Polly KraftAmerican Woman Artist Society Doyenne Polly Kraft Large Watercolor Painting, 1984

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Polly Kraft
American (1928-2017)
Umbrella Still Life (1984)
watercolor on paper
signed lower right
29 1/2 x 41 1/2 inches
… Read more Polly Kraft
American (1928-2017)
Umbrella Still Life (1984)
watercolor on paper
signed lower right
29 1/2 x 41 1/2 inches
frame dimensions: 33 x 45 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches, wood frame with acrylic glazing

Provenance: East Hampton Collection
Fischbach Art Gallery New York, NY label affixed verso

Polly Kraft, Known for painting portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes, realist artist Polly Kraft worked in both watercolor and oil. She had the ability to translate a split second glance into a memorable painting.a painter who turned quotidian objects and scenes — a sliced red apple still bearing its seeds, an unmade bed cluttered with mail, a filleted fish vibrant even in death — into works of art resonant with meaning, Her son, Mark Stevens is an art critic who with his wife, Annalyn Swan, co-authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “de Kooning: An American Master”
Mrs. Kraft spent a half-century at the center of the Washington establishment as the wife of Joseph Kraft, the syndicated newspaper columnist, and later, after Kraft's death in 1986, of Lloyd Cutler, the high-powered lawyer who was White House counsel to Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Her marriages took her into the thick and thicket of social life in the capital — a world, she once remarked, where "politicians were mixed in with intellectuals, mixed in with academics, mixed in with movie stars." She counted among her friends members of the Kennedy family, former Washington Post chairman and publisher Katharine Graham, former Post executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee and diplomats W. Averell and Pamela Harriman.
Although oft cited as a doyenne of Georgetown hostesses, Mrs. Kraft professed that she relished neither politics nor Washington’s breed of socializing, which at times approached the intensity of a competitive sport.
“When it comes to the poetry of dishevelment, Polly Kraft is one of our more rewarding practitioners,” art critic John Russell wrote in the New York Times in 1981. “She specializes in the domestic pileup — cushions knocked out of shape, books and magazines left askew, hasty departures acted out in verismo style. The point of the paintings lies in the contrast between this archetypal havoc and the order that Mrs. Kraft has imposed upon it.” Classic Americana.
Her paintings, mainly watercolors and oil paintings, appeared at venues including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and Addison/Ripley Fine Art in Washington (she was part of their 40 year retrospective along with
Lou Stovall, Diana Walker, Sam Gilliam and Wolf Kahn, as well Frank Hallam Day, Trevor Young, Isabel Manalo and Dan Treado) and the Fischbach Art Gallery in New York City.
Mrs. Kraft painted and exhibited her portraits, among them renderings of Bradlee and James Wolfensohn, the investment banker who served as president of the World Bank. She also painted landscapes inspired by the vistas at her second home, on the East End of Long Island. Mrs. Kraft’s work was hung in many East End houses, and for years it was exhibited at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton. Mrs. Kraft’s art also was seen at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller on Newtown Lane in East Hampton. One exhibition there was of portraits of her friends, among them the author Peter Matthiessen, the film and stage director Gene Saks, and the film director Sidney Lumet with his wife, Mary (Piedy) Lumet.Mrs. Kraft’s artwork exuded a timelessness not often celebrated in Washington, a city of transients where fortunes shift with each incoming presidential administration. Arts critic Ferdinand Protzman, writing in The Post, likened her work to the poetry of William Carlos Williams, who also found meaning in everyday things: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow,” the poet wrote, “glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.” See less