Talisman Roses
Walt Kuhn
WALT KUHN, 1935. OIL ON CANVAS.
A boy from the Brooklyn docks, working at a bicycle repair shop at the turn of the 20th century, set off for California with sixty dollars in his pocket and the dream to create art. Once there, he travelled to Europe and traversed the continent, exploring the fledgling artistic movements and finding himself as an early American voyeur to modernism. Bringing this movement back to his native New York, Kuhn worked to establish a school of American Modernism and in 1913, organised the legendary Armoury Show which established the United States as a consequential player in the new artistic world. Yet as he aged, Kuhn came to the question his loyalty to the modernism he had championed, and found himself between worlds, adrift in the seas he himself had planted. While his earlier work depicted performers, dancers, circus acts and vaudeville characters, his later work came to focus on still lives. There is something in the flowers, their droops and springs, the curves and sharp edges that still carries something of the performer in them. In his moments of calmness, Kuhn still found a part of the energetic, young man seeking new life and experiences.