My Love Affair With Modern Art: Behind the Scenes With a Legendary Curator
By Katharine Kuh, edited and completed by Avis Berman
Arcade, 314 pages, $27.50
Art can be shocking and baffling as well as transfixing and transforming. With her discerning eye and interpretive mind, Katharine Kuh reveled in the daring inquiries and revelations of modern art, but Chicago, her home base, proved to be aggressively resistant to the work she found so powerful and urgent. Fortunately, her brio was limitless and her sense of mission sure, and Kuh persevered in her efforts to bring modern art to the heartland, ultimately parlaying her passion for art into a life rich in adventure, discovery and accomplishment.
Kuh opened Chicago’s first modern-art gallery, was appointed the first curator of modern art for the Art Institute of Chicago and, after moving to New York, became the art critic for the Saturday Review, a post she held for 19 years. Kuh loved to travel, and she met and befriended many prominent artists. She wrote several books over the course of her splendid career but didn’t find time to commit her personal reminiscences to paper until she was 87. Art historian Avis Berman, a close friend and Kuh’s literary executor, was amazed by the precision of her memories. Kuh came close to completing the manuscript before she died in 1994, trusting Berman to finish the book for her. With “My Love Affair With Modern Art” she has magnanimously fulfilled Kuh’s wish, and the result is a scintillating collection of incisive essays profiling the artists who most intrigued Kuh–artists who just happen to be among the most significant painters and sculptors of the 20th Century.
But before the reader encounters Kuh’s lively and candid authorial voice, Berman does the reader and Kuh a great service: She succinctly profiles Kuh, revealing key facets of her life that Kuh does not divulge. These measured disclosures make Kuh all the more impressive and her modest, even self-deprecating essays all the more compelling.
Born Katharine Woolf in St. Louis in 1904 and distantly related to Leonard Woolf, Katharine was struck with polio as a child. Unable to walk for 10 years, she spent her youth encased in a plaster cast, isolated and lonely. Her father and uncle collected prints and paintings, and encouraged her to study art. But once she was able to walk again–albeit with a limp, because her left leg remained atrophied–she chose to study economics at Vassar College.
Then, on a whim, she signed up for a class on Italian Renaissance art taught by the now-legendary Alfred H. Barr Jr., the future founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. Suddenly she realized that, indeed, art history was her calling. She earned her master’s degree at the University of Chicago and was about to work toward a doctorate at New York University when instead she married George Kuh, a prominent businessman.
Thwarted in her attempts to pursue her interest in art, Katharine Kuh found life as a housewife on the North Shore as confining as the plaster cast that weighed her down as a girl. She left after five years. In 1935, with far more chutzpah than money, she opened a gallery at 540 N. Michigan Ave. and became the first in the region to exhibit the work of such stellar modern artists as Paul Klee, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Fernand Leger, Josef Albers and Joan Miro.
But thanks to what Kuh bluntly describes as Chicago’s “general know-nothingness about contemporary art,” these groundbreaking exhibits were met with outright hostility, even vandalism. Kuh became the target of “art vigilantes” calling themselves Sanity in Art, a group rallied by Chicago Tribune art critic Eleanor Jewett, who also happened to be the cousin of Robert McCormick, the Tribune’s publisher. Vociferously opposed to modernism, Sanity in Art demanded that only American art be shown in Chicago. So obstreperous did the group’s protests become, Kuh was frequently forced to call the police. But as she notes, there was one benefit to Chicago’s contempt for modern art: She was able to buy a Kandinsky at auction for $5.
Kuh is a marvelous writer: arch, knowing and nimble. Her crisp, to-the-point prose is spiked with uncommon observations and arresting opinions. A master of restraint, she sidesteps the personal matters Berman gently unveils, such as the fact that the great love of her life was her boss, and a married man, Daniel Catton Rich, director of the Art Institute. Berman also catalogs the inequities Kuh faced because of her sex. Kuh focuses on the thrill of curatorial sleuthing and zestfully shares juicy inside stories about manipulative collectors, detrimental museum politics and mishaps associated with one of the Art Institute’s most famous works, Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Kuh also writes with vigor about the difference between seeing and looking, the catalysts for and evolution of modern art, and what she believes the mission of art museums should be.
But the most salient aspect of this eye-opening and engaging book is her uncanny ability to concisely portray artists in all their emotional contrariness and creative fervor in finely crafted essays that are at once delectably anecdotal and keenly analytical.
Kuh reveals volumes, for instance, in her pithy account of a day in 1950 when Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought her to the now-iconic Farnsworth House to help deflect the complaints of his outraged client. Kuh describes painters Fernand Leger and Stuart Davis as vividly as any novelist conjures her characters, then glides into a shrewd assessment of their love for jazz and jazz’s enormous influence on modern painting. Whether she’s remembering an angry Clyfford Still, an ebullient Hans Hoffmann, or a reticent Edward Hopper, her perspective is fresh, human and expert.
If there is a reigning figure in Kuh’s pantheon of artists, it is the great abstract painter Mark Rothko. Kuh struggles with the puzzle of his suicide and traces his pervasive influence. She is equally adept at parsing the personalities and artworks of less-familiar figures, such as Alfred Jensen, a painter obsessed with magic squares, and Mark Tobey, an American artist “never fully appreciated in his own country.” Kuh’s tale about working with Vincent van Gogh’s nephew is deeply moving, and her takes on Bernard Berenson, Constantin Brancusi, Franz Kline, Isamu Noguchi, Josef Albers and Jacques Lipchitz are uniquely intimate, sensitive and enlightening.
In sum, Kuh’s witty and reflective reminiscences preserve invaluable chapters in the complex and resonant story of modern art. And how ennobling it is to spend time with a woman of resilience and vision, a writer of clarity and ardor, and an avid and knowledgeable art advocate dedicated to making art an integral part of our lives.
