Walt Kuhn

Lavender Plumes, nd

Green Pom-Pom, 1944

Roberto, 1946

Chico in a Hat, 1948

Chorus Captain, 1935

Dressing Room, 1926

I came upon Walt Kuhn by chance, noticing Dressing Room for the first time a few months ago on one of my infrequent visits to the Brooklyn Museum. I took a photo of the painting while passing through, forgetting to note the artist. Then I stumbled on the magnificent Chorus Captain on a rare visit to the Yale University art gallery. I immediately knew it was the same artist, although I didn't yet know his name and even though the paintings are from different periods and differ stylistically. Just yesterday I finally looked up the signature from the photo I took of the Yale painting, expecting to find some Weimar/Neue Sachlichkeit follower. Much to my surprise Walter Francis Kuhn (1877-1949) was born in Brooklyn. He worked as a sculptor, draftsman and cartoonist in addition to painting, and was an organizer of the landmark Armory show (International Exhibition of Modern Art) of 1913.

In my research I came across the intriguing art inconnu, who says of Kuhn:

There is certainly an air of unease about some of his paintings but I wouldn't describe them as disturbing...there is a lot of humanity in his portraits. This is made all the more remarkable by the fact that unlike most modern portraiture almost all his subjects sit in full costume, often including face masks or makeup, often looking faintly ridiculous.

I found Kuhn's stark, psychologically intense portraits vastly appealing and disturbing simultaneously. His circus performers alternately stare out confrontationally from full stage make up, while others wearily recede behind the regalia.

Some other art(ists) to keep in mind, with regard to Kuhn:
German "New Objectivity":

Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, Otto Dix, 1925

Fernand Pelez:

Grimaces and Misery, 1888

Guy Pene du Bois:

Cafe du Dome, 1925-6

Edward Hopper:

Soir Bleu, 1914

Some background:
As a young man Kuhn left the US for art training in Europe, studying in Paris and Munich. After a summer's work produced only one painting, Kuhn's notion that he had plenty of time was brusquely dispelled when a teacher said, "For you it is a quarter to twelve."

A hospitalization for a serious stomach ulcer in 1925 compelled him impose a time limit of two years in which he would "find himself in art." He concentrated on his early interest in theatrical and circus performers.

Enormously self-critical, he claimed that he was “forty years old before he painted a really worthwhile picture.” A 1967 article in American Artist revealed that “He ruthlessly destroyed more paintings than he preserved, and he never signed one until he was completely satisfied with it.”

In his last years Kuhn suffered increasing mental turmoil, becoming irrational and moody. When the Ringling Brothers Circus was in town, he found solace in attending night after night. His family committed him to Bellevue in 1948; he died the next year of a perforated ulcer.

Roses, 1933

Consider the Crest

On a visit to Bowne* yesterday I was able to study Robert Warner's latest ebay find. Somehow he is able to ferret out and "win" fascinating and often significant ephemera without emptying the coffers. I have no ebay karma, even when I win, I lose.

This exquisite little gem, ca. 1880, appears to be a child's album for collecting and arraying crests and monograms. A selection of 7 or so appealing geometric page designs serve as display guidelines for arranging the art. Each page pattern is printed in color—one is vaguely islamic, another looks like a cathedral window—and each looks like a coloring book version of a page from the Grammar of Ornament. What floored me was the detail of these snippets of engraving: most examples are smaller than my thumbnail. What disappointed me was the realization that these crests were likely not acquired bit by bit—not garnered from, say, years of missives from "Prince Leopold," or correspondence with "The Royal Dragoons," or "Quekett Microscopical Club", each heraldic emblem cut from its letterhead or calling card, each paper escutcheon stowed away in some violet-scented family keepsake chest. No, they were probably purchased in packs: a revelation by way of the advertisements at the back of the book. No matter. I picked up some useful Latin (and French) mottoes along the way:

sine macula– without spot or blemish
cave adsum—beware I am present
nosce te ipsum— know thyself
esse quam videri— to be rather than seem
sapere aude—dare to know
avisez le fin—consider the end
fuimus– we have been; we have endured
renovate animos—renew your courage
le bon temps viendra—the good times will come

---

NB, coming soon: Now that we've scanned the colored guide pages, Robert will letterpress print them and bind them into an updated version of a pasting and display album based on this one. It will be sold at Bowne along with a selection of vintage and vintage inspired ephemera bits— a starter kit of sorts. beautiful.

