:::Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts::: Artists

Kenneth Hayes Miller ( 1876-1952 )

	Casual Meeting - 1928 Oil on canvas 20 ¼ x 24 ¼ inches Signed and dated (at upper right): Hayes Miller/ '28 Print Click image for detailed view Contact the Gallery for more information

Provenance:
John P. Axelrod, Massachusetts

Kenneth Hayes Miller was a revered and highly influential teacher at New York’s Art Students League from 1911 until 1952. He taught many artists who would ultimately surpass him in fame, they include George Bellows, Paul Cadmus, Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent.

Although Miller participated in the Armory Show of 1913 and was one of the first artists to enter the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, his style was distinctly traditional and antithetical to the modernists’ ideas. He studied art with William Merritt Chase and soon after began his own career as both painter and teacher.

Miller’s aesthetic was based on the theory that the back plane of a picture was important as an anchor and reference point for the forms that grew forward from it. He stressed that a painter who loses the sense of this plane will not be capable of giving his work substance and weight.

Casual Meeting is a prime example of Miller’s favorite subject matter—genteel urban women on the street, going about their business of shopping and socializing. The two figures in Casual Meeting display many of the artist’s interests: the hinted at voluptuousness of the women, their elaborate clothing and jewelry and the sculpted roundness of their faces. Miller’s belief that painting should be grounded in classical ideals is also apparent in Casual Meeting. The application of paint and modeling of figures exemplify his conviction that painting must not radically change in method, but rather follow the examples of the masters of the past. (Some of Miller’s paintings are updated versions of Renaissance and 19th century French paintings.) What is new is the subject matter: primarily the women of his time and the opulence of their fashions, which, while of the moment, are also reminiscent of fabrics and accessories from earlier centuries.

Casual Meeting, like the artist’s other paintings of women, should not be taken as a social critique, although there is some humor to the opulence. It is obvious from his work that Miller had both a fascination for and attraction to these women. He was an artist with thorough knowledge of art history and technique, and he used it throughout his career to create charming paintings such as Casual Meeting, thereby returning us to a more gilded age and capturing a specific social milieu in the New York of the first half of the century.