Diana Kurz: A Journey of Discovery by lincolnglenngallery

DIANA KURZ

A Journey of Discovery

Catalog design by Clanci Jo Conover

Front cover illustration: Untitled, c. 1959

Oil on canvas

42 x 38 inches

Back cover illustration: #8, 1961-1962

Oil on canvas

54 x 48 inches

Diana Kurz, c. 1972. Photograph by Ethel Virga.

Foreword

It is with great excitement and profound admiration that we present Diana Kurz’s first solo exhibition in New York in nearly two decades. Our journey with Diana began nearly a decade ago, when we were introduced to her work and became immediately captivated by her historic pieces—works that had been quietly hidden away for over 50 years in her SoHo loft where she has lived and painted since the early 1970s. These remarkable pieces were created during Kurz’s shift from abstraction to figuration, and exemplify the artist’s desire for exploration and experimentation.

Since that first encounter, we have come to deeply value not only Diana’s extraordinary talent but also the true friendship that has grown between her and our gallery. Her work embodies a combination of depth, introspection, and a keen eye for color. It is an honor to now share her early works—paintings from a time when she was discovering and refining her voice as a young artist here in New York.

This exhibition marks a significant moment in Diana Kurz’s artistic journey, and we are incredibly proud to showcase these works for the first time. Our deepest gratitude goes to Diana Kurz for her unwavering support and trust, to our associate, Filippo Marino, for his photography and cataloguing, to Clanci Jo Conover for her catalogue design, and to Jonathan Spies for his invaluable scholarship.

We invite you to explore the works of this remarkable artist and share in the beauty and legacy she has created.

Sincerely,

Douglas Gold & Eli Sterngass

DIANA KURZ: A JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY

by Jonathan Spies

Diana Kurz remarked later that the path of the artist never occurred to her as a choice, but unfurled as an inevitability from germinal influences. She was born in 1936 in Vienna. Her father’s eyewear business had franchises beyond Austria, commercial outposts that would become critical to the family’s survival when it was forced to flee, and arriving finally in Brooklyn in 1940. At the ripe age of four, Kurz began putting down her own bohemian roots.

When her father held her aloft to see the Statue of Liberty, seismic shifts in the global order intruded upon her consciousness through the wings. The family was deeply affected by the Holocaust—but Kurz’s work would only explore the trauma much later in life. She maintained, from some immemorably early age, a fascination with the philosophy of the fellow Viennese Jewish thinker Martin Buber. “All real living is meeting,” Buber reasoned in his seminal work, I and Thou—a thought with implications for artists. “This is the eternal source of art,” he observed in the same treatise. “[An artist] is faced by a form which desires through him to be made into a work. This form is no offspring of the soul, but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power . . . The act includes sacrifice and risk. This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of form.”1 Buber’s philosophy of life as an encounter spurred Kurz’s work with a desire for discovery.

Kurz’s training as an artist began at Brandeis University. Brandeis was a great place for Kurz, still fluent in German and an avid student of philosophy and music–but studio art education was not among the university’s priorities. She recalls toiling away at a single still life for a whole scholastic year, an exercise that neither buttressed her confidence in her drawing abilities nor fired her creativity. Nonetheless, when she graduated cum laude in 1957, her grades won her a spot in the tiny studio art MFA program at Columbia University.

Columbia required that she take a year of studio classes and complete BFA credits before joining the MFA program, and while honing her studio chops, Kurz sought a place in Hans Hofmann’s atelier. Hofmann by that point was late in his life and highly regarded as the Ur-text of Abstract Expressionism; sadly, Hofmann’s studio was full. But his wife Maria, delighted to be able to converse with Kurz in their native German, brokered a brief consultation. With few words, Hans Hofmann offered what Kurz regarded as some of the most powerful technical advice of her career. With index fingers, Hofmann indicated a pair of colors in Kurz’s work, and then found the same pair in one of his own canvases. The exercise was not intended to demonstrate the similarity to his own work, but to show how color arranges space and space shapes color–a stirring evocation of his famous push-pull philosophy. Kurz’s canvases of this period have a relentless push-pull quality–reeling in the viewer and slyly closing off avenues. Her work of the early 60s–OP #7, 1960-61 is an exemplar case–has a Hofmannian restiveness. They are most active along the axis that runs between the viewer and the painting–an appearance, in Buber’s terminology, which steps up and demands: a lively meeting.

