<i>I want to be known as a painter.</i> <i>You spend your life doing that work.</i> <i>You want it to mean something.</i> <i>The problem for an abstract artist is to get</i> <i>shapes and images that correspond to his feeling.</i> <i>He doesn't quite know what his feeling is, but he knows when it's there or not.</i> Jacob Kainen is one of these unsung heroes.

He was an incredible painter and extraordinary writer.

He was an incredible critic and extraordinary curator.

The Washington art scene would not have been the same without Jacob.

The art world that didn't exist, he sort of created it.

He is a bridger between various components and people and personalities.

He didn't care what other people were doing.

He followed his own artistic path, his own passions.

He left a lasting legacy whose impact we still see to this day.

<i>In the early 1900s, <i>my parents immigrated from Czarist Russia.

<i>My father was an inventor and factory worker,</i> <i>and my mother was a homemaker, raising my brother and me.</i> <i>I was always smart, and even</i> <i>tried to enroll myself in school at the age of three.</i> <i>I loved words and art.</i> As a child of Jewish immigrants, and with his Jewish heritage, he grew up with the Jewish Daily Forward in his home.

On Sundays they would reproduce Old Masters in color.

He would read about them, cut them out, and paste them into a scrapbook.

He learned a lot about art that way.

His mother, although not formally educated, understood arts and culture, And took him to museums, and did whatever she could to encourage him.

So he was quite well trained by the time he was in his teens even before he went to school.

<i>By the time I was 18,</i> <i>I was finally old enough to enroll with the Pratt Institute.</i> <i>We used to work six hours a day, five days a week.</i> Pratt Institute was a very important training ground for many artists at that particular time and even to this day.

He goes to Pratt, he finds it useful, he's learning some really important aspects for his art, but he then gets disillusioned by a emphasis on the commercial art program there.

<i>From the beginning, the Dean of the art school had problems with me.</i> <i>I was persona non grata because I didn't fit in.</i> I think, you know, as a young man, he was a little too ready to show off his learning, because he seemed to know more than the teachers.

He would correct them when they were wrong.

And so he becomes really antagonistic to the administration and the faculty.

He decided to play tricks with one teacher in particular.

He went and took Prussian blue, the most intense of all the watercolors, and he chose watercolor because he knew she'd try and wash it off.

He put it under her doorknob in the keyhole and just under the door so she'd step in it, get it on her hand and the key, put it in her pocket.

He said the next morning she came into class, she was blue from head to foot.

completely blue.

<i>Three weeks before graduation,</i> <i>I was expelled for what they termed my "independent aesthetic outlook.

"</i> <i>By the time I was kicked out of Pratt, the Depression had dropped down on the country.</i> <i>It was a time when businessmen were leaping from buildings.</i> <i>People were scraping garbage cans for food.</i> <i>There was no jobs.

nobody had any money.</i> During that period, there was a movement known as Social Realism.

We have a number of artists who are interested in making social commentary on this challenging period.

<i>Despite the fact that we were in a deep Depression, I was full of hope.</i> <i>We were young.</i> <i>We had ideas that society could be perfected.</i> He had an unbelievable faith in the expression.

He was very optimistic about the power of what art can do for society, and the importance of art for society.

<i>My earliest paintings were on fires, floods,</i> <i>the unemployed, and shipwrecks.</i> <i>As a young man, a disaster had</i> <i>a certain romanticism, because life was eternal.</i> His art in the '30s were real genre scenes, and you really got the feeling of the street.

He liked the German Expressionist because of that, because they had that feeling of the street.

He painted one particular canvas that I'm very partial to which is <i>Tenement Fire,</i> which is about problematics in the city, but it's more from his imagination.

<i>I never copied exactly what I saw,</i> <i>in any case, because I felt that the artist's job</i> <i>is to not just record what he sees,</i> <i>but to inject his own personality into it.</i> His socially interested outlook, his open mindedness, was certainly honed there.

That's where he got some of his early writing opportunities.

John Reed Club gets started in 1929.

It was kind of this very consolidated group of artists and writers who are really wrestling with what does it mean to be a Creative, and concerned with social issues.

I had written a lot of articles for left-wing publications on art, for the New Masses and the Daily Worker.

But only art reviews, no political reviews.

He was too smart to write propaganda.

It's an understatement to say that that economic event really affected artists.

It very specifically affected Jacob Kainen.

The artists really had no jobs, no hope, no place to go.

and they were really left behind.

The Great Depression has left millions of able and willing Americans bewildered and jobless.

But a new government program, the Works Progress Administration has been created offering employment to millions Through one division, WPA artists will contribute greatly to the culture of America.

The Works Progress Administration had several different areas in which artists could gain employment, and one of them was the Graphics Art division.

