Note
1) The following Kainen lengthy biographic materials are provided by
Askart.com:
"The
following obituary of the artist is from http://washingtonpost.com (March 19,
2001):
A Moving Life in Art
The
art books of the future will have to be fairly thick before they get to Jacob
Kainen, who may not have been this city's greatest painter. Still, Washington
feels different, cast adrift, now that he is gone.
Kainen,
in the studio, was subtle, serious, diligent and idiosyncratic, but art history
is ruthless, and this may not be enough. Perhaps he knew too much.
The
largeness of his mind may well have worked against him. His many ways of thinking
made his pictures feel ambiguous, insufficiently clear-cut. His art was often
muted by reconsiderations. His aesthetic innovations came a beat or two too
late. Flash was not his thing.
His
wife, Ruth, said he died of a heart attack in a matter of seconds yesterday
morning as he was getting dressed to go to his studio. He was 91. Posterity is
stingy. Only a few artists will be remembered as key figures. Kainen worked
with many, but perhaps he wasn't really one himself.
Except
in Washington. Among the elders of our art world his status was immense.
In the national museums he did so much to build, in the white studio in
Kensington where he painted every day, among connoisseurs of prints, or, late
in his long life, among other art collectors, he carried the authority of a
patriarch, a sage.
You
caught something of his specialness when you watched him look at pictures. He
always did so deeply, never merely glanced, for he could curate art, and make
it, and write learnedly about it. He interrogated objects with these
interlocking skills.
This
was rare enough. Even rarer was the way he moored us to the past.
In
the bitter 1930's, when Greenwich Village leftists made art go proletarian,
Kainen had been one of them. He'd published small cartoons in the "Daily
Worker." This later got him into trouble. He'd painted stevedores, gaunt
miners, the cloth-capped unemployed.
Much
later one might see him, natty in black tie, easy in the company of the wealthy
givers to the National Gallery of Art. But Kainen, in the '30's, was as broke
as his subjects. For $24 a week he'd joined the WPA.
He
was also a participant when a newer kind of painting, freer, more abstract,
began brewing in Manhattan. The abstract expressionist manner wasn't brewed in
bars.
Willem
de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko, the founders of the style, didn't
have the money for bars. They hung out in all-night cafeterias, and as they
argued art for hours over thick white mugs of coffee, Kainen had been one of
them, accepted as a peer.
Gorky
did his portrait in 1934.
Washington,
in those days, was a city in the sticks. Kainen helped to make it the art town
it is now. He came here, for the money, during World War II.
By
1942, Kainen, in his scholar mode, already knew so much about printmaking's
technologies--about aquatint and drypoint, paper types and etcher's ink--that
he was hired as a specialist by the Smithsonian Institution.
In
the course of his employment there he helped to build two surveys of the
history of printmaking, the first for the U.S. National Museum (now the
National Museum of Natural History), the second for the National Collection of
Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum). And throughout his
curatorial years he had not one career, but two.
"He
worked at the museum until 5:15; grabbed a quick supper, and by 6 o'clock was
at his unheated studio at 3140 M Street," wrote historian Avis Berman in a
catalogue accompanying the Kainen retrospective arranged by the Smithsonian in
1993. "He painted until 10 or 11 o'clock, then returned home to do some
writing or museum research until 2 a.m. because the Smithsonian would not allow
him to do scholarly writing on government time. Kainen adhered to this routine
for decades."
This
city's leafy landscape soon crept into his pictures. He was especially
attracted to the curious pointed turrets that the row houses he found here wore
jauntily, like caps.
Most
Washingtonians in those days couldn't understand his art. Its depictions were
too simplified, its colors too peculiar, its spirit too advanced. But there
were a few exceptions, and one was Duncan Phillips, who for his family's museum
bought a Kainen streetscape in 1942.
When
Washington began producing art that felt distinctly new, Kainen helped it
happen.
He
was present at the birth of the Washington Color School--though perhaps as an
uncle rather than a father.
The
Washington color painters--Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas
Downing, Alma Thomas and the others--made big, amazing objects. Often they
adhered to rigorous geometries, hard-edged stripes, concentric circles. They
made wholly abstract art.
Kainen
might have joined them, had he been a joiner, but he never turned to staining
or gave up layered colors or abandoned figuration as the color painters did.
Instead he served them in another role--as instructor and exemplar.
"Jacob
was a pro," Noland remembered. "He wasn't just a teacher. He was a
real artist, a New York artist."
He
was also a collector.
He
began collecting art at age 7--well, not art exactly, but the little reproductions
that were published every Sunday in the rotogravure section of Jewish Daily
Forward.
His
parents, Russian immigrants, had given him a childhood in which culture was
appreciated, erudition valued, industry expected. He printed his first drypoint
through the rollers of his mother's washing machine. He entered high school at
12.
