:::Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts::: Artists

Walt Kuhn ( 1880-1949 )

	Ocean Cliffs - 1914 Oil on canvas 24 ¾ x 29 inches Signed and dated at lower left: Walt Kuhn / 14 Print Click image for detailed view Contact the Gallery for more information

Provenance:

Alexander Gallery, New York

Private collection, acquired from the above in 2002

Born William Kuhn in Brooklyn, New York in 1877, Kuhn began calling himself “Walt” at the age of twenty-three when he was illustrating magazines in San Francisco. He studied art at the Royal Academy in Munich between 1901 and 1903 before returning to the U.S. to live in New York and resume working as an illustrator. His involvement in the organization of the “Exhibition of Independent Artists” in 1910, led by Robert Henri who was once referred to as “the emancipator” for his efforts to liberate young American artists from the constraints of the National Academy, was a turning point in Kuhn’s life.

This exhibition became the main catalyst for the Armory Show which Kuhn began discussing with two other artists, Jerome Myers and Elmer L. MacRae, in late 1911 and which opened to the public in February 1913. As spokesman and secretary for the “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” Kuhn traveled to Cologne, Germany to observe the Sonderbund exhibition on its final day. The scale and scope of the German exhibition became the model for the Armory Show. Kuhn went on to travel to Europe’s major cities where he selected additional pieces for inclusion at the Armory.

During its month-long run in New York, the Armory Show had nearly 90,000 visitors who came to see what for many was their first glimpse of the recent developments in European modernism. The impact of the show was felt by every segment of the American art world; for artists it affected how they viewed color, composition, and brushstroke. Because of his pre-Armory Show whirlwind tour in Europe, Kuhn had even more exposure to the work of his European counterparts. He spent the summer of 1914 on Grand Manan in New Brunswick, Canada. There he executed Ocean Cliffs with an eye toward the Fauvist lessons of Raoul Dufy and André Derain, as well as the compositional structure of Paul Cézanne.

In later years, particularly at the end of the 1920s, Kuhn self-edited his oeuvre, destroying many of his early works. As a result, few works from these post-Armory Show years survive today, making Ocean Cliffs a rare example of his experimentation in the various styles of the European moderns. A comparable piece from 1914, At the Dressing Table, shares several compositional and stylistic features: the subject of each is doubled: two imposing cliffs and a nude doubled by her mirror image. The forms occupy the right portion in each work and anchor the composition from top to bottom. In At the Dressing Table, the rocky shoreline from Ocean Cliffs is substituted with an abstracted pattern (possibly suggesting a fabric skirt on the dressing table) in the lower left quadrant. Kuhn signs and dates each work in this area.

The palettes of both are similar and clearly share the same hue of yellow/green in the background. The light gray forms of the cliffs that are repeated in the pale skin and white towel are defined in each work by gray/blue outlining. The rocks and the floral fabric provide darker tones as contrast to the paler shades of the subjects. The brushstrokes that form the yellow/green background of each painting radiate upwards and appear to have evolved from the more dramatically radiating brushstrokes in the background of Morning, the 1912 work that was included in the Armory Show and is now in the collection of the Norton Museum of Art.