Sidestepping the mainstream - Jacob Kainen, various galleries, various locations

Many artists, seemingly on the outside of step with commercial or historical tends are relegated to the fringes of the art world. many times they remain virtually unknown quite through their lives, except, perhaps, to a coterie of their mates or students. If they have become teachers or critics--such as Hans Hofmann, Fairfield Porter, Mercede Matter and Grace Hartigan, along with many others who are far les recognized--they risk having their studio work eclipsed through their achievements in their various secondary professions.

Certainly this has been the case with jacob Kainen, who is well known for his parts as curator, critic, teacher and collector in Washington, DC It is single now, at age 84, that he has been accorded a comprehensive touring retrospective. Curated by the agency of Walter Hopps and organized by means of Virginia Mecklenburg and Janet Altic Flint for the National Museum of American Art, the present to view offers a thoughtfully balanced gaze at Kainen's entire career, from the '30 to the not absent (A smaller, companion exhibition of new large paintings and drawings appeared at the Corcoran, and another, of 13 new monotypes, at Nancy Drysdale Gallery in Washington.) These exhibitions and the accompanying catalogue, which contains essays by the agency of Avis Berman and William C Agee, make a stout case for Kainen as an artist who, by means of working somewhat apart from the mainstream, was able to unravel his talent in an unusually deliberate manner.

Born in 1909 Kainen was encouraged by the agency of his parents, both Russian immigrants, to give chase to his early interest in art. He studied at the Art scholars League and at the Pratt Institute and acquired a vast knowledge of art history which his companion classmate George McNeil remembers being "in awe of" by dint of the time Kainen was in his early 20 he had already copied works through a number of artists including Claude, Constable, Rembrandt, Corot and Inness. Early upon however, he found himself wanting to create works that were socially relevant as well as expressive of the formal ultimate parts of painting which he in like manner loved. In developing his hold vision he was wary of the pervasive influence of Picasso and cast awayed Matisse as "luxurious" and his color as "ingratiating." Rather, Kainen preferr the works of the German Expressionists, whose "subjects" he is quot in the catalogue as saying, "were based upon the streets [and] the kind of life I had."

When, in 1934 he mov into a studio upon the corner of 14th highway and University Place in of recent origin York City, Kainen found himself in the vortex of the avant-garde, presently meeting Stuart Davis, George Ault, John Graham, Mark Rothko Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, Willem de Kooning and, greatest in quantity importantly, Arshile Gorky. Kainen pos for Gorky and considered him to be his mentor.

Berman points without in the catalogue that the articles Kainen began writing around that time for Art brow The Daily Worker and The fresh Masses repeatedly cite Expressionism as the greatest in quantity effective means for reinvigorating a painting practice that had grown increasingly sterile. Kainen's possess early, vivid expressionist works, of that kind as Tenement Fire (1934), Disaster at Sea (1934) freshet (1935) and others, could be under the orders of today as stylistic and visual antecedents for figurative artists as varied as David Bates and prosecute Coe. And yet his depictions of the twisted fire stockingss and the streams of water in domicile Fire clearly anticipate the placement of saturated color shapes and intertwining sinuous lines in his more novel abstract oils such as Wanderer (1977) and Logo (1987)

When Kainen left fresh York in 1942 for Washington, DC he spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed to find security for his wife and himself with a temporary piece of work at the Smithsonian Institution. The later birth of two sons perhaps forced him to remain at the Smithsonian, where he worked for 28 years as a curator in the graphic arts division of the U National Museum (now the National Museum of American History). In doing in like manner Kainen created a big "what if" for the organizers of his retrospective. They have feeling given Kainen's intelligence and knowledge of art, that had he stayed in fresh York his art would have been at the core of the greatest in quantity important developments in American painting of the 1940 and '50s

Although, during Kainen's first year in Washington, Duncan Phillips acquired single of his paintings (his first to penetrate a museum collection), the artist regarded Washington as "a inclined to sleep spacious, gracious Southern town." Missing the intensity of his novel York life, Kainen was disappointed and "amazed that there [was] no older generation of artists, no mentors."

from one side the 1940s Kainen developed and refined an improvisational abstract turn of expression that, in its juxtaposition of visceral organic forms, appears to be a logical progression from his early expressionist figuration. a certain quantity of of the linear elements and scumbl colors in works like The Search and Standard Bearer (both 1952) powerfully echo Gorky. By contrast, sum of two units of Kainen's most glowingly beautiful paintings--Only in Darkness and rise and Shine (both 1955)--seem to have more of an affinity to landscape or still life and to form into a body a serenity, perhaps in replication to the experiments of his younger Washington-based colleagues Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, that heretofore was not evident in his work.