Columbia proved a more impactful environment for Kurz’s growth as an artist. John Heliker led the class, but his pedagogy was an encouraging one. This suited Kurz’s searching sensibilities: she counted her classmates as more influential than any teachers at the time. Much of that influence manifested in her abstract expressionist canvases that developed there, blossoming after she completed her degree in 1960.

Along with her studio work, Kurz took anthropology classes under Margaret Mead. An influence on her humanistic worldview, Mead’s importance was felt more acutely for the fact that she was the only woman professor Kurz encountered in higher education. At the same time, Kurz encountered Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex–a seminal tome of feminist theory which had only recently been published in English for the first time. It ignited a quiet observation about her work as a woman and as an artist. By the early 1960s, Kurz’s paintings were aggressively applied, searching, kinetic, and daring to the point of abrasiveness. An established artist told her she painted like a man. She tried to accept the remark as a compliment—after all, weren’t

her cat Thelonious. many of her heroes of the brush men? She revered Mondrian, Philip Guston, de Kooning, and Georgio Morandi almost as deities—but surely there was a way to be both a woman and a painter? Simone de Beauvoir’s writing captivated Kurz: here was a woman alongside Camus and Sartre, writing more lucidly and profoundly than the men of her cohort. “I never wanted to paint ‘like a man,’” she told me. “But I wanted my paintings to be as powerful as anything in art history.” She found in de Beauvoir’s memoirs a prefiguration of the same backhanded compliment. De Beauvoir’s father, proud of his precocious daughter, bragged that “Simone thinks like a man!”2 While Kurz’s work was being praised in these oblique terms, there was also institutional disparity of support. Her male MFA colleagues were offered teaching positions, Kurz foundered without guidance. It may have appeared obvious that her terminal credential from a leading university qualified her to teach at the college level, but Kurz had never had a female art teacher herself. Her first teaching work was at a pre-school.

On canvas, Piet Mondrian was an early and lasting influence on Kurz’s work. Composition is the site of drama for Kurz, whether the product is a portrait or a vast abstract expressionist canvas. The Dutch painter’s stark black lines raised a challenge: how to energize a canvas without leaning on the subject? Kurz’s early mature canvases have names that hint at what she was listening to at the time–the heady bebop of Clifford Brown, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk–but she was an abstract artist not by philosophy, but by trial. Mondrian; the abstract paintings of Phillip Guston; Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art: they threw down a gauntlet. What can you make of this two-dimensional plane–what journey of discovery can line and color bring us on? Mondrian had given a compelling answer, Guston quite another, Joan Mitchell a third–what would Kurz offer? The challenge propelled her.

Fig. 1: Image of Kurz’s first studio at 1290 Madison Ave, featuring

Kurz won a Fulbright grant to travel to Paris in 1965. Her devotion to the spare rectitude of de Stijl saw her into the circle of the art concret painter and theorist Jean Hélion. Hélion had been a champion of abstraction before the war, but his outlook changed when he was taken as a prisoner of war in 1940. He told Kurz that in the POW camp, when he had a chance to draw, it was not neo-plastic forms, but familiar things like hats, that comforted him. It’s a sobering test—what an artist reaches for in periods of most hopeless confinement, and whether it surprised Hélion, the anecdote piqued Kurz. What’s wrong with the quotidian? As a comfort; as a vehicle, a quest; as a challenge? Such trivialities had been anathema to the New York School of painting, but by 1966, familiar objects found their way into Kurz’s work, albeit with macabre gravitas, as with the skull in her 1966 Still Life.

At Yaddo residencies in 1968 and 1969, Kurz met one of her idols, in the form of visiting artist Philip Guston. In craft, Kurz had long been a Gustonite: her canvases bear the influence of his giant chromatic steps, reaching pitched grays through reds and greens. Guston and de Kooning, like Heliker and all of Kurz’s favorite influences, gave her little in the way of specific instruction about her own work—“Pay attention to the edges” is one retained bon mot. She recalled listening endlessly to Guston’s philosophizing: a deep and powerful river of thought, meditating on the same themes of self and searching, in paint and word, as Kurz was pursuing. Guston, too, was remaking himself in those same years: “I became very reduced,” he wrote. “Some of the drawings are just one or two lines. And then reacting against that, with a very deep desire to paint tangible things. And it began with just the forms around me. I mean, my shoe on the floor. Books. I did lots of shoes and lots of books. Lightbulbs. Just common things around. I wanted to wipe the slate clean. Get rid of ‘Art.’”3 The final, famous act in Guston’s career began just as Kurz’s first act ended.

