He was joined in Paris by Arthur B. Davies, who was president of the association, and together with Walter Pach they completed the task of gathering the art that was to shift the main current of painting in the United States away from American scene realism for nearly two decades. After the Armory Show, Kuhn's own style, like that of Davies, changed abruptly under the pressure to assimilate European modernism. From 1912 through the early 1920's his art reflects, in an extremely eclectic manner, the various cubist experiments, as well as the paintings of Matisse, Cézanne, Dufy, Derain, and Signac. In these years, for financial reasons, Kuhn's energies were dispersed in a variety of directions; he designed costumes for the circus and theater, created routines for vaudeville, and acted as adviser to the art collectors John Quinn and Lizzie (later known as Lillie) Bliss.
Despite his somewhat solitary nature, he maintained friendships during the 1920's with George Overbury ("Pop") Hart, Jules Pascin, and William Glackens. In 1925 Kuhn suffered from a serious stomach ulcer, and the resulting awareness of mortality forced him to come to grips with the fact that he had not yet achieved distinction as a painter. (At about this time, apparently self-conscious about his slow artistic development, he subtracted three years from his true age. )
In the spring of 1925 Kuhn set out for Europe, determined to study systematically the old masters in the Louvre and the Prado. Resolving in a letter to his wife that he would combine the styles of Greek and Egyptian art with the painting freedom and confidence of Goya, Kuhn returned from Europe, and by 1929, in such works as The White Clown, he succeeded in creating a fully self-expressing idiom.
The decade of the 1930's brought him considerable recognition. Exhibiting regularly at the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York, and also advising the Harrimans in matters of acquisition, Kuhn was praised by critics for the frankness and power of his pictures. In 1932 the Whitney Museum bought one of his circus portraits, The Blue Clown. Kuhn's style and message remained virtually unchanged from this point on; he had found his formula and continued to practice it until a nervous breakdown brought about his hospitalization in November 1948.
Yet Kuhn's pictures were not without more immediate predecessors. It was Robert Henri who first made popular among earlier twentieth-century artists the dramatic power of Spanish and Dutch art. Kuhn's achievement, in this sense, was a somewhat belated although authentic continuation of the Ashcan School, with additional roots as well in the clown paintings of Picasso, Derain, and Rouault. Furthermore, Kuhn's oeuvre, although rarely flawed by sentimentality, cannot compare in the depth or range of its melancholy to that of his contemporary Edward Hopper. Like many of the realists of the 1930's and 1940's Kuhn struggled to reconcile his desire for deep characterization with the problems of aesthetic structure. Paradoxically, Kuhn himself, in his most historically significant act, bequeathed these aesthetic problems to his generation by creating and promoting the Armory Show.
Achievements
Kuhn was instrumental in staging the Armory Show, the first exhibition of modern art in the United States.