* Bowne & Co., Stationers at South Street Seaport Museum

Jarhead

Spouted, globe-shaped jars, or askoi, from Canosa, Apulia (modern Puglia) c 250-350 bc.

I'd first seen examples of Canosa pottery at the British Museum a few years ago and was completely astounded. These particular types of vases were frequently made to be placed inside tombs, thus never intended to be functional, and it seems that gave their makers license to go bonkers. Sometimes called "magenta ware" because of the strident pink and purple coloring, Canosa pottery is garish, outlandish, loud. Seemingly bizarre conglomerations of heads, figures, spouts, and horses, they are completely antithetical to the supposed ideal of ancient Classicism.

I like that early Classical scholars seemed to be embarrassed by them:

From Canosa, a city near the east coast, north of Brindisi, have come a series of vases which the most ambitious endeavours have been made to decorate with figures, the result, however, being altogether unsatisfactory. Examples...[are]...mixed and confounded in an almost ludicrous fashion.–Marcus Bourne Huish Greek Terra-cotta Statuettes 1900

It occurred to me that these were likely made by local craftsmen extemporizing on a known theme—riffing— rather than artists creating to a traditional standard. Perhaps like the gravestone carving of colonial New England they're folk art interpretations, each potter adding and altering the form as he saw fit. Like Classical Outsider Art.

From an earlier post, and some other favorites:

Another thing I never truly noticed before was how mutable form was for the Greeks and Romans et al.This flies in the face of the measured, symmetrical rationality that supposedly defines the Greeks. Double-faced ("janiform") heads, heads split down the center, human figures sprouting horses, extra heads or an accretion of limbs. Vases in the shape of legs, heads, phalluses, birds, even lobster claws... It's as though corporeal form, for them, was a transient state: often recorded, in bronze or terra cotta, in mid-transformation...

Social pages

Update: Many thanks to an anonymous commenter– who sounds very much like a curator in-the-know– for filling in much of the background information on this album. It is in fact not Constance's album– it is her sister Amy's, who was a 14-year old at the time. Read more interesting tidbits in the comments section...

The leaves of this album are somewhat tersely recorded as "albumen photomontage with watercolor embellishment, London, 1867, Constance Sackville West." Found within the fascinating online collections at George Eastman House, that venerable photo repository in Rochester, NY, the pages have no other commentary or curatorial insight. In my research as to who Constance was I've discovered that my ability to decipher British Peerage and hereditary lines is sorely limited. Other than knowing she had to have been a fairly close relative of notable Bloomsbury adventuress, Virginia Woolf paramour, gardener, and woman of letters, Vita Sackville-West, the album's creator was a mystery. It is possible that it was Constance Mary Elizabeth Cochrane-Baillie who married Reginald Windsor Sackville West (without the hyphen) in 1867. That would make the person who conceived these truly exceptional and endearingly odd tableaux a newly-married 21 year old. Possible.

Most of the characters gamboling on lawns and reclining at the shore (or whose disembodied heads bob amidst the clouds) form a roster of mid-nineteenth century bold-faced names and are are identified in Constance's hand. The Earl of Scarborough, the Marchioness of Huntley, the Queen of Naples, and the "Misses Bismarcks", among various other royal and social lights, are in her parade of notables.

