Clown with Drum and Jug
Artist
Walt Kuhn
(American, 1877 - 1949)
Date1943
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions12 x 10 in. (30.5 x 25.4 cm)
ClassificationsOil Painting
Credit LineHarriet Russell Stanley Fund
Terms
Object number1948.17
DescriptionKuhn's most famous works fuse the two dominant passions of his life-painting and show business. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he painted a succession of clowns, acrobats, trapeze artists, jugglers, and showgirls and achieved considerable renown despite this limited subject matter. Unlike Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Reginald Marsh, and other artists who depicted cabaret nightlife, Kuhn extracted his sitters from the context of the performance, typically posing them in his studio against a bare monochromatic background. His often bizarre and garish colors mirror the mix of the gaudy and the glamorous in the circus; the uncomfortable poses and awkward expressions of his sitters, who often glare at the viewer from beneath their heavy makeup, reveal the more sordid and melancholy aspects of their occupations. In these portraits of specific but anonymous individuals, Kuhn, like Henri and his followers, tried to capture the essence and personality of the sitter, applying the paint freely and thickly in broad outlines and often mixing colors on the canvas.Kuhn always painted from a live model, but before actually beginning a portrait, he executed numerous preliminary drawings and watercolor sketches, and sometimes small oil sketches. "Clown with Drum" and "Jug" may have been intended as such a study, though no larger oil has been associated with it. (1) Alternately, it may have been one of the many small circus subjects he executed as a sort of painting exercise and as a break from his larger portraits. In fact, as Kuhn's daughter Brenda recalled, he painted "very few large paintings," feeling that "a painting need not be big to be powerful and . . . should be small enough to take in a taxi
cab." (2) His smaller oils exhibit a playful and spontaneous quality similar to that found in his ink drawings and watercolors. The faces are often masklike and caricatured, not as individualized or as studied as those in the larger portraits.
While Kuhn's harsh color combinations elicited many comments-praise as well as censure-many of his pictures, like "Clown with Drum" and "Jug", are monochromatic. The New Britain picture is one of several clowns painted in shades of white, including "Clown With Drum" (1942; Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago) and "White Clown" (1929; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), which caused a critical sensation at a 1929 exhibition of contemporary painting at the newly established Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
MAS
Notes:
1. Clown with Drum and Jug does not appear in the extensive records of the artist's paintings assembled by Kuhn and his wife, Vera (Walt Kuhn, Kuhn Family Papers, and Armory Show records, 1893-1966, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., microfilm, reels D242A-B), nor in Philip Rhys Adams (Walt Kuhn, Painter, 1978), which is based largely on the Kuhns' records.
2. Brenda Kuhn to Lois L. Ice, Assistant Director, NBMAA, August 29, 1966, NBMAA files.
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