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Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
JACOB KAINEN The Corner Store.
Etching and drypoint, 1955. 200x251 mm; 7 7/8x9 7/8 inches, full margins. Edition of 25. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. A superb, richly-inked impression.
Jacob Kainen (1909-2001) began his career as an artist, and painter foremost, in New York during the 1930s. His early years in school at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute were less influential than years spent studying the works of the Old Masters at museums and libraries; Kainen was actually expelled from Pratt just a month before graduation because of his rebellion to the newly instituted curriculum that encouraged commercialized art. With an intellectual curiosity, his work throughout the 1930s explored economic unrest and political and social concerns of the period, while also recording moments of daily life, Cafeteria (1933) and Hot Dog Cart (1937) for instance. He worked within a variety of styles in New York, inspired by his friends Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Stuart Davis and Ashile Gorky, while showing great familiarity with the Expressionists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Edvard Munch. Thus was born a style that often vascilated between the abstract and the figurative.
In the 1940s Kainen began a career as a scholar, taking a post as a curtor of prints at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC, that would last nearly 30 years before finally returning to his art full time. Toward the end of his career, he taught with Morris Louis, whom he introduced to Kenneth Noland. The two would become the main proponents of the Washington Color Field Painting movement, which in return would certainly have its affect on Kainen (see lot 511). Flint 89.
