Jonah Kinigstein, Large Oil Painting Circus Scene Clowns Rediscovered NY Artist Jonah Kinigstein, c. 1950s

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Jonah Kinigstein "Death of a Clown" Large Oil on Board Painting of macabre circus scene with clowns Hand signed lower … Read more Jonah Kinigstein "Death of a Clown" Large Oil on Board Painting of macabre circus scene with clowns Hand signed lower left and signed and titled verso Frame: 55 X 43 Image: 48 X 36 Jonah Kinigstein (b. 1923) is a National Academy artist from Coney Island. An American Postwar & Contemporary painter. He works in a figurative expressionist style. His works are featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Academy of Design, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He lives in New York City. Jonah Kinigstein was trained at Cooper Union Art School, The Grande Chaumiere in Paris; and Belle Arte in Rome. He has been a Fulbright Fellow. He has holdings at MOMA, the Ain Herod Museum in Tel Aviv; Smithsonian; the Albright-Knox Gallery and the Nelson Gallery of Art. He lived and worked in Brooklyn New York. Kinigstein was inducted as an Academician into the National Academy of Design in 1997. Exhibits include: Young Americans at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the National Academy of Arts and Letters; ACA Gallery; Rittenhouse Gallery; the Washington Irving Gallery; and the Pindar Gallery. Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture (CAPS) '59, University of Illinois, Arthur Okamura, Fred Farr, Jonah Kinigstein, Lawrence Calcagno, Reuben Tam and Rico Lebrun. Jonatha Kinigstein attended The Cooper Union and Grand Chaumiere, Paris. He received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome, and has also received awards from the Butler Art Institute; American Academy of Arts and Letters; Silvermine Guild; and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Kinigstein has had solo shows at Galerie Bretau, Paris; Alan Gallery, Grippi Gallery, ACA Gallery, and Pindar Gallery, New York; Siembab Gallery, Boston; Rittenhouse Gallery, Philadelphia; among others. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art; Allentown Art Museum; Albright Art Gallery; Butler Art Institute; and more. He has taught at the Brooklyn Museum and National Academy of Design School of Fine Arts. Born in 1923 in Coney Island, Jonah’s early influences were discovered during visits to the Metropolitan Museum- “When I really saw the old masters, it blew my mind, of course.” He attended Cooper Union for a year before he was drafted into the Army, serving from 1942 – 1945. Soon after, Jonah moved to Paris where he spent time at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, conversing with other aspiring artists, exchanging ideas, exhibiting his work, seeing established artists, and generally soaking up a fertile creative environment. He exhibited in several shows including the Salon D’Automne, Salon de Mai, and the Salon des Moins de Trente Ans, and had one-man shows in the Galerie Breteau and Les Impressions D’Art. After Paris, Jonah moved to Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at the La Schola Di Belles Artes. After a year, he returned to the U.S. and exhibited his paintings at the Downtown Gallery in Manhattan. A classically trained painter whose ambitions were frustrated by the New York art world’s obsession with Abstract Expressionism and the lucrative industry that grew up around it. Like so many painters, he was unable to make a living solely from painting, so he worked in the commercial art world and did freelance illustration and design. Throughout this time, Jonah’s commitment to his own art never wavered, and he continued to paint and occasionally exhibit. He was included in the MoMA show, Summer Exhibition: New Acquisitions; Recent American Prints, 1947–1953; Katherine S. Dreier Bequest; Kuniyoshi and Spencer; Expressionism in Germany; Varieties of Realism along with Alexander Archipenko, Francis Bacon, Balthus, Will Barnet, Leonard Baskin, Eugene Berman, Reg Butler, Lovis Corinth, Andre Derain, Otto Dix, Raoul Dufy, Max Ernst, Lucian Freud, George Grosz, Alexei Jawlensky, Oskar Kokoschka, Roberto Matta, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and more. The most comprehensive collection of paintings by the noted satirist and cartoonist Jonah Kinigstein Unrepentant Artist features over a hundred paintings that “discover the most repulsive absurdities and abnormalities in the world as a whole — in human existence as such” (from Barry Schwabsky’s introduction). Kinigstein’s portrait and landscape paintings and satirical cartoons. An art-world pariah most of his life, he’s become an unlikely star at age 92, with an acclaimed exhibition of his savagely satirical cartoons at the Society of Illustrators in New York and a new book from comics powerhouse Fantagraphics that shares its title, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Tower of Babel in the ‘Art’ World. “ As that name attests, Kinigstein’s work rips into what he sees as the vapidity, pretension and inanity of 20th-century modern art, from institutions like MoMA to gallerists like Ilona Sonnabend to critics like Clement Greenberg. Sacred-cow abstract expressionist artists — Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns – don’t escape his poison pen, either. “I put the cartoons up on walls all over Soho,” he says. “I really gave these people the business. And I got a lot of pushback. Some people wanted to fight with me.” They’d have a tough adversary. Kinigstein was born in the Bronx and raised on East Tremont Avenue in one of the borough’s rougher sections. His family was Jewish, but not especially religious; “we had Passover Seders, things like that,” he says. He studied architecture and painting at Cooper Union, which was still free at the time for deserving students. After serving in the Army as a photographer, Kinigstein bolted for Paris and Rome, where he studied art on a Fulbright scholarship and exhibited his paintings. He was included in the prestigious exhibition Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1955. The exhibition featured works by prominent American artists of the time including artists Josef Albers, Milton Avery, Louise Bourgeois, Stuart Davis, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hoffmann, Robert Motherwell, Georgia O'Keefe, Ben Shahn, Yves Tanguy, and Dorothea Tanning. The exhibition was part of the University of Illinois's Festival of Contemporary Arts. It was a snapshot of the art scene in 1955. Back in the U.S., Kinigstein’s figurative work found a following, until it didn’t; as more diffuse art forms took over, his style fell out of favor among art-world gatekeepers. “There was no interest in figurative art or what I had to say,” he remembers. To support himself, he launched a career in advertising and commercial illustration, drawing and painting on the side. “I’m really a painter. The cartoons came later,” he says. “I had to do something to clear the air.” Eventually, Kinigstein sent his cartoons to Fantagraphics, where they lay in the office of publisher Gary Groth for five years. When Groth finally got around to opening Kinigstein’s mailing tube, he was blown away. “It was savage, contrarian work,” Groth says in the short film that accompanies Kinigstein’s MoCCA exhibition. The cartoons – which draw inspiration from classic satirical cartoonists like William Hogarth, James Gillray, and George Cruickshank — have been collected in a handsome 80-page volume that lands this month. Not everyone in the art world gets darts from Kinigstein. “I never lost interest in Pablo Picasso,” he says. “He was always figurative.” Kinigstein pointed to the packed walls of the Society of Illustrators’ gracious third-floor restaurant, where he spoke with the Forward. In the meantime, Kinigstein seems to be enjoying his belated moment in the sun. He’s even slated to lecture this spring at Parsons the New School for Design, the temple of art education in New York. See less