Jacob Kainen, The Hidden Gem of the New York School

He left New York

In ’42, New York had become the center of the art world, and Kainen would certainly have been noticed; a virtuosic painter, remarkably erudite, not to mention a movie-star-handsome athlete, he was moreover a favorite of three early mentors to the WPA painters, the aforementioned Davis and Gorky, but also John Graham, the intellectual guru of his day. They all considered young Kainen a rising star and gave him artworks of theirs in admiration. Ad Reinhardt put him on the same tree branch as Rothko and Gottlieb in his cartoon “How To Look At Modern Art In America.” But the WPA was closing down, and Kainen needed a real job for his new family, so he moved to what was then the artistic backwater of Washington, D.C. to take a job at the Smithsonian Institute.

Too Many Careers

In DC, Kainen soon became the Smithsonian’s curator of prints, and a founder of the DC art scene, which to his dismay was non-existent. He became a mentor to Morris Louis, Ken Noland, Gene Davis, and all the Washington Color School artists as well as Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam. For over 25 years, as he fathered the Washington art world, he worked 18-hour days to produce a large body of work of paintings, prints, and drawings as well as leading a prestigious career as curator, scholar, author, lecturer, and collector.

Ironically, these parallel careers only tended to obscure his art. As historian William Agee reminds us, both Hans Hoffman and Joseph Albers were first known only as teachers.

Critically Misunderstood

Critics are often swayed by a single, bold, “signature style.” Kainen created a number of wholly original, iconic approaches in his eight decades, not because he was casting about, but, much like Picasso, he was a virtuoso painter and draftsman, bursting with ideas and not content with just one concept. Sadly, this was misinterpreted by some critics, who could only give a name to these new idioms by comparing them to historical precedent, and described him as “grafting and inflecting existing styles” and having a “hybrid sensibility,” when that was the furthest thing from the truth. Kainen was remarkably self-aware aesthetically, more than most artists, and his forms and colors were very much his own throughout his long career.

Kainen believed that an artist was a “lonely Faustian thinker, combining wisdom and magic.” His wisdom can be seen in his color, draftsmanship, sensuous paint handling, and composition, which add up to more than the sum of their parts to become the magic, or what he called the “aura of human experience,” that you will feel when you see Jacob Kainen’s work.