In 1970, Kurz regularly exhibiting and teaching—now at the college level—bought a loft in SoHo. It was a perfect moment to join the downtown art scene: Kurz joined a generation of painters that reintroduced figure and narrative into their canvases, and that practice was a social one. A loose circle of painters invited one another to paint and draw from models in their studios, and Kurz joined Philip Pearlstein, Lois Dodd, and Mercedes Matter, to face her own bête noire. She developed her confidence to capture the human form, and her previous milieu had never forced her to try. Now,

Fig. 2 (left): Grant card issued by the Franco-American Commission for Education Exchange, 1965-66 Fig. 3 (right): Diana Kurz in her Paris studio, 1965-66

the challenge excited her, just as abstraction had fired her creative spirit decades before. I don’t sense much competitive spirit in Kurz; hers was the fire of odyssey. Drop me in your most disorienting of Dardanelles and I shall find a way home. Decades of over-sized figures followed—they billow off the canvases, neither godlike nor heroic, but totems of a challenge embraced. In so much as abstraction ended in Kurz’s work, its end was a matter of fatigueless exhaustion: she no longer felt challenged by total abstraction. Abstraction continued in the architectural strata of the pictures, but now the human form offered the most satisfying challenge. (Years into her figurative work, Kurz tried to return to abstraction; she found that she could, but she found no risk in it. She knew how to get the effects she had struggled for in her youth; Ithaca was there but the odyssey was gone, and stolen glory held no attraction for her.)

The return to figuration met with Kurz’s increasing involvement in feminist politics. She joined the Women’s Caucus for Art in 1972, and was increasingly invited to show with other women. In 1977, her spent her fellowship at the MacDowell Colony producing a vision of a massive female deity for the Sister Chapel at P.S. 1. Ilise Greenstein conceived of the Sister Chapel as a collaborative “Hall of Fame of Women,” tapping Kurz along with Alice Neel and eleven others for panels. The Hindu goddess Durga attracted Kurz for her powers of creation and destruction; Kurz also desired to represented more than just white Western women in the Sister Chapel. For Kurz, there was a liberatory selfactualization in this portrait: the whole range of the artist’s powers were available to a women artist—without reference to masculinity.

In 1989, Kurz was encountered old photographs of family, stirring in her the desire to memorialize the family that had disappeared during the Holocaust. And a new arc appeared in her work— her first expressions of personal narrative. The paintings that came from these tiny black-andwhite photographs were monumental in size and, surprising some viewers, in vibrant color. Color had been a prime expressive vehicle even before Hofmann’s profound influence on her work, but here she used her intense palette to express a truth that the photographs forget: that in spite of the horrors of the Nazi regime, the sky was sometimes blue. She insisted on painting life.

Kurz often set these over-life-sized portraits into medieval altarpiece format—the aura of veneration appealed to her as much as the medium’s ability to convey “different types of information” in the wings, predella. In one work, she used the predella to include the letter from the family friend that exhorted her mother to leave the country—a document of deliverance and personal provenance.

4: From left: Juanita McNeely, Alice Neel, Lucia Vernarelli and Diana Kurz at an Alliance of Figurative Artists meeting, 1971. Courtesy of Marjorie Kramer.

5: From left: Lucia Vernerelli, Diana Kurz, Lois Dodd, Ora Lerman at an Alliance of Figurative Artists meeting, 1971. Courtesy of Marjorie Kramer.

Fig

Fig.

In several of these works, the subjects’ faces are turned away. Inscribed in the wings of one of these works is a remark from Primo Levi: “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses . . . those who saw the Gorgon have not returned to tell about it.”4 While the Holocaust works are memorials in form, they underscore the failure of witnessing. Masklike, distant, unreachable: the disclosive properties of portraiture fail, and we are left with something imaginary, abstract.

