Walt Kuhn 1880 - 1949

Kennedy Galleries, New York
Private Collection, Great Neck, New York (sold: Christie's, New York, May 26, 1988, lot 335, illustrated in color)
Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York (acquired at the above sale)
(Ronnie Meyerson, Inc., Bayville, New York)
Acquired by the present owners from the above, 1992

By the late 1920's, Walt Kuhn was channeling his passion for the spectacle of public entertainment and its players into a personal idiom: his iconic images of circus and vaudeville performers. Kuhn's often profound portraits of clowns, acrobats, jugglers, and showgirls doubled as "timeless metaphors of the human condition" (Philip Adams, Walt Kuhn, Painter: His Life and Work, Columbus, Ohio, 1978, p. 158). Fridolf Johnson writes, "Boldly outlined, brusquely modeled, intensely expressive, and frozen in limelight against dark backgrounds, Kuhn's portraits are unforgettable, disturbing paintings. Most present a frontal gaze that is at once hypnotic and that were considered startling in their day. Just as Rembrandt and van Gogh allow the viewer to pierce the facades of their sitters' faces to look deeper into their beings, so Kuhn accomplishes the same thing, but in an almost eerie fashion" ("Walt Kuhn: American Master," American Artist, December 1967, p. 52). Lady in Robe, painted in 1935, is a striking portrait in which the female sitter, her arms and legs crossed, confronts the viewer with disquieting honesty. Her revealing robe and matching hat adorn her partially exposed body and fill the picture with a brooding sensuality. The palette of the painting is largely black and white; however, Kuhn incorporates a pale yellow and soft pink for tonal variation. The pyramidal heavily built-up form of the figure and her monumental proportions within the dark, non-descript space, give visual expression to the emotional gravitas of Kuhn's portraits.

With long-standing personal experience in show business, Kuhn had several different methods for discovering his portrait subjects. His daughter described her father's practices to Bennard Perlman who wrote: "Sometimes he would stand on the corner of University Place and Union Square wearing a black fedora, and he'd dump it over his nose and just stand there looking for models.... On other occasions he would talk to them in cafes and dance halls, then ask one of his friends in the theater to approach them, reasoning that a fellow actor might be less likely to be turned down.... At other times, Kuhn might simply inform his male models that he was looking for a particular type of female and they would scour the neighborhood and send several candidates to his studio..." (Walt Kuhn, 1877-1949, New York, 1989, p. 13).