Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

The artist

Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York

Private Collection, New York

Private Collection, Newport, Rhode Island

A consummate landscape painter, frame maker and furniture designer, Max Kuehne was born in Halle, Germany in 1880 and immigrated to the United States with his family in the 1890s. Initially working as a dental assistant and then a printer’s apprentice, he began formal artistic training in 1907 at William Merritt Chase’s New York School of Art. In addition to studying with Chase, Kuehne learned to paint under the tutelage of Kenneth Hayes Miller and Robert Henri. Although the young artist embraced Chase’s penchant for vivid colors and vigorous brushwork and Miller’s more structured approach to composition, it was Henri’s charismatic personality and ardor for realism that most heavily influenced Kuehne’s artistic development.

Completing his formal studies in 1910, Kuehne embarked upon a yearlong excursion through Europe during which he studied the works of the Old Masters and encountered the innovations of the Modernists. Returning to New York in 1911, the artist established his own studio in Greenwich Village. The following year, he spent his first summer in the town of Gloucester, drawn there by one of Childe Hassam’s views of its harbor. The quaint fishing village, which is on Cape Ann in Massachusetts, aroused in the artist a strong sense of geographic attachment and inspired many of his best works. Although he did not return again until 1918 and only intermittently after that, the artist and his family spent every summer from 1925 onward in Rockport, an important artist colony only a few miles away from Gloucester.

In 1914, inspired by the picturesque villages that they had encountered during their first European trip, the Kuehnes moved to Spain. It was there, in the midst of the country’s rich cultural and artistic heritage, that the artist first developed his skills in frame making by watching Spanish craftsmen practicing their trade. Upon his return to New York in 1917, Kuehne began making his own frames in order to save money and to ensure that his paintings had a high-quality, harmonious appearance. He not only designed the shapes and decorative motifs of the frames but also hand carved and gilded them. From that point, Kuehne’s proficiency in wood carving expanded to include large-scale objects like clothing chests, end tables and bed frames. The artist’s frames and decorative furniture became so well known that his clientele included important art patrons like Dr. Albert C. Barnes, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Juliana Force.[1]

Enamored with outdoor activities, it is not surprising that Kuehne’s painting style was indebted to the en plein air tradition of the French Impressionists; nevertheless, his preferred subject matter, which primarily consisted of port scenes and still lifes, displays a distinctly American sensibility. Rich in color and texture, Gloucester Harbor is a lively scene that captures the vitality and restless beauty of Cape Ann. Compressed into the foreground, the choppy waves reflect the images of the yellow cabins and the verdant hills in the background, while the faintly visible orange masts of the boats provide relief to the otherwise horizontal composition. Rendered in a melodious range of cool tones, the painting conveys a sense of immediacy through the artist’s rapid layering of heavy impasto. At the same time, the loose, multi-directional brushstrokes dissolve and flatten the forms of the boats and the houses, serving to intensify the painting’s impressionistic surface quality. Inscribed on the back with the date 1911, this painting is one of Kuehne’s earliest depictions of Cape Ann and represents the beginning of the artist’s lifelong passion for the subject.

Gloucester Harbor features an original Max Kuehne frame. The cassetta-style frame, a design that dates back to the Italian Renaissance, possesses flat sections of molding ideal for the addition of two-dimensional patterns. Choosing an equally historic method of decoration known as sgraffito, the artist created the subtle but complex tonal variations by incising the pattern into the wood’s painted surface to reveal the layers of gilding below.[2] In this case, he selected a smaller, continuous floral and leave motif that beautifully complements the flat, abstracted qualities of the painting. Likewise, Kuehne employed a reverse-profile design, which allows the painting to project from the frontal plane of the frame rather than receding into it, in order to prevent the frame from competing with the scene’s dynamism. Acutely sensitive to the notion that a proper frame enhances a work of art, Kuehne combined his impressionistic sensibility and his sophisticated understanding of artisanal practices to create a unified whole that evokes the poetic charm of Gloucester’s scenery.