When I visited Kurz, a painting hung over a sofa. A quartet of misfits huddle around a cafe table, one dressed up in clown regalia fit for a James Ensor painting. “But it could only be Vienna,” Kurz sighed, shrugging off a memory of more recent and presumably happier times in the city of her birth. The person in the dead center of the picture leans conspiratorially into the conversation—all we see is the back of his head. It’s a particularly Kurzian maneuver, whether in the fully abstract canvases of the 1960s or the almost diorama-like Holocaust pictures: there is an implication of contact, of disclosure—you sense that you can tease out the mystery and meanings— but these efforts are often thwarted. A deeply expressive painter who has led an extraordinary and effervescent life, Diana Kurz nonetheless prefers not to say too much.

Endnotes

[i] Martin Buber, Ronald Gregor Smith (trans.), I and Thou, Edinburgh: 1937, pp. 9, 11.

[ii] As quoted by Deirdre Bair in Simone de Beauvoir, 1991.

[iii] Philip Guston in remarks to Yale Summer Art School at Norfolk, as quoted at https://www. philipguston.org/home/chronology.

[iv] Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 83.

Fig. 6: Sylvia Sleigh (19162010), Diana Kurz, 1978, Private Collection

Oil on canvas 22 x 20 inches

Thelo #5, c. 1959

Thelo #8, c. 1959

Oil on canvas

47 x 41 inches

Signed lower left; signed on the reverse

Untitled, c. 1959

Oil on canvas 42 x 38 inches

Signed lower right; signed on the reverse

Summer Joy, c. 1960

Oil on canvas

70 1/2 x 66 1/4 inches

Signed and titled on the reverse

Small Green Pale, c. 1960-61

Collage and mixed media on board

12 1/2 x 10 inches

Verticle Orange, 1961

Collage and mixed media on Masonite

12 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

Signed and dated lower right

Red and Blue, c. 1960-61

Oil on canvas

61 1/2 x 33 inches

White

OP #7, 1960-61

Oil on canvas

66 x 52 1/2 inches

Signed, titled, dated on the reverse

Clifford, 1961

Oil on canvas 55 x 50 inches

Signed and titled on the reverse

#8, 1961-62

Oil on canvas 54 x 48 inches

Signed and titled on the reverse

Oil on canvas

53 x 47 1/2 inches

Signed lower right

#10 Big Orange and Turquoise, 1962

Studio Interior, 1964

Oil on canvas 52 x 72 inches

Signed lower right; Signed, titled, dated on the reverse

Exhibition Checklist

Thelo #5, c. 1959

Oil on canvas

22 x 20 inches

Thelo #8, c. 1959

Oil on canvas

47 x 41 inches

Signed lower left; Signature and address on verso

Untitled, c. 1959

Oil on canvas

42 x 38 inches

Signed lower right; Signature and address on the reverse

Summer Joy, c. 1960

Oil on canvas

70 1/2 x 66 1/4 inches

Signed and titled on the reverse

Small Green Pale, c. 1960-61

Collage and mixed media on board 12 1/2 x 10 inches

Verticle Orange, 1961

Collage and mixed media on Masonite 12 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

Signed and dated lower right

White Red and Blue, c. 1960-61

Oil on canvas

61 1/2 x 33 inches

OP #7, 1960-61

Oil on canvas

66 x 52 1/2 inches

Signed, titled, dated on the reverse

Clifford, 1961

Oil on canvas

55 x 50 inches

Signed and titled on the reverse

#8, 1961-62

Oil on canvas

54 x 48 inches

Signed and titled on the reverse

#10 Big Orange and Turquoise, 1962

Oil on canvas

53 x 47 1/2 inches

Signed lower right

Studio Interior, 1964

Oil on canvas

52 x 72 inches

Signed lower right; Signed, titled, dated on the reverse

Endnotes

1 Martin Buber, Ronald Gregor Smith (trans.), I and Thou, Edinburgh: 1937, pp. 9, 11.

Diana Kurz Select Exhibitions & Experience

2 As quoted by Deirdre Bair in Simone de Beauvoir, 1991.

Solo ExhibitionS

3 Philip Guston in remarks to Yale Summer Art School at Norfolk, as quoted at https://www.philipguston.org/home/chronology.

4 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 83.

