Jonah Kinigstein

Last updated

Jonah Kinigstein
Born (1923-06-26) June 26, 1923 (age 100)
New York City, New York, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Known forPainter, cartoonist
MovementExpressionism

Jonah Kinigstein (born June 26, 1923) is an American artist known for his Expressionist paintings.

Contents

Early life and education

Kinigstein was born on June 26, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York City. [1] [2] [3] [4] His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland. [4] As a teenager, he would use chalk to make sidewalk art. [4] At times he worked with his father, a house painter. [4]

After high school, he attended Cooper Union. [4] [5] Before he graduated, he was drafted into the army during World War II, where he served in a photo topography unit. [4]

Art career

After being discharged from the army, he moved to Paris, where he attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. [4] [5] He exhibited at the Galerie Huit. [6]

He later moved back to Manhattan. [4] The rise of abstract expressionism and the loss in popularity in figurative art prevent Kinigstein from being able to paint for a living. [4] He worked in commercial art, where he designed Bloomingdale's first collectible shopping bag in 1961. [4] He also began drawing political cartoons criticizing abstract expressionism and the figures in the art world promoting it. [4]

Kinigstein continued to paint for himself. He dubbed his style "figurative expressionism", and his painting frequently depict distorted figures in front of surreal backgrounds. [4] At age 99, he continues to paint for two or three hours a day in his home. [4]

Kinigstein's work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, [7] the Smithsonian American Art Museum, [2] and the Whitney Museum of American Art. [8]

Personal life

Kinigstein has been married twice and has two children. [4] His second wife is Eileen Muken Kinigstein. [4] Kinigstein turned 100 in June 2023. [9]

Awards

He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship as well as a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. [10]

Publications

In 2014, a book of his cartoons entitled The Emperor's New Clothes: The Tower of Babel in the "Art" World was published by Fantagraphics Underground. [4] [11]

In 2022, Unrepentant Artist: The Paintings of Jonah Kinigstein was published. [4] [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abstract expressionism</span> American post–World War II art movement

Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the immediate aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the epicenter of this movement, included such artists as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning and Theodoros Stamos among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Diebenkorn</span> American painter and printmaker

Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elaine de Kooning</span> American expressionist painter (1918–1988)

Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Color field</span> Art movement

Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elmer Bischoff</span> American painter

Elmer Nelson Bischoff was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way back to figurative art.

Neo-expressionism is a style of late modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called Transavantgarde, Junge Wilde or Neue Wilden. It is characterized by intense subjectivity and rough handling of materials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reginald Pollack</span> American painter

Reginald Murray Pollack was an American painter known for metaphorical and theme based works of art. He was also a veteran of World War II having served in the Pacific Theater of Operations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethel Schwabacher</span> American painter

Ethel Kremer Schwabacher was an influential abstract expressionist painter, represented by the Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a protégé and first biographer of Arshile Gorky, and friends with many of the prominent painters of New York at that time, including Willem de Kooning, Richard Pousette-Dart, Kenzo Okada, and José Guerrero. She was also the author of a monograph on the artist John Charles Ford and a memoir, "Hungry for Light".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Mitchell</span> American painter (1925–1992)

Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of her career.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lyrical abstraction</span> Art movement

Lyrical abstraction is either of two related but distinct trends in Post-war Modernist painting:

The Bay Area Figurative Movement was a mid-20th Century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s.

Harvey Dinnerstein was an American figurative artist and educator. A draftsman and painter in the realistic tradition, his work included genre paintings, contemporary narratives, complex figurative compositions, portraits, and intimate images of his family and friends.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Zajac</span> American sculptor

Jack Zajac is a Californian West Coast artist who has been concerned with the “Romantic Surrealist tradition”.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York Figurative Expressionism</span>

New York Figurative Expressionism is a visual arts movement and a branch of American Figurative Expressionism. Though the movement dates to the 1930s, it was not formally classified as "figurative expressionism" until the term arose as a counter-distinction to the New York–based postwar movement known as Abstract Expressionism.

<i>Little Big Painting</i> Painting by Roy Lichtenstein

Little Big Painting is a 1965 oil and Magna on canvas pop art painting by Roy Lichtenstein. It is part of the Brushstrokes series of artworks that include several paintings and sculptures. It is located at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. As with all of his Brushstrokes works, it is in part a satirical response to the gestural painting of abstract expressionism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irving Kriesberg</span> American painter, sculptor, educator, author, and filmmaker

Irving Kriesberg was an American painter, sculptor, educator, author, and filmmaker, whose work combined elements of Abstract Expressionism with representational human, animal, and humanoid forms. Because Kriesberg blended formalist elements with figurative forms he is often considered to be a Figurative Expressionist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Figurative Expressionism</span> American art movement

American Figurative Expressionism is a 20th-century visual art style or movement that first took hold in Boston, and later spread throughout the United States. Critics dating back to the origins of Expressionism have often found it hard to define. One description, however, classifies it as a Humanist philosophy, since it is human-centered and rationalist. Its formal approach to the handling of paint and space is often considered a defining feature, too, as is its radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure.

Julius Hatofsky was an American painter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ezio Martinelli</span> American painter

Ezio Martinelli was an American artist who belonged to the New York School Abstract Expressionist artists, a leading art movement of the post-World War II era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfred Russell (artist)</span> American painter

Alfred Russell was an artist who was a member of the early New York school of Abstract Expressionism. He exhibited in Paris and New York along with such well known painters as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. Later in life, Russell, disillusioned with abstraction, turned to figurative painting, with inspiration from the classical world.

References

  1. Who's Who in the World. Marquis Who's Who. 1970. p. 519. ISBN   9780837911014 . Retrieved February 19, 2023.
  2. 1 2 "Jonah Kinigstein". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
  3. Young America 1957. Whitney Museum of American Art. 1957. p. 45. Retrieved September 15, 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Schuerman, Matthew (January 1, 2023). "This artist stayed figurative when art went abstract — he's finally recognized, at 99". NPR. Retrieved January 3, 2023.
  5. 1 2 "Jonah Kinigstein". AskArt. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
  6. "Galerie Huit American Artists in Paris 1950-52 Catalog". Worthpoint. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
  7. "Jonah Kinigstein MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
  8. "Jonah Kinigstein". Whitney Museum of American Art. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
  9. "Meet the artist who just turned 100 years old — and is finally having his moment". NPR. Retrieved July 22, 2023.
  10. "Jonah Kinigstein". National Academy of Design. Retrieved September 2, 2022.
  11. Kinigstein, Jonah (2014). The Emperor's new clothes : the Tower of Babel in the "art" world. Seattle, Washington: Fantagraphics.
  12. Kinigstein, Jonah (2022). Unrepentant artist : the paintings of Jonah Kinigstein. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. ISBN   9781683965411.