| ART “4”
“2”-DAY 27
October |
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Born on 27 October 1859: Elizabeth
Nourse, US painter, active in France, who died in 1938.—
[une nou-nourse?] — Elizabeth Nourse and her twin sister, Adelaide, were born in Mount Healthy, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. In 1874, Elizabeth began art studies at the McMicken School of Design, which later became the Art Academy of the Cincinnati Art Museum. During her seven years at the school, she studied drawing, watercolor, oil painting, woodcarving, painting on china, and sculptor. Although Nourse did not study under Frank Duveneck, a student of the Munich School and Cincinnati's most famous teacher, she became aware of Duveneck's influence and began to incorporate his rich painterly technique into her work. After the marriage of her twin sister and the death of her parents in 1882, Nourse went to New York and studied under William Sartain. She returned to Cincinnati and by 1883 was supporting herself and her sister by selling her artwork. She became especially noted for her intimate scenes of rural women engaged in domestic work. Nourse was offered a position as a drawing instructor for Cincinnati School of Design in 1887 but decided to study in Paris instead. She went with her older sister Louise and studied for three months under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefèbvre at the Académie Julian and received advice from Jean Jacques Henner and Carolus-Duran. Her painting La Mère (1888), was accepted to the Paris Salon in the same year. Elizabeth Nourse became well established at the Salon as a painter of peasant woman and children She also painted genre, portraits, Arabs, markets, canals, and flowers. She has been described as a forerunner of Social Realism. After establishing herself in France, Nourse returned only once to the United States in 1893, to visit with her family and see the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago. During her life she visited (often in the company of her sister Louise) Russia, Italy, Austria, Holland, Spain, and North Africa where she was known to paint the exotic sites and inhabitants of the land she visited. She usually spent her summers either in Brittany, Normandy, or Saint-Léger-en-Yvelines, near Paris. Nourse called North Africa “the land of sunshine and flowers and lovely Arabs.” Her style was bold and strong and demonstrated a rather painterly quality that she was praised for both during and after her life. Nourse employed bold confident brush strokes and a strong sense of color and light that was derived from her training in Cincinnati, where Munich trained Duveneck had introduced “a taste for both picturesque subject matter and rapid painterly style.” She often set her subjects against a rich contrasting background to further highlight the central theme. She maintained an active exhibition schedule wining numerous awards and sending paintings to major exhibitions in France and abroad. She retired in 1924 and lived with and supported her older sister Louise throughout her life, dying only one year after her. — LINKS — Mary and Child (1891, 61x46cm; 1000x778pix, 154kb) — Moorish Prince (1897) aka Head of an Algerian _ Nourse called North Africa “the land of sunshine and flowers and lovely Arabs” when she visited there during the winter of 1897-1998. Attracted by the brightly-colored costumes of the natives, Nourse spent a productive three months in Tunisia and neighboring Algeria. Head of an Algerian, a painting also known as Moorish Prince, was probably created during a side trip from Tunis to the Algerian city of Biskra. The painting depicts a traditionally-costumed and confidently-posed young African, who rests one hand firmly on his hip and holds a cigarette in the other. He wears a white turban around his dark head and several layers of colorful clothing wrapped loosely around his body. Blue, green, and yellow fabrics add color accents to his otherwise monochromatic robe, and a vivid red waistband contributes an especially bright note to his exotic attire. Orientalist subjects were very popular in France during the second half of the nineteenth century, as France celebrated its imperialistic claims to the resources of its North African colonies. Nourse's North African subjects were greatly appreciated in France, where she exhibited them at both the Salon and the Societé des Orientalistes. — Fisher Girl of Picardy (1889, 119x82cm; 416x277pix, 31kb) — Two Dutch Children (62x48cm; 416x327pix, 28kb) — Girl Sewing (500x372pix, 17kb) — Une Heure de Loisir (500x354pix, 25kb) — The Weaver (28x36cm; 401x500pix, 47kb) — 8 Owls on a Branch (1927, 25x61cm; 209x500pix, 27kb) — A la Messe en Bretagne (318x400pix, 110kb) — Discussion (400x421pix, 30kb) — Lilas (1891, 97x75cm; 416x320pix, 42kb) |
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Born on 27 October 1877: Walt Kuhn,