This oblique view of Constance's daily circuit (croquet, hunting parties, lots of sitting–a life lived as a series of tableaux vivants) makes the evidence of her agile imagination far more intriguing. It's interesting is that she had access to so many full-length photographs of friends posing–did they have photographing parties? What else did Constance do?

Addendum: Thanks to the wonderful Florizelle who has pointed me toward another strikingly similar embellished photo album in the collection of the Musee d'Orsay. Georgiana Berkeley made her album around the same period as Sackville West (1860-70) and created witty dreamlike scenes interspersed with more typical portraits and mementos. It seems as though she and Constance would have moved in the same circles. I wonder how common a hobby this was? How many other albums disappeared, falling victim to vigorous housecleaning in some decade or other...

trading halos for high jinks

above, a scene from Caught in a Cabaret with Charlie Chaplin, 1914

left, "The Return from Toil," working girls as sketched by John Sloan; right, Variété (English Couple Dancing), 1912/13, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Special to The New York Times.Thursday, February 6, 1913
Mrs. Taft being the President's wife...

A week ago or so at a client meeting I found a book in the "free" pile– Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York by Kathy Peiss. Published in the 1980s, the book has a very academic and earnest "Women's History" approach which would be enough to turn me off normally, but I particularly got caught up in the chapters on dancing and "Putting on Style."

The first decades of the 20th century brought legions of girls and young women–garment workers, salesgirls, artificial flower makers, tobacco workers– into the work force. Some of these women even lived on their own– a very new phenomenon. The book focuses mostly on working class women who were intrigued by the novel concept of "leisure time", influenced by feminist intimations of the "New Woman" and enticed by a range of modern consumer options.

Most people think of the 1920s as erupting into dance, champagne and louche-ness in a fireworks display of Modernity when in fact, the years leading up to the First World War were rather "fast" and raucous in their own right. Much of the behavior the "Jazz Age" gets credit for had its beginnings before the War.

New York was "dance mad." Social clubs and amusement societies held rackets or blow outs at one of the many dance palaces that would hold up to 3000 patrons. "Rough girls" smoked and teased their hair into high pompadours, augmented with puffs and rats. They wore red high heels and exaggerated straw hats drooping under the weight of stuffed birds, and sprays of artificial flowers. They flocked to dance halls, hotels, restaurants for dancing teas and a chance to learn the One-step, the Gaby Glide, the Hesitation Waltz, the Maxixe, Tango, and the Shimmy.

Some of the dances became huge controversial fads and were banned from respectable establishments. The Grizzly Bear, Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot in particular were said to have originated about 1906 in the brothels of San Francisco's Barbary Coast and were judged vulgar, bordering on obscene. The very worst of the dances invited "much twirling and twisting and easy familiarity...in nearly all the men in the way they handle the girls," according to an observer. "Once learned the participants can at will instantly decrease or increase the obscenity of the movements."

Many venues instituted patrols to maintain decorum and public declarations were made against the new dances. The New York Times of January 16, 1912 reported an announcement at the Hotel Astor "Should there be any of you who have the inclination to dance the grizzly bear, the turkey trot or an exaggerated form of the Boston dip the members of the Floor Committee will stop you."

Investigators sent to prowl the dance halls by the Committee of Fourteen (whose focus was the suppression of commercialized vice) found patrons "smoking cigarettes, hugging and kissing and running around the room like a mob of lunatics." The girls, they found, were "game and lively and sought out flirtation. They go out for a good time and go the 'Limit'".

* * *

"It was the hesitation drag...and never before has there been such a gliding sliding hesitancy; never before such a dreamy drag; never before such a culminating triumph as the whirl, a la pivot. It was supreme; it was new... It was a dance that renounced halos for high jinks, disapproval for complete surrender."
Djuna Barnes– Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 5, 1913

* * *

What I enjoy most in reading history is when the accrual of a few small casual details suddenly makes the subject recognizable. In an instant a description of "history" becomes knowable, the facts lift from the page. Despite the fact that we see the 1910s in black and white and consider it part of history, it no more felt like or unfolded like "history" than right now feels to us. History is not a place– it is not bound by "the past"– it's simply a stream of everydays.

