Jacob Kainen

“An Aura of Human Experience”

A Rising Star

Jacob Kainen was a rising star in the firmament of young, WPA artists during the Federal Arts Project in 30’s New York. It was not just because of his handsome, athletic presence - a skilled amateur boxer and semi-pro second baseman - but also because of his already quite accomplished work and for his remarkable erudition, which made him a favorite among the elder artist mentors at that time, Stuart Davis and John Graham, as well as Arshile Gorky, who was not much older but already famous and revered. They all considered 25 year-old Kainen unique among his peers. Davis liked his paintings so much that he convinced him to join the print making, rather than the painting program of the Project, because his paintings would be shipped out to who-knows-where and he’d lose them, whereas with prints, he would still have the plates and not lose the work. Gorky took a liking to him when they first met in a café, and painted his portrait. Graham, an intellectual guru among the artists of the day, and who didn’t suffer art critics gladly, was so impressed with Kainen’s critical pieces for Art Front magazine, that he asked him to look over the manuscript of his now famous “System and Dialectics of Art”. Davis, Gorky, and Graham all gave Kainen works of theirs in admiration, and he remained lifelong friends with them, as well as with his fellow artists, de Kooning, Rothko, and others. He was especially close with De Kooning and Gorky. The three would pal around, hiking up to Times Square in the morning for a movie serial, before getting back to their studios on Union Square for the rest of the day.

The Move to D.C.

In 1942, Graham curated what was to be an important show at the McMillan Gallery, exhibiting work by Davis, Pollock, Krasner, and de Kooning. Kainen surely would have been in that show, but with the Project closing down, and a family on the way, he needed a steady job, and left New York earlier that same year to take a job at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and soon became its curator of prints, vastly improving the collection.

To his dismay, Kainen found D.C. to be an artistic backwater, and went on to become a founder of its art scene. Parallel to his illustrious career as a print curator and scholar at the Smithsonian, and his mentoring many other artists, writers, dealers, and even other curators, he produced a large body of work throughout the succeeding decades. Revered in D.C., he was eventually celebrated with a huge retrospective show at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in ‘93.

Critically Misunderstood

Outside of D.C. however, he was somewhat damned with faint praise by some (New York) critics who unconsciously linked him to the D.C. hinterlands. While recognizing the solidity of his work, they did not see Kainen’s profound originality, and instead compared him to what they already knew. They compared, for instance, his 1930’s strongly colored, passionately painted disaster scenes to German Expressionism and his early 40’s abstracted New York street scene’s bright colors to those of the Fauves, whereas Kirchner and others used much more distorted forms and radical color contrasts, and the Fauves’ palette was higher key and more acidic, aside from the completely different spirit of the work. In fact, throughout his entire career, Kainen’s forms and colors have always been very much his own. His profound understanding of color is what drew the artists of the Washington Color School to study with, and learn from him, although he did not join them in staining canvas, saying it “sacrificed mass”. He was very aware of the expressionists, as well as Picasso and others, including his mentor, Gorky, but he had the aesthetic self-awareness not to copy them. He had his own concepts in mind.

Independence and Change

While never lacking in inspiration or intensity, or inner turmoil for that matter, Kainen’s effortless control of the medium did not project the desperado approach of some of his contemporaries, who, in the mid-forties, inspired by the work of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Soutine, not to mention Picasso and Miro, struck out into their own very admirable forms of abstraction - and for the most part stuck with them for their entire careers without radical change. Kainen took great liberties with his figurative work of this period, but waited a few years before turning to total abstraction, not yet believing it capable of expressing his vision fully. Throughout the succeeding six decades he created over a dozen of his own very original forms of both abstraction and figuration. Much like Picasso, Kainen was an explorer; he did not stick with any one particular style, no matter how well received, but continued his lifelong commitment to that for which he was expelled from art school: “Independence of aesthetic outlook.”

Overview: 8 Decades

In all of the groups below, click images to enlarge; some allow scrolling within group.

Student Work, 1920’s

Done in his junior year at Pratt Institute, at age 18, these studies are simple and straightforward, rendered in strong impasto technique, yet sensitive enough to show, for instance, a slight cataract in the wall-eyed gaze of an elderly woman model, as in “Woman in Black,” 1927, or rouge on a cheek, and the transparency of a lace shawl, as in “Copper Girl,” also 1927. He had not yet thought much about composition (“It’s the last thing you get.” he would say later), but the poses are solidly observed and well placed within the rectangle.

WPA

His work for the Federal Arts Project was, at the urging of his friend, Stuart Davis, only for its print division. Davis admired Kainen’s painting, and warned him that WPA paintings were sent to public buildings who knows where, and he’d never see them again. With prints, he’d still have the plates and the work wouldn’t be lost. In this period, he gravitated toward three main subjects: Disaster scenes, allegories, and street, or genre scenes.

Disaster Scenes, 1930’s

In the mid 1930’s Kainen painted disaster scenes with bold shapes, and rich colors. In “Tenement Fire,” 1934 the flames, hoses, jets of water, and dangerously leaning buildings evoke calamity. The treatment is not so much expressionist as his own brand of exaggerated forms, which also appear in “Disaster at Sea,” 1934, and “Flood,” 1935, where an anthropomorphized tree gestures helplessly amid the billows. “Invasion,” 1936, in response to the Spanish Civil War, is an invented jumble of cacophonous shapes, made more disturbing by conflicting, opposite colors of orange and green, with gas-masks suggesting death’s heads.

Allegories, Late 1930’s, Early 1940’s

Kainen was remarkably well-read (at 17, he was in charge of the classics section of Brentano’s book store) and very often referred to titles and characters from literature. In “Blake’s Angel”, 1940, an androgynous angel guides the hand of the poet, William Blake. “Young Man’s Fancy,” 1939, vignettes the tempestuous dreams of youth.

 New York Genre Scenes, Late 1930’s

In these days, Kainen believed strongly in an art that ordinary, working people could appreciate, even though they had “been miseducated by magazine covers, illustrations, calendar covers, five-and-ten-cent-store etchings and other pictorial commodities” and so, while this period could be called Social Realism, it was not a strident critique of social conditions, or a glorification of the proletariat as some WPA art was, but carried more the tone of daily life, and was his way of bringing good art to the people. He wanted an every-day image, but also a lasting, timeless vision, and so rarely used what he thought would be distracting topical, or local references, such as real names in signs. For instance, the number, “20” appears in “Hot Dog Cart,” 1938, but all other letters and numbers are reduced to shapes. Likewise, in “Barber Shop,” 1939, the letters in signs over store windows are abstracted. The style is deliberately simplified, with shapes and forms bluntly and clearly rendered.

This deliberate pictorial simplicity, when compared to the very small, intimate and tender gouache portrait of Kainen’s fiancée, Bertha, done the same year as Hot Dog Cart, shows his ability to work in whatever style suits the subject. Again, the dead-spit portrait of Louis A. Weber, done a few years later in 1941, is a keen psychological study, the body language and the tension in the facial muscles revealing aspects of the man’s character.