2016 Landscapes - A Retrospective , Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, Woodmere, NY

2015 Wien-New York-Wien, Palais Porcia, Vienna, Austria

2012 Portraits of Remembrance, Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn, NY

2010 Loss, Memory, Remembrance, Suffolk Community College, Selden, NY

2007 Places and Faces, Show Walls, New York, NY

2003 Portraits of Remembrance, Boardroom Gallery, St. Joseph’s College, Patchogue, NY

Paintings and Works on Paper, Holocaust Museum and Study Center, Spring Valley, NY

Portraits and Narratives, VisualArts Gallery, Purdue University, Fort Wayne, IN

2002 Portraits of Remembrance, Walsh Library Gallery, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ

Diana Kurz: Paintings, Trenton City Museum at Ellarslie, Trenton, NJ

2000 Diana Kurz: Loss, Memory, Remembrance, Harlan Gallery, Seton Hill College, Greensburg, PA

An Artist’s Approach to the Memory of the Holocaust, Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota

1998 Diana Kurz, Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt, Vienna, Austria

Loss, Memory, Identity, Santa Fe Gallery, Santa Fe Community College, Gainesville, FL

1996 Paintings on the Theme of the Holocaust, Synagogue for the Arts, New York, NY

1995 Diana Kurz, Kavehaz, New York, NY

Diana Kurz, The Austrian Consulate General, New York, NY

1991 Flower Paintings, Thomas Center Gallery, Gainesville, FL

1990 Figures: Selections by Four Artists, Art Gallery, Mercer County Community College, Trenton, NJ

1989 Flower Paintings, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Steinhardt Conservatory, Brooklyn, NY

New Work From New York, Bienville Gallery, New Orleans, LA

1987 Recent Paintings by Diana Kurz, Alex Rosenberg Gallery, New York, NY

1986 Diana Kurz: Peintures-1985-86, Palais de Justice, Aix-en-Provence, France

1984 Figures and Still Life, Alex Rosenberg Gallery, New York, NY

Diana Kurz/Sylvia Sleigh, Rider College Art Gallery, Lawrenceville, NJ (twoartist show)

1982 Paintings 1980-1982, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY

1979 Diana Kurz, Green Mountain Gallery, New York, NY

Boulder Landscapes, Bridge Gallery, Boulder Public Library, Boulder, CO

1977 Diana Kurz, Green Mountain Gallery, New York, NY

Figure Studies, Paul Klapper Art Gallery, Queens College, New York, NY

Drawings and Watercolors, College of Staten Island Art Gallery, Staten Island, NY

Landscapes, Institute of International Education, New York, NY

1974 Diana Kurz, Green Mountain Gallery, New York, NY

Diana Kurz: Landscapes, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY

1972 Diana Kurz, Green Mountain Gallery, New York, NY

AwArdS And rESidEnciES

2023 Amen Institute

2017 Hambidge Residency, GA

Wildacres Residency, NC

2005 Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency

1997 VCCA – Austrian Federal Ministry of the Arts Artist-in-Residence, Vienna

1996, 93 Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship

1994, 93, 92 Hambidge Center Fellowship

1991 Artists Space, Artist Grant

1987 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship

1985-86 American Center Residency, Cite International des Arts, Paris, France

1985 NY Artists Equity Mitchell Prize, Honorary Mention

1982 Artists Space, Artist Grant

1977 CAPS Grant, New York State Council on the Arts

MacDowell Colony Fellowship

1976,77 Visiting Artist-in-Residence, Artists for the Environment Foundation, Columbia, NJ

1976 Artist-in-Residence, Millay Colony for the Arts

1968, 69 Yaddo Fellowship

1965-66 U.S. Government Fulbright Grant to France

1959-60 Brevoort-Eickemeyer Fellowship

EducAtion

Brandeis University, BA (cum laude)

Columbia University, MFA

SElEctEd tEAching

1990 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont

1988 Ox-Bow Summer School of Art, Michigan

1987 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

1980-81 Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio

1980 Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia

1979 State University of New York at Stony Brook, Long Island, New York

1978 University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado

1976-78 Visiting Artist-in-Residence, Artists for the Environment Foundation, Columbia, New Jersey

1973 Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York

1971-76 Queens College, New York

1968-73 Philadelphia College of Art, Pennsylvania

SElEctEd Public collEctionS

Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt, Vienna, Austria

Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Brooklyn, NY

City of Vienna Collection, Austria

Columbia University, New York, NY

Jacqueline Casey Hudgens Center for the Arts, Duluth, GA

Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna

Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, Brooklyn, NY

Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA

Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ

Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA

Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ

Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

Wien Museum, Vienna, Austria

Woodman Family Foundation Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem, Israel

Diana Kurz in her SoHo studio, c. 1972, photo by Ethel Virga