A unique look at the evolution of modern art in America, from art historian and eminent former curator of the Chicago Art Institute Katharine Kuh, a key figure in opening America+s eyes to contemporary art. -Any artist worth his salt is in advance of his time,+ writes Katharine Kuh. Picasso, Duchamp, LŽger, Mir—, Braque, Chagall, Klee, Calder, Davis, Hopper, Weston, Rothko, Arensberg, Dale, Philips. These are just a few of the artists, photographers, and collectors Katharine Kuh knew and worked with during her long career. One of America+s pivotal forces in the arts for over four decades, she began with her own gallery in Chicago in the early 1930s. To sell contemporary art in post-Depression America was almost suicidal, but with guts and gumption Kuh survived. In 1954, the Chicago Art Institute named her its first curator of modern art-a position of great prestige. Over the next 26 years, scouring the world, she acquired some of the most famous pieces in the institute+s collection, and formed close relationships with the artists themselves. Here she gives us insights into their personal lives, their creative influences, and the way they worked. After her death in 1998, noted art historian Avis Berman, Kuh+s literary executor, selected her key writings for this book.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by James LordThis love affair provides for those who care about art and artists a piercing, passionate glimpse of creative activity in America during the first half of the 20th century. Kuh (1904–1994) saw everything, knew everybody, went everywhere and in the miraculous lucidity of her old, old age still had the wit and discernment to tell the story of her vision, knowledge and travels. It is, of course, a very personal tale. The raison d'être of memoirs is not merely to relate experience but also to reveal the personality of the author. Thus, Kuh discloses how and why art became, as it were, the very backbone of her physical and spiritual adventure. It required exceptional courage and intellectual discipline. The revelations are aided and abetted, so to speak, by Kuh's friend, admirer and accomplice, Avis Berman, who edited and completed the manuscript after the author's death, at 89, and who disclosed vital information that Kuh's reticence would have set aside, describing, for example, details of the love affairs which contributed essential elements to the passion of art.Passionate as it indeed is, this around-the-art-world voyage invited mainly the happy few as fellow passengers. And Kuh possessed the resilient temperament enabling her to sail audaciously along when the happy few were very few. Almost all of her professional and emotional life was spent in Chicago, the pivotal center of the aesthetic doldrums then prevailing in America's cultural badlands. New York was artistically far more exciting, but Katharine was determined to create excitement within spitting distance of the stockyards.She opened her own gallery there in 1935, the nadir of the Great Depression, when even in New York it was difficult to give away a drawing by, say, Bonnard. Nonetheless, the gallery prevailed, introducing unheard of and unwelcome artists to Chicago, where a handful of prescient adventurers were prepared to pay a pittance for pictures their neighbors considered evidence of madness. Kuh's courage was rewarded when she was appointed to the prestigious post of curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, a museum which her sharp eye enriched with fine examples of avant-garde modernism.The love affair with the art of her time came fully into its own after WWII, when the enamored connoisseur developed close friendships with the artists, collectors and curators whom she had intimate cause to admire. The larger part of her autobiography is an account of her devotion to these individuals, almost all of them celebrated today: Brancusi, Mies van der Rohe, V.W. van Gogh, Rothko, Clyfford Sti·ll, Tobey, Berenson, Albers, Léger, Franz Kline et al. Her reminiscences vividly draw the reader into a deep sympathy for her love affair. Succinctly written, it is a fine memorial to a memorable journey.James Lord is the author of Picasso and Dora, Six Exceptional Women and, most recently, Mythic Giacometti, all published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Visionary gallery owners and curators were essential to bringing radical works of modern art before a recalcitrant public. Born in St. Louis in 1904, and inspired by the innovative art historian Alfred Barr, Katharine Kuh valiantly opened a gallery in Chicago to show the likes of Klee and Kandinsky. Kuh went on to become the first curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago and art critic for the Saturday Review. So full was her life, she didn't start writing her memoirs until she was 87 and then died before completing the project. Berman has done a superb job of tying up loose ends and in his moving introduction reveals Kuh's struggles with polio and the many dimensions of her impressive life. Kuh herself is scintillating, incisive, and elegantly offhanded as she relates eye-opening anecdotes about her seminal curatorial adventures. She focuses most on the artists she knew best, astutely assessing both temperaments and aesthetics as she portrays, with rare intimacy and insight, more than a dozen brilliant artists, including Duchamp, Rothko, and Hopper. Kuh's evocative, engaging, and unique reflections enrich the stirring story of modern art and introduce readers to a refined and unstinting arts advocate who significantly enriched American culture. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Affair to Remember,
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This review is from: My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator (Hardcover)
Those interested in American art of the last century will find great pleasure in reading this book. Chicago and New York are the centers from which Katharine Kuh radiated. As a museum curator, art dealer, and published critic, she was personally close to many of the modern masters. In this book, she provides short but telling stories about their work and lives. I especially liked the chapters on Rothko, Tobey and Noguchi.
Disparate side characters, such as Judge Learned Hand and LBJ, pop up and add further to the value of Ms. Kuh's memoir. Avis Berman has done a great service to all those interested in the history of twentieth century American art by completing the memoirs of Katharine Kuh. The author's reflections have been preserved in a form, while still true to the author, that is likely better than had the elderly Ms. Kuh herself remained alive to complete the job. Notes to the text and a more complete description of Katharine Kuh's personal background are some of the very much-appreciated work accomplished by Ms. Berman.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Back in the day, and what a day,
By
This review is from: My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator (Hardcover)
As a general reader with an appreciation for art, I loved MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MODERN ART. It is a vital and highly readable document of one of the most important eras in art history.
Katharine Kuh (1904 - 1994) was a gallery owner, then curator, then art critic (Saturday Review) and in the course of her long career, she came to know the international movers and shakers. Many came to trust her and call her their friend and shared their private lives and ideas about art with her. She outlived just about all who parade across her pages--each chapter profiles a different artist or collector--and had the luxury of reflection at the end of her life to select what about each personage mattered most. For example, though she opens the chapter on Mark Rothko with the tragedy of his 1970 suicide, that's not how she wants him remembered and thus her story emphasizes what he was like twenty years before as he struck his flow. The chapter on world-class collector Bernard Berenson seems anomalous at first--his heart was pre-Modern--but in many ways the story of such a man living in the heart of the Modern era is quite revealing. That is the one chapter where the very private Kuh allows for some self revelation as well. The portraits of the lights like Brancusi, Hopper, Noguchi and Kline, to name a few, are priceless, and they offer Kuh a chance to discuss a number of issues, including the dynamics of cultivating collectors in hopes of donations to museums, government interference, general public taste, fakes, curating a retrospective exhibit, and artists' estates. Though she keeps the attention on the artists, Kuh comes through as a very interesting person, one who chose to go against the conventional choices for women of her time. Avis Berman, who edited and completed the book posthumously, has kept Kuh's extraordinary voice intact without a quiver.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Provides a moving memoir,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator (Hardcover)
In the 1930s interest in modern art was low - but Katharine Kuh opened a gallery in Chicago anyway, exhibiting many then-obscure artists form Paul Klee to Ansel Adams and Marc Chagall. Her passion for modern art fostered their careers and led to a world-wide revitalization of interest, documented here in a blend of modern art history and autobiography. Her friend Avis Berman, a art historian, edited her writings for this book after Kuh's death: it provides a moving memoir of a life in the art world at a time when her artists' visionary works weren't widely recognized.
Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch
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