Walt Kuhn - Personal Background Information

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 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" 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.

Philip Rhys Adams wrote: "There is very little Impressionism or Cubism in 'Polo Game' and quite a bit of Raoul Dufy. There were two oils by Dufy in the Armory Show, both dating from his best "fauve" period of 1909, and Kuhn may have seen many more in Paris. With its horizontal bands and frieze of fluttering flags instead of a sunrise in the background .... The horses and riders are boldly, clearly drawn, the audience a Prendergast tapestry of color with a few sharply contoured parasols as accents. It is both animated and decorative."

"Only two paintings can be confidently assigned to 1914, and one of them, Polo Game, is his first fully post impressionist arrival. The first record of its exhibition in New York, though it might well have hung along with works by Davies and Jules Pascin at the Macbeth Gallery in the spring of 1916, is the Maynard Walker Gallery showing of "Early Works by Walt Kuhn" in April and May of 1966. John Canaday, in The New York Times , called the exhibition 'a careful selection of early works by this American painter who died in 1949, drawing from his estate.

Kuhn often had trouble deciding just which of several artists he most admired, and his various decisions en route are reflected in some of these pictures. But he was always a strong painter never afraid to declare his loyalties. Filled with collector's items, an exhibition of Kuhn's polo art is also something of a documentation of American painting during its transition from provincialism to internationalism under the impact of the Armory Show.'

John Gruen, in the Herald Tribune, mentioned 'Polo Game' specifically: 'There are fascinating stylistic struggles to be observed in such works as 'Tea! (1923) in which the artist's wife with a lady friend [Brenda] are painted in a mixture of Cubism and German Expressionism, or the 1914 'Polo Game' which combines pure Impressionism with Post-Impressionism.'