Some
people regard art as a form of self-expression. Kainen wasn't one. Soul was not
enough. Art required learning. As a stock boy at Brentano's he read all the art
books in the store (in those days there weren't many). When he discovered the
Metropolitan Museum of Art he approached it as assiduously. He didn't merely
look, he made copies of the paintings--by Claude Lorrain, Corot and
Rembrandt--hanging on the walls.
He
knew studio practice, theory, and the byways of art history. His sharp eye had
been sharpened by many years of study in the print rooms of museums, and you
sensed his erudition when you looked at what he bought
In
1985, a strong historical exhibit--"German Expressionist Prints From the
Collection of Ruth and Jacob Kainen"--opened to the public at the National
Gallery of Art. The 90 pictures on display were probably were worth millions.
One Ernst Kirchner lithograph had already sold at auction for $135,894, and there
were more than 20 Kirchners in the Kainens' focused show.
The
German artists Kainen bought did not make pretty pictures. They sought the
troubling, the coarse. When museum folk, investors, dealers and collectors
began to recognize, belatedly, just how much German expressionism had gone into
abstract expressionism, they found Jacob Kainen had known it all along.
Ruth
Cole Kainen had known it, too. They had met in 1968 at a luncheon at the
Woman's National Democratic Club. Somehow Kirchner's name had come up in
conversation, and when he started to explain just who Kirchner was, she
replied, with some annoyance, that she already owned his art.
They
were married a year later. Ruth became his champion, his adviser, his companion
in collecting, the key promoter of his art.
They
gave their best works to the National Gallery--the third Washington museum
enriched by his eye.
The
Red Scare almost got Jacob Kainen.
Between
1948 and 1954, he was investigated closely. "Kainen," writes Berman,
"was uncomfortably familiar with the outcome of such interrogations
because one of his brothers, a meteorologist at the Department of Commerce who
had never been politically active, was dismissed from his job for having signed
a political petition in the early 1930's. Kainen, who had also signed it, knew
that it was only a matter of time before his own future would be jeopardized.”
Soon
enough it was. He was called up before the Smithsonian's loyalty board, and
then the civil service's. Had he not presented three commendation letters from
J. Edgar Hoover (during World War II, he had helped the FBI analyze the inks of
Nazi propaganda), Kainen would probably have lost his curatorial job.
In
retrospect, this episode seems utterly preposterous. If anyone in Washington
was less a threat than Kainen, it's not easy to think who.
Kainen
was no dogmatist. After the Depression, preachiness of any sort vanished from
his pictures. "Idealism," he warned in 1983, "is a snare for the
guileless." In all the years he showed here--and he showed a lot--no party
line controlled the content of his art. (Kainen's works on paper are on view at
Hemphill Fine Arts in Georgetown.)
He
was always a contrarian. Voguish trends annoyed him. When abstraction was most
fashionable in the 1960's, he stubbornly, characteristically returned to
figuration. When the wheel turned again, and abstraction lost its chic, Kainen
began making big, clean-cut abstractions. In the long and fervent 20th-century
battle between the representational and the nonobjective, he fought with courage
on both sides.
And
with tenderness as well. Tender was one of his favorite adjectives. Blatancy
distressed him. He loved painting, he once wrote, for "its tenderness, its
opacities and translucencies, its reserves and contrasts, its magical charge of
color."
"Magical,"
for Kainen, was another term of praise. When depicting mundane subjects--fire
escapes or street signs--he made them seem enchanted. When presenting abstract
forms--squares or grids or ovals--he did something as mysterious. He made those
chill shapes seem humane.
His
oils, toward the end, sold for as much as $50,000 each, but you never got the
sense he was in it for the money.
Next
time you see a Kainen, try peering past the colors. See if you can glimpse
there the spirit of the man, and how much he revered art."
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Note 2) As the above Washington Post article
observed: "
His oils, toward the end, sold for as much as $50,000 each, but you never got
the sense he was in it for the money." In addition, the foregoing
article, the letter of Mrs. Kainen, of March 25, 1991, particularly with
regard to the exhibition of this auction painting “Man Astride a Chair,” at
both the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Phillips collection and its impeccable
provenance, starting with the Phillips Collection and Dorothy Phillips and
her discussion of the source and technique of this auction painting and where
it fits in with Kainen’s oeuvre, together with the following auction records, provide support for a
conclusion that the above presale estimate of $4,000-$8,000 is reasonable and
justifiable. Kainen's
works have rarely appeared at auction. Only
13 of Kainen’s works have been auctioned, per Askart.com, from 1994 to the
present, but all of them are very abstract works, and none of them was a
Kainen work from his late 1950’s-1960’s period and style, of which this
auction painting is a part and representative, have appeared at auction. The
highest auction price ever paid for a Kainen work was an abstract painting,
which sold for $4,100 on 9/14/2007 at this auction house, Sloans &
Kenyon. Another abstract painting sold for
$4,030 on 11/12/201.
The auction prices for these
Kainen abstract paintings are very much lower than the $50,000 prices Kainen
was obtaining for his oil paintings, a price which may be reached as the current
owners of Kainen's work die and some of his works of the 1950’s -1960’s
appear at auction:
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