US painter who died in 1949. — Born in New York City, after studying in many European countries, he helped organize the famous Armory Show (International Exhibition of Modern Art, New York City, 1913). He is noted chiefly for his vigorous studies of circus performers, chorus girls, and trapeze athletes. His Blue Clown (1931) is the most popular example of his work. He also did a number of brilliant still lifes, as well as designs for musical revues. Kuhn contributed substantially to the introduction of the techniques and theories of modern art to the American public and to many American artists. — Walt Kuhn was born in Brooklyn, New York, the only one of eight brothers to survive childhood. At the time of his christening, he was named William, but this was changed to Walter Francis. The artist himself later shortened his name to Walt. He was proud of his mother's Spanish blood, and from her he acquired a life-long love for the theater and the circus. As a child he was encouraged to draw, and drew constantly throughout his school days. After one year at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, he went into business as the proprietor of a bicycle shop. This was 1897 when cycling was in its heyday, and during the summers, Kuhn barnstormed as a professional bicycle racer at county fairs. He also learned to tap dance, a skill he would practice all his life. In 1899, Kuhn began a leisurely trip West, eventually finding a job drawing cartoons for a San Francisco newspaper. Several years later, realizing the need for more training, Kuhn left for Europe to study in Paris and Munich. It was here that he heard a phrase that remained with him always and was frequently quoted to young artists. After a summer's work produced only one painting and the opinion that he had plenty of time, his teacher said, "For you it is a quarter to twelve." Back in New York he continued to make a living as a cartoonist for newspapers and magazines while beginning a serious course of self-training, making 3000 studies of the nude. Biographer Frank Getlein writes, "He was convinced then and remained convinced that nothing came easy to him." In 1909 Kuhn met and married a Washington DC woman, Vera Spier, the daughter of a jeweler and herself a designer of jewelry. Their daughter and only child, Brenda, was born several years later. Despite the fact that first Vera and then Brenda managed the business of Kuhn's career as an artist, he kept his wife and child in a private world separate from the artists and collectors he saw frequently as professionals and friends. Though Kuhn was by nature a loner, he became very involved in artists' activities. Walt Kuhn was a principal organizer, with artist Arthur B. Davies, of the historic Armory Show of 1913, an event that forever changed the course of US art. |
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Kuhn suffered acutely from a stomach ulcer in 1925, he thought he might
not survive. Not so much concerned with the thought of death as with the
lack of enduring achievement in art, Kuhn set a time limit of two years
in which he would "find himself in art." Utilizing his first loves, the
circus and the theater, he "began the feverish outpouring of show girls,
circus subjects and theatrical folk that were to become synonymous with
his name." Bennard B. Perlman describes these works: "Boldly outlined, brusquely modeled, intensely expressive, and frozen in limelight against dark backgrounds, Kuhn's portraits are unforgettable, disturbing paintings. Most present a frontal gaze that is at once hypnotic and that were considered startling in their day. Just as Rembrandt and van Gogh allow the viewer to pierce the facades of their sitters' faces to look deeper into their beings, so Kuhn accomplishes the same thing, but in an almost eerie fashion." Kuhn said he was forty years old before he painted a really worthwhile picture. In fact, he was over fifty when his long, frustrating search for a resolution to the problems confronting him as a painter was finally reached with completion of White Clown --a painting that was both his masterwork and an intensely personal symbol. He rarely exhibited the work after its debut at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and would not allow it to be purchased during his lifetime. In the next two decades of productive maturity Kuhn continued to paint show people, still lifes and landscapes. Though he wrote to a friend, "I have more or less arrived at the point where I can make my brushes carry out my instructions," he continued to be highly self-critical. Fridolph Johnson wrote in a 1967 article in American Artist, "He ruthlessly destroyed more paintings than he preserved, and he never signed one until he was completely satisfied with it."5 In his last years Kuhn began to suffer increasing mental turmoil, finally becoming irrational and stormy. Concerned