Walt Kuhn 1880-1949

Mr. and Mrs. Harry Daniel, Bristol, Tennessee, 1946
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York
Private collection, 1969

Tuscon, Arizona, University of Arizona, University Art Gallery, Walt Kuhn: Painter of Vision, February-March 1966
Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum, Walt Kuhn Retrospective, August 1978-April 1979

Philip Rhys Adams, Walt Kuhn, Painter: His Life and Work, Columbus, Ohio, 1978, no. 530, pp. 235, 276, illustrated pl. 152

Walt Kuhn’s mature career is almost exclusively identified with his poignant psychological portrayals of circus and vaudeville performers.  Kuhn’s fascination with the theater began at an early age; as a young boy, he delivered rental costumes to theater troupes and in later years he designed costumes and sets and directed acts for vaudeville and musical revues.   While Kuhn painted circus performers throughout much of his life, his paintings from the 1940s penetrate with searing intensity these heavily disguised and costumed characters whose portraits become timeless embodiments for the human condition.  Duncan Phillips writes, “The clowns are of many different types and reveal many individual idiosyncrasies and even complexities.  Kuhn uses the language of design to aid him in suggesting these undercurrents of character beneath the make-up and costume.  Far from describing his models, in all their flamboyant or grotesque professional appearances with the exaggerations of subjective fantasy, he imposes upon himself the challenge of confronting only the facts about some very human personalities, conditioned to specialized jobs in burlesque, vaudeville and circus” (Philip Rhys Adams, Walt Kuhn, Painter: His Life and Work, Columbus, Ohio, 1978, p. 211).

Chico in Silk Hat, painted in 1948, is a particularly striking portrait in which the artist hauntingly plumbs the darker depths of the human spirit.  Hollow cheek bones, a furrowed brow and piercing kohl-rimmed eyes confront the viewer with a brutally candid and disquieting gaze.   Kuhn’s painterly style—his vigorous, broad and lush brushstrokes, rich and somber colors, and his exaggeratedly attenuated treatment of the figure, especially the hands—enhance the sense of the sitter’s own mental and physical distortion.  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). 

The year Chico in Silk Hat was painted, Kuhn was visibly suffering from increasing mental turmoil.  “By the fall of 1948 Kuhn’s eccentric behavior was becoming more noticeable.  He denounced dealers and critics, an age-old privilege of artists; but Walt did it with unusual vehemence, announcing that he would become a critic himself.  He openly and violently broke with friends of long standing, and held others helpless on the phone for long ranting hours.  Everyone who had any dealings with him that fall used the same word: Kuhn was a ‘sick’ man” (Walt Kuhn, Painter: His Life and Work, p. 232).  By the end of November, following the opening of his show Fifty Years a Painter at Durand-Ruel, his family made the difficult decision to commit him to Bellevue, a psychiatric hospital in New York.  In view of this dark period in Kuhn’s life it is tempting to see this compelling portrait as a psychic mirror of the artist’s tormented soul.