Walt Kuhn
American, 1877 - 1949
Kuhn exhibited at the Harriman Gallery from 1930 to 1941; the Durand-Ruel Gallery from 1943 to 1945; and he had a retrospective exhibition in 1960 at the Cincinnati Art Museum. His works were also shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1921.
Kuhn’s work is in many private and public collections, including the Dublin Museum in Ireland; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Addison Gallery of American Art; the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the art museums of Denver, Columbus, Los Angeles, Wichita, and Detroit.
As well as being an artist and cartoonist, Kuhn wrote The Story of the Armory Show in 1938, and in 1939, he wrote and produced a motion picture entitled Walt Kuhn’s Adventures in Art. In 1913 he and A.B. Davies organized the landmark Armory Show in New York City.
Walt Kuhn died in New York City in 1949.
Born in Brooklyn, NY. Kuhn began his career in 1898 as a cartoonist for a San Francisco newspaper. From 1901-03 he studied in Munich and in Paris at Académie Colarossi. By 1910 he was a successful artist and in 1913 was an organizer of the Armory Show. His painting forte was clowns and circus performers. One year before his death, he suffered a mental breakdown and was institutionalized. He died in New York on July 13, 1949.
A painter and major organizer of the Armory Show, Walt Kuhn is perhaps best known for his circus figure-clown depictions. They were unique in that he treated his subjects as human beings conditioned to specialized jobs. He also painted still lifes and some landscapes. He was inspired and influenced by many artists, most notably Paul Cezanne, and like Cezanne, he destroyed many of his canvases, saving only about a dozen paintings a year.
He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1877 (some older sources quote 1880 as his year of birth) with the name William, but in 1900 first used the name "Walt" when illustrating magazines in San Francisco. He studied at the Royal Academy in Munich from 1901 to 1903, and returned to New York where he worked as a cartoonist and magazine illustrator.
He was associated with "The Eight", New York modernist painters, and with Arthur B. Davies, was a the key figure in forming the American Association of painters and Sculptors that organized the Armory Show of 1913 that introduced modernist European art to America. Kuhn was executive secretary of the Association and traveled abroad to select entries for the Armory Show.
In 1941, he was granted a press pass to all of the Madison Square Garden performances of the Ringling Brothers Circus, which reinforced his focus on that subject matter.
He also had a major interest in the American West, and between 1918 and 1920 did 29 paintings in a series he called Imaginary History of the West, whose source material was primarily books. In 1936 and 1937, he was commissioned by the Union Pacific Railroad to design the interior of two club cars, The Frontier Shack and Little Nuggett.
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