friends convinced his family to commit him to Bellevue Hospital in New York in late fall of 1948 and he died in a White Plains hospital the following summer. — LINKS — Portrait (of a woman, 1922, 61x41cm; half-size; ZOOM to full size) — Clown with Drum (1943) — The White Clown — Apples in Wooden Boat (1938, 63x76cm) _ This is one of a series of impressive still-life paintings on a similar theme. "If he [Kuhn] could, he got someone else to set up the arrangement. His daughter Brenda reports a whole series of small paintings of apples, executed at the rate of one a day during a summer in Maine, which were set up by the process of Brenda's removing the rotten ones each morning and replacing them with fresh."1 Describing his study of apples, Kuhn wrote in a letter to his publicity agent, "I have tried 'Greenings,' 'MacIntosh,' 'Delicious,' and many other types, but finally decided that the 'Winesap,' was the very apple which Eve offered Adam, and which every school boy polished for his teacher. That was good enough for me. Whether this effort has been successful or not, I promise you I shall never look another bowl of red apples in the face." — The Guide (1931, 61x51cm) _ — Green Pom-Pom (1944, 76x64cm) _ Though he was an accomplished landscape and still-life painter, Walt Kuhn's mature career as an artist is almost exclusively identified with his haunting portraits of circus and vaudeville performers, like Green Pom-Pom. Kuhn was completely at home in the world of show business. His mother had introduced him to theater as a child and he went on to discover the delights of vaudeville, burlesque, and the circus on his own. In fact, from 1922 to 1926, wary that becoming financially dependent on the sale of his work would make him vulnerable to undue influence from dealers and critics, Kuhn earned a successful living designing and directing touring stage revues. The performers depicted in Kuhn's paintings were not merely models but individuals he knew professionally. Yet Kuhn's paintings are not true portraits in the traditional sense. He was less concerned with the individual personalities of his sitters than with presenting them as timeless metaphors of the human condition. Beneath the mask of theatrical make-up and the tawdry glitter of the costumes, each figure asserts a somber human dignity. Kuhn's entertainers are the heirs of Watteau's Gilles from the commedia dell'arte, descended through the dancers and cabaret performers of Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Indeed, a contemporary critic observed that one "gradually realizes ... the unbroken chain of French figure painting" had found its "last representative in Walt Kuhn, an American." Green Pom-Pom is the last in a series of three-quarter length portraits of show girls that the artist began in 1938. Distinct from Kuhn's other images of show girls, these figures are dressed in close-fitting, military-style costumes. Each of the women probably helped select her own costume from the large rack Kuhn kept at his studio-costumes which he designed and his wife made. According to Kuhn, he often encouraged models to choose their own attire as a way of helping him preserve the "freshness of his seeing," just as he insisted on continuing to work directly in front of a model because he needed "the challenge of the physical fact in front of him." The young entertainer in Green Pom-Pom confronts the viewer with the startling frankness typical of Kuhn's figures. Her heavily mascaraed and shadowed eyes gaze at us from an expressionless face, with a deliberate dispassion that seems at once candid and unimaginably remote. Her sullen sensuality imbues the picture with the inescapable disquiet of broken dreams. Stylistically, the painting possesses the quiet authority and spare grandeur that characterize Kuhn's best work after 1940. The figure has an insistent monumentality. The brassy, dissonant color that still attracted the artist in earlier paintings has been abandoned in favor of the subtle richness of a limited palette. The pallid flesh tones and cream-colored vest direct the viewer's attention to the powerful drama of the figure's head, further accentuated by the exaggerated epaulets that project from the girl's shoulders and form the base of a compositional triangle culminating with the green pom-pom. Kuhn considered the classic concern for the sculptural reality of the human form to be the dominant theme of his mature work. His observation about another of the paintings in this series applies equally to Green Pom-Pom, 'A lump of weighted form, the one, the universal substance of art. Trying to get it makes art history. The Greeks had it, lost it; Rubens caught it, then it slipped through Van Dyck's fingers. Cézanne chopped it up to see how it is made; his followers fooled with the pieces. Here it is whole again." |
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