ON VIEW

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Walt Kuhn was a professional bicyclist and a San Francisco newspaper cartoonist before traveling to Europe to study art in 1901. Over the next few years, he studied in Paris, Munich, and New York while continuing to earn a living through cartooning and teaching. Between 1911 and 1913 he helped to organize the famous Armory Show of modern painting. The experience sharpened Kuhn's already progressive outlook, and he began to experiment with modernist modes derived from Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), the Fauves, and the Cubists. To support himself and his family, Kuhn spent six months of the year painting and six months in steady employment as a visual consultant for theatrical productions, including circus and vaudeville acts.

In 1925 Kuhn nearly died of a stomach ulcer. After his recovery, he became concerned that he had no mature works to leave to posterity. He abandoned his paying jobs and used his savings to fund a two-year period of concentrated painting. During this time, he began to develop the figure paintings for which he would become best known. Inspired by his experiences with the circus, Kuhn took as his subjects clowns, acrobats, showgirls, and other performers. Monumental, yet sympathetic, his portraits were hailed by critics as honest images of human dignity. The circus theme absorbed Kuhn for much of his remaining career, and during the 1930s and 1940s he produced some of his greatest paintings. Kuhn died in 1949.

Lancer was painted in Kuhn's New York studio in 1939. According to the artist's daughter, Brenda Kuhn, the subject of the painting is Lorraine Roe, a nightclub performer. Depicted in a revealing and faintly ridiculous outfit reminiscent of a military uniform, Roe stands with her arms akimbo, steadily regarding the viewer. Although her outlandishly tasseled and plumed shako takes up nearly the entire top half of the vertical canvas, the force of Roe's personality dominates the composition, emerging through garish trappings to reveal a serious and dedicated worker.

Kuhn held a high degree of respect for his subjects, viewing them as kindred spirits. While he maintained a large wardrobe of costumes for his models, he often let them choose their own outfits and poses, thus collaborating with them to a certain extent on the final composition. In some paintings, such as the well-known White Clown (1929, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), the subject appears weary and introspective; in others, such as Lancer, the performer is proud and unperturbed. To emphasize the individuality and heroic quality of his subjects, Kuhn avoided group studies. The backgrounds of his figure paintings are almost always featureless, and props, other than costumes, are largely absent.

Paralleling his romantic emphasis on personality, Kuhn's style is directed toward bringing out a sense of his subjects' flesh-and-blood presence. The blocky realism that characterizes Lancer and other paintings has its origins in the work of Cézanne. Yet Kuhn was little interested in the French artist's intellectualized probings of mass and volume. Instead, he found Cézanne's approach useful in expressing the robust physicality of the subject. At the same time, Kuhn frequently attempted to infuse his paintings with the vitality possessed by the performers themselves. On those rare occasions when he spoke of the impulses underlying his compositions, he tended to generalize them in terms of movement and energy. Speaking of Lancer in 1940, Kuhn noted: "The chief interest in this picture is its definite and acute design made up of upward-lunging scimitar strokes."(1)

Although Kuhn was often harshly self-critical of his work and destroyed numerous paintings that he felt did not meet his standards, he was particularly proud of Lancer. The painting was reproduced on the cover of his retrospective survey, 50 Paintings by Walt Kuhn, published in 1940, and was included in several one-person and group shows before the artist's death. Lancer was acquired by the Currier Museum of Art in 1958.

VSD


NOTE

1. Walt Kuhn quoted in Walt Kuhn 1877-1949, ex. cat. Cincinnati Art Museum, 1960, n.p.

REFERENCES

Painter of Vision: A Retrospective Exhibition of Oils, Watercolors and Drawings by Walt Kuhn 1877-1949. Ex. cat. University of Arizona Art Gallery, 1966.

Walt Kuhn 1877-1949. Ex. cat. Cincinnati Art Museum, 1960.