Missing

Recently I saw "Man on Wire," the film about Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in the summer of 1974. I was slow to warm to the film's charms but the tale finally and completely won me over. Primarily, this is because Petit is an intriguing, exasperating, narcissistic, fairy tale figure. A little prince in many senses, he is both a singular personality and a caricature–as well as very very French. (Which is almost like being a caricature, anyway.)

What I didnt expect from the film was how emotional I would be over seeing so much footage of the World Trade Center: its construction, as backdrop against the city, sweeping aerial beauty shots.

For most of its existence I was indifferent, at best, to the WTC. I have no recollection of actually visiting the towers though I think there may have been a trip to the observation deck at some early juncture. They served a purpose as a visual anchor, a directional on which to get my bearings upon emerging from an unfamiliar subway stop. Other than that, I disliked their needlessly overscaled banality– their crudeness. I had been attuned to architectural grace notes and these buildings were power chords.

It was totally without context, then, that less than a year before they were destroyed I had an abrupt change of mind about the WTC. I was virtually struck in one epiphanic moment. The double towers in tandem, along with their uninviting windswept plaza were one conceptual gesture about scale, less about execution and finish than idea. A simple notion that, for some reason, I had not comprehended, and then I did.

Like lightning rods the WTC attracted Petit's fanatical curiousity. His nearly mystical draw to the towers began with an article he'd read in 1968 about their initial planning and was not extinguished even after completing his mission 6 years later. In the film, Petit recalls his high wire walk as spiritual, a "gift", "elation...I was actually venturing in another world.” The footage in the film shows Petit practically dancing on the wire, weightless, it seemed, and imparting an unexpected delicacy to the colossus he was so barely tethered to. He pulled off this caper, this coup, and managed to bring the building itself into the poetry of the moment.

When he stepped onto the roof after his 45 minute sojourn a quarter mile in thin air he was ambushed by police and reporters. Barraged by what Petit termed a "typically American question" he was repeatedly asked "why did you do it?" The disconnect between the question and the event itself was a sadly comical point in the movie.

Twenty-seven years later in the aftermath of a devastating surreal spectacle people were again asking, "why did they do it?"

Images from top: Tom Fletcher's New York City architecture; "before 9/11" by Baldwin Lee; from wikipedia; from Man on Wire.

pietra paesina

Pietra paesina, also called “landscape stone,” “ruin stone,” “ruiniform marble,” and “Florentine marble” among other names, has been collected for centuries. The “marble” is in fact a type of limestone which when cut into slabs and polished reveals natural veining of iron oxides that resemble –with minimal poetic license–mountainous landscapes, castles, and ruins.
Displayed as natural objects of contemplation in European Renaissance wunderkammer the marble was also incorporated into decorative panels in architecture or furnishings. The stone was sometimes further embellished with painted detail, which, to me, seems sacrilegious.

Ruiniform marble hovers between natural specimen and artifact, abstract configuration and narrative. Its markings are angular, geometric, almost Cubist, vividly etched, yet undefined at the same time. Many stones have the suffused colors of a foggy twilight but some, like the specimen third from bottom, give off the sonorous (yes, sonorous) golden warmth of classical ruins.

How wonderful (in the true sense of the word) it must have been that first time to cut into something solid and “see” the spiritous atmosphere, to peer into something small and see distant wide vistas.

Images: St. Francis exorcising demons from Assisi, Giotto, c.1297; View of Delft, Vermeer, 1659-60; my specimen, which I had framed, was purchased a few years ago from Claude Boullé Galerie 28, Rue Jacob, in Paris.; 3 sample pietra; at bottom is another variant of pictorial stone, Cotham marble, quarried near Bristol, whose striations usually evoke natural landscapes of trees and stormy clouds.