<i>By 1935, when the WPA project started, <i>I found the studio on 14th Street in New York City.</i> <i>Many artists were there, Stuart Davis,</i> <i>Raphael Soyer, Arshile Gorky.</i> <i>All the artists seemed to know each other.</i> Gorky was an important artist in the New York community.

Gorky and Kainen spoke a lot, and among their conversations that was influential on Kainen was that he should work a little bit more from his subconscious.

Stuart Davis was a big influence and encouraged him not to join the painting group of the WPA, because he said, "Your paintings, they'll send them out to Oshkosh and you'll never see them again.

You'll lose all your work, and you already know how to paint, so join the print making group."

And so he learns how to make a woodblock, he learns how to make all kinds of intaglio prints.

He learns about lithography, he learns about photomechanical processes.

It was something of a renaissance in art in the '30s in New York, but then in the very early '40s, the WPA was closing down.

So there wasn't any more income for artists and he really needed a good job because he was just married and he had a kid.

<i>I came to Washington in 1942</i> <i>to take a job as an assistant at the Smithsonian Division of Graphic Arts.</i> <i>Coming to Washington was a big shock because</i> <i>in New York there were so many brilliant people,</i> <i>so many artists and private galleries.</i> <i>I felt as though I had been dropped in the center of the Sahara.</i> He didn't have the stimulation of his friends and fellow artists, so he sort of went off on his own a bit more.

When he got to Washington, DC, Jacob Kainen found that the collection at the Smithsonian was lackluster, and he set about figuring out how to increase the collection.

He learned that there was no "budget" for acquisitions, but he did learn there was a budget for equipment.

Sort of famously, he tricked the system, he gained the system, and he figured out that he could acquire works as property, as a "equipment," in order to make acquisitions.

<i>Under my guidance not only did</i> <i>they begin to acquire work, but I had</i> <i>taken the collection from a thousand prints to 7,000 prints.</i> In 1946 he becomes Curator of the Graphic Arts Division.

One reason why he was so well qualified for this was because of his experience in the WPA.

As a curator, he amassed a wonderful collection for the Smithsonian.

He put on many shows, he wrote about the artists, <i>But Washington did have something different than New York had.

<i>Washington had much cleaner air.</i> <i>The sky was different.</i> <i>The color was different, brighter, more luminous,</i> <i>and the buildings were a revelation</i> <i>because there were so many Victorian and monumental government buildings.</i> He was really taken by the architecture in Washington, This kind of strange Victorian and oftentimes decorative architecture, it oftentimes didn't have a purpose, But mansard roofs and minarets, and downspouts and fences, and he wound up drawing a lot of that material into what would later become his more abstracted images.

In the postwar fear of Communism, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his committee seek to bring justice against anyone with possible leftist leanings.

Consequences of such acts would lead to loss of employment, damaged reputations, and social ostracism.

In the '50s, McCarthy had reared his ugly head and was really pretty terrifying for intellectual government employees.

Government employees with a Russian background, ones that had written for leftist and joined leftist publications, My father checked all of those boxes off, so he was a prime target And then he heard from friends on Capitol Hill that he was being investigated.

The repercussions could be the loss of livelihood, maybe even worse, being blacklisted such that you can't even get another job.

<i>I was afraid.</i> <i>Fortunately, the Smithsonian had on its loyalty board an anthropologist</i> <i>He just said, "So what?</i> <i>he wrote about art.</i> <i>That's no crime.

"</i> Also, during the war, Jacob had gone to the FBI and taught them how to look at documents and see not only if they were authentic, but where they came from.

Eventually he got a couple of letters from J. Edgar Hoover thanking him for his service to his country.

Jacob saved these letters, and they in turn, saved his bacon.

They couldn't touch him ultimately with a testimonial like that.

But it's really Jacob Kainen's depth of knowledge about printmaking that saves him.

<i>A whole group of my generation felt greatly</i> <i>disillusioned by the McCarthy business.</i> <i>It was absurd.</i> <i>I started to feel I had betrayed my talent</i> <i>by coming to Washington, and not pursuing the career I should have pursued.</i> He kept his head down he didn't show for ten years in New York because that would have put him on the map, and this was just when all his old friends were becoming famous because of their shows in New York.

To have something always in the back of your mind that you're constantly worrying about, it distracts you.

It affects you emotionally.

I'm sure it affected his family life, and it definitely affected his art.

<i>This painting is </i>Hour of the Beast <i>which I did in 1953.</i> <i>I very consciously was influenced to show McCarthy</i> <i>as a beast in his hour of triumph</i> <i>The animal has claws.</i> <i>It's no specific animal,</i> <i>it's just the personification of a predatory quality.</i> It vacillates between threatening and vulnerable.

It's very a sort of visceral looking figure.

There's clearly something not good going on.

Any artist, when your emotional circumstances changes, your art usually changes too.

If there's anything that I can think of that really drove him his whole career was to find a unique expression.

