Walt Kuhn

Green Apples with Gray Curtain, 1943

oil on canvas

25 x 30 in.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Hope

Learn More

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Walter (Walt) Kuhn lived most of his life in Manhattan.  He had a brief art education at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, but was mainly self-taught.  Kuhn began his career as a cartoonist before sailing to Europe where he studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris and the Royal Bavarian Academy in Munich. Upon returning to America, he set up a studio in New York City.  He became part of a group of artists determined to break away from the constraints of the National Academy of Design and helped organize the 1910 Exhibition of Independent Artists.  Kuhn was also a founding member of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors who became the organizers of the 1913 Armory Show. In the 1920s, Kuhn was involved with show business and wrote and directed vaudeville acts and designed costumes.  The actors, actresses, showgirls and clowns were the inspiration for the paintings that became the source of Kuhn’s fame as an artist.  Although Kuhn is best known for his paintings of these performers, he also created notable still lifes and landscapes.

The 1913 Armory show introduced Kuhn to the work of the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne.  Green Apples with Gray Curtain shares with Cézanne’s still lifes the dramatization of commonplace objects in a subtly complex composition.  Kuhn transformed a nearly haphazard arrangement of apples into a taut, balanced design in which the solidly painted apples take on an almost classical dignity.  Kuhn reported that color and tonal relationships were difficult for him to achieve, but in this composition he attained a poetic harmony, in which the apples’ tart, fresh greenness glows against a warm, dark background.

Reference

Philip Rhys Adams.  Walt Kuhn, Painter: His Life and Work, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978. ISBN-13: 978-0814202586