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Jacob Kainen Winter Night, 1980 oil on canvas 48 x 40 in. “However abstract the forms and colors seem, they should somehow give off an aura of human experience, particularly that of the lonely Faustian thinker combining wisdom and magic. The images should seem serene at first, then troubling, then serene again.”1 Jacob Kainen, 1973 Jacob Kainen’s career could be used as an object lesson in how not to make a reputation in the art world. As a young painter in New York in the 1930s, he enjoyed the friendship and intellectual stimulation of artists like Milton Avery, Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky, but in 1942 financial pressures led him to accept a position as curator of graphic arts at the Smithsonian Institution and he moved to Washington, a town isolated from the artistic stimuli of New York. As he later recalled, “What I found particularly conspicuous, like a missing tooth, was the lack of an older generation of ambitious artists, that we, the upcoming generation, could look up to and cross swords with.”2 Besides living in an artistic low-pressure zone, Kainen was in an anomalous position as an artist who had become a print curator. A curator collects, studies, and may even commission works of art, but seldom produces them on a professional level. In this unfavorable setting Kainen continued to paint and played an active role in the emergence of a livelier artistic scene in the Washington of the 1960s. As an artist however, he remained on his own. It is typical of his independence that just as the color field paintings of his friends Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis were drawing national attention to Washington as an art center, Kainen was turning from abstraction to a figurative style, which he would pursue for the rest of the decade. Retiring from the Smithsonian in 1970 Kainen was free to give undivided attention to his own art, and in the next three decades produced what is probably the most important work of his career. The sensitivity to color in these paintings allies them to the Washington color school, but Kainen never adopted the stained-canvas technique of Louis and Noland. In its play of soft-edged areas of flat color it actually has more affinities with the late work of Milton Avery (catalogue no. 2). No artist should be expected to tailor his painting style to a statement he made about it seven years earlier, but all the same it is interesting to examine Winter Night in the light of the quotation that heads this entry. Certainly Winter Night is serene enough on the surface, with its harmonious shades of orange-pink, violet-gray, and blue, and its composition echoing the rectangle of the canvas. Yet on closer inspection some nagging questions begin to raise their heads. That central rectangle: The four panes in a frame are almost a cartoon cliché for a window. Should we see ourselves looking out into winter, or in from night to a lighted interior? Kainen takes care to push us away from such a literal reading. The central vertical of the “window sash” meets its horizontal partner not in a carpentered miter joint but with the hint of one rope twisting around another. As for the horizontal member, it sends misty projections beyond the window frame to the edges of the canvas. But the issue persists. With Avery one knows that somewhere in the most abstract painting a subject can be found; with Louis or Noland one knows that such a reading would be perverse. Kainen keeps us wondering. If we ignore the issue of representation, the painting still has some formal quirks to tease us with. The orderly system of verticals and horizontals is jarred by the single most vibrant element in the picture: the bar askew at the left. The white rectangle sits high in its gray frame, leaving a narrower margin at the top than at the sides; just the way every good print curator knows a mat should not go around a picture. But Kainen makes these “mistakes” work, using the horizontal orange bar at the top of the painting to hold the skewed vertical in balance and add weight to the slender upper margin of the gray “frame.” After all, our first impression was the right one. It is a harmonious painting. Timothy Riggs |