Art: I Gotta Be a Showman

Walt Kuhn is a big, rawboned old man. He looks like an upcountry sheriff on a spree, but he is one of the handful of top-ranking painters in the U.S. Last week, Kuhn (rhymes with hewn) was having a one-man show in a Manhattan gallery, and he took the opportunity to speak his mind on the state of modern art.

“It’s gotta stop!” he began. “These young fellows don’t know where the Sam Hill they’re at. It’s true the Museum of Modern Art has contributed to the hilarity of the nation—but at a million dollars a joke. The good painters are never intellectuals, they’re simple people, with one-track minds. Now I myself was past 40 before I painted a decent picture. I was the gauchest thing you ever saw. But I’ve had fun. God, I’ve had more fun! I’ve probably painted three of four masterpieces in my lifetime, while they haven’t done one. Don’t mention any names,” he added, waving his huge hand in the general direction of Europe.

A Good Cook. The oils in Kuhn’s new show were as forceful and unpolished as the man himself. The portraits of friends like “Miss D” (who models for Harper’s Bazaar when she has her clothes on) and circus and vaudeville performers such as Bobby Barry, the white-hatted clown, showed them stiff, direct, and isolated against a dull wall of paint, looking gallerygoers right in the eye. There were paintings of apples that looked almost as round as Cezanne’s, and a crisp turkey lying succulent and helpless in a pan. “I’m a good cook,” Kuhn explained. “I did that one myself. Painted it in 24 hours straight, and then we ate off it for two weeks. It weighed 30 pounds.”

Among the other standouts was a lion head reminiscent of Delacroix. Kuhn said that one started with a painting of two kittens in a basket. “They looked like a couple of gangsters, so I figured I’d better do a lion. My wife reminded me I didn’t know anything about lions, so I went up to the Natural History Museum and they loaned me a lion skull.” One still life consisted of a rib roast on a table. “A fellow who knows the Old Masters will eat that one up,” Kuhn averred. “And a beef picture is a good idea nowadays. It’s news! You see I gotta be a showman. It’s no disgrace to be a showman.”

A Sense of Humor. If it is, Kuhn has led a disgraceful life. Born in Greenwich Village, he got his start as a bicycle racer, graduated to inventing and producing vaudeville acts. At the same time he was studying art and selling comic drawings to magazines. “I covered a million miles of paper,” he remembers. “It took me a long time to learn. But now I can draw a picture with my eyes shut. I’ll prove it to you when I’m not so tired. A young artist ought to make a perfect disease, you know, of drawing everything in sight. He ought to get married—I couldn’t have gotten along without my wife and daughter—and he should be glad he’s not a genius. Geniuses burn out too early and in this business, guts and a sense of humor are the main ingredients.”

At 68, Kuhn is philosophical about his past struggles: “I got my beatings early and I have an awfully tough hide. The fact is I’ve been solvent for only two or three years, but now they buy my pictures as an investment. It’s grotesque. I even have to sell my stuff on installments so the Government won’t get all the money. That’s legal, you know. A Virginia fellow saw a reproduction of a picture of mine and he bought it on the phone for $10,000. But I’m quittin’ anyway. Of course I’m gonna paint, but I’m not gonna let the dealers push me around any more.”

A Pair of Garters. His Manhattan studio on 18th Street has a dusty, comfortable, behind the scenes look; it is littered with circus costumes, antlers, decoy ducks, a trumpet, a mandolin, a pair of pink garters. Photographs of archaic Greek statues share the walls with theater posters, cutouts of full-blown society belles of the ’90s, and shiny dragoon helmets.

“I go to bed early if I want to paint,” Kuhn says. “When I come up here and start in, the weather’s gotta be right, I gotta feel right, and the model’s gotta feel right, too. I don’t do much work from sketches, because unless the thing is there in front of you, you can’t get the discipline. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not a realist; painting is not that easy, it’s not copying. Why, if I do one good picture in a year I’m tickled to death.”

Which of the 14 oils in his show—all done in the past three years—were good ones? “That,” said Kuhn cagily, was for time to decide, “and I don’t mean TIME Magazine.”