He was looking for his his voice, his artistic voice, and that's why he wasn't beholden to a single style.

He was trying to find his own way.

whether that meant he was on trend or off trend didn't really bother him.

My father believed very much in following one's inner voice.

Trust your instincts.

Abstract Expressionism blossomed in New York in response to some of the terrible events of World War II.

Certain artists just did not want to paint figures.

They wanted to paint inner states, so they began to really emphasize bravado brush strokes.

The physical act of painting had to be paramount.

In 1966, there's this very important groundbreaking show called Washington Color Painters.

That show is the debut of what becomes known as the Washington Color School.

The artists of the Color School all looked up to my father, and knew that he knew so much about color just from looking at his work, so they studied with him - Gene Davis and Tom Downing, Ken Noland.

He became Alma Thomas's teacher, probably the most important talent he nurtured.

Jacob introduced her to a literature and a world of art that and was really transformative for her, and as a result of that, she really recalibrates her own work and she energizes her work with these colors and these patterns.

He was an incredible colorist.

He was obsessed with color, color combinations, but he didn't start staining because he didn't want to give up the touch.

He didn't want to give up the pigment, because the pigment is what attached him to that long history of painting.

The physical touch to the canvas was his connection to painting.

Once you start staining, you've removed that connection.

<i>I didn't want to be part of the Color School.</i> <i>Eventually I got a grant to go to Europe for research,</i> <i>writing a book on 18th century art.</i> <i>While I was there, I saw a lot of the Old Masters.

<i>but a dark shape against the light background just stays there, frozen.</i> <i>I tried to compensate for that by having colors on the edges of the form shape.</i> His whole life he pursued what we call abstract expressionism, but I think there was a conflict with his personality.

He told me a few times that he found it very exhausting.

The idea of trying to maintain that level of angst.

It wasn't in his nature.

<i>In 1969, I got married for the second time.</i> One of my favorite stories about Jacob is how he met Ruth.

It was at the women's National Democratic Committee luncheon.

She was the Chairwoman, and they had scheduled an artist to speak, but he couldn't make it so they chose my father to speak about German Expressionism.

And when he sat down at the table prior to the talk, he began to explain to this woman next to him who Kirchner was.

Well, that was Ruth!

And she interrupt him and says, "Yes, I own a Kirchner print, and other German Expressionist art."

Kainen kind of was taken aback and looked at her with new eyes and said he wanted to come up and see her collection.

Ruth was a determined collector.

She had a real genuine passion for the work, and Jacob shared that passion, and that was a beautiful thing to see.

Ruth Cole Kainen was an individual with means and resources.

Her family had a lumber, a timber business, which produced a great amount of wealth and she devoted so much of it to Jacob.

Because of Ruth, my father could retire early from the Smithsonian, which he finally did in 1970.

It's a blessing because he now has more time to paint, more time to travel, more time to think and to have the space to create and produce the amazing works that he produces.

The Abstraction came about in the '70s after his life began to change.

<i>I think I became more abstract</i> <i>also because I was living a happier life.</i> <i>Happily married and could devote full time to work.</i> <i>My colors became brighter.</i> <i>The canvases became bigger, the forms became more expensive.</i> Finally, he abandoned the figure as such, and began doing totemic images.

His work dramatically became more and more abstracted, and more symbolic as the years went by.

<i>I totally abandoned any notion</i> <i>of the outside world and began expressing myself,</i> <i>first, in geometrical forms.</i> In the 1980s, he really starts to explore Geometric Abstraction with imagery that is much more about squares, rectangles, kind of very recognizable geometric shapes.

<i>Eventually, I decided that</i> <i>a more lyrical style was really the most internal way I could get.</i> <i>I want to strive toward what I don't know.</i> <i>I'll know when it's right.</i> <i>I know when it's wrong.</i> <i>I look at it, and if I don't like it, I change it.</i> His language is a language on one hand, of abstraction, but we have shapes and forms which suggest nature, emblems, figures.

He's able to create bodies of work that then are able to be displayed in gallery exhibitions.

I think that he was really fortunate that he had a lot more years than a lot of artists ever got.

Because the stuff that he did in those last 15 years of his life was really remarkably strong stuff.

One of the truly admirable things about Jacob is that he did not let his physical infirmities stop him from painting.

Up until about a year before he died, he would get out here and paint.

He would paint from a wheelchair.

He was acutely aware that we have a limited time, and that his time was limited.

So he wanted to get get the last expression out.

<i>I think that I'm still the same artist I was in the 1930s,</i> <i>but I have a dimension of age</i> <i>and the perspective.</i> <i>As I look over my work, in retrospect, I am surprised that</i> <i>every decade I seem to have reconsidered my work.</i> <i>Something inside me tells me to do this, so I do it.</i> <i>An invisible guide.</i> <i>You just trust the whole canvas.</i>