Katherine Schmidt
Katherine Schmidt was an American artist and art activist. Early in her career, the figure studies, landscapes, and still lifes she painted drew praise for their "purity and clarity of color," "sound draftsmanship," and "individual choice of subject and its handling." During the 1930s she was known mainly for the quality of her still life paintings which showed, one critic said, "impeccable artistry." At the end of her career, in the 1960s and 1970s, she produced specialized and highly disciplined still lifes of objects such as dead leaves and pieces of crumpled paper, which, said a critic, approached a "magical realism." As an art activist she helped promote the rights of artists for fair remuneration.
Art training
In 1912, at the age of 13, Schmidt started taking Saturday classes at the Art Students League under the artist Agnes Richmond. At that time the League was popular with girls and young women who wished to study art and its Saturday classes made it accessible to those, like Schmidt, who were attending school on weekdays. While still in high school she, her sister, and two other girls spent part of one summer painting at the art colony in Woodstock, New York. With her sister and another girl she spent the next two summer vacations painting in Gloucester, Massachusetts, then a popular destination for artists. During these trips Agnes Richmond acted as chaperon and guardian.In 1917 after graduating from high school Schmidt took regular afternoon classes at the League. By chance she joined the class of Kenneth Hayes Miller, the artist who would most influence her mature style. Schmidt found Miller's teaching style to be emotionally and intellectually demanding. She said that in addition to teaching technique Miller helped each student bring out his or her unique talents and as a result, she said, "all of us were enormously different" in manner of working and artistic style. By giving them group assignments and inviting them to regular Wednesday afternoon teas at his apartment Miller also helped his students become well acquainted with one another.
During the time she was his student the League abolished its single-sex classroom policy and, mixing more freely with men than she had previously been able to do, Schmidt broadened her circle of friends. To a group of women she had previously befriended she now added a roughly equal number of men. Over the next few decades this group of students would form the nucleus of three others: the "Fourteenth Street school" or "Miller gang" made up of Miller students who rented apartments in the vicinity of his apartment at 30 E. 14th Street, the "Whitney Circle" all of whom were members of the Whitney Studio Club, and the artists attached to two galleries, the Daniel Gallery and, after its demise, the Downtown Gallery. In 1932 Peggy Bacon produced a drypoint print showing the group enjoying themselves at a Third Avenue bowling alley. Entitled "Ardent Bowlers," it showed Alexander Brook, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Reginald Marsh, along with Peggy herself and others of Schmidt's friends. In an oral history interview of 1969 Schmidt named many of the ardent bowlers as her lifelong friends.
Artistic career
Schmidt became founding member of Whitney Studio Club in 1918. The club welcomed talented young artists such as Schmidt and her friends from the Miller class. Proponents of all artistic styles were welcome and the membership grew quickly as members proposed other artists for membership. In addition to holding group shows, the club held solo exhibitions in separate galleries for two or three members at a time. These exhibitions drew favorable reviews from New York critics thus helping Schmidt and the club's other young members, especially the women among them, to advance their careers. Schmidt later recalled that the young League students in the club were among the first League artists of her time to be given exhibitions.In 1919 Schmidt married fellow student Yasuo Kuniyoshi at an artist compound that had been established by Hamilton Easter Field in Ogunquit, Maine. As a patron of young artists, Field had recognized Kuniyoshi's talent and had invited him to spend summers in Ogunquit beginning in 1918. Schmidt met Field through Kuniyoshi and was herself invited to attend. As a wedding present Field gave them the use of a studio in the compound and also gave them an apartment in one of two houses he owned in Brooklyn's Columbia Heights.
1920s
Although both Schmidt and Kuniyoshi were able to sell a few paintings in the early 1920s, they had to take jobs both to support themselves and to save for a planned trip to Europe. Schmidt ran the lunch room at the League during this time and later ran an evening sketch class and performed odd jobs for the Whitney Studio Club.Schmidt and Kuniyoshi spent two years in Europe during 1925 and 1926 and returned there in 1927. Unlike Kuniyoshi and other American artists who traveled in France, Spain, and Italy during the 1920s, Schmidt did not find in those places subjects that she wished to paint and she returned to the United States feeling that the American environment suited her artistic outlook better than the European.
The Whitney Studio Club had given Schmidt her first solo exhibition in 1923. She and two other artists showed works in three separate galleries. In 1927 Schmidt was given her second solo show, the first of an annual series of them held at the Daniel Gallery. By this time Schmidt's work had become familiar to both critics and gallery goers. Earlier shows at the Whitney Studio Club, the Society of Independent Artists, and a few other galleries had attracted notice from New York art critics, but these reviews were not nearly as comprehensive as the write ups her work received at this time. A critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Helen Appleton Read, said her work during the early years of her career had shown Kenneth Hayes Miller's influence but was nonetheless "distinctly personal." The paintings in the solo show at the Daniel Gallery were now, she said, less given to Miller-like subjects than they had been. A critic for the New York Times noted an influence of Renoir in the figure studies and praised her ability to capture a sense of drama in her subjects but felt, overall, that her work lacked feeling, was "somewhat dry in aspect."
In reviewing the solo show given her a year later a Brooklyn Daily Eagle critic noticed a continuing improvement in her work. This critic saw little influence of Miller's naïve style, a continuing feeling for texture and color, and, in general, and increasing competency in her work. Writing about the same show Margaret Bruening of the New York Evening Post mentioned lingering traces of "Kenneth Hayes Millerism," praised Schmidt's self-portrait as "a likeness and a good piece of plastic design carried out in reticence and surety," and said that she "seems to grow quite steadily and triumphantly into her own." One painting, called "Still Life" was to Breuning the highlight of the exhibition. "A real joy to behold," it was, she said, a work of "power and beauty" having "aesthetic emotion" that was lacking in Schmidt's landscapes and figure paintings. The tendency to see increasing strength and maturity in Schmidt's work continued in reviews of her solo show at the Daniel Gallery in 1930 of which one critic pointed to a "a rich and natural realization of her gifts" and said "she is now reaping the artistic reward for this strenuous apprenticeship, in a power and concentration that the more easily satisfied painter does not attain."
1930s
Schmidt held her last solo show at the Daniel Gallery in 1931. By then she was seen as primarily a still life painter. One critic found the still lifes in the show to be technically sound but lacking in "soul." Finding in them a "substantial fund of humor," another said they showed an "uncanny skill in surrounding three-dimensional forms with air" and possessed a "mysterious realism." A third critic, Breuning in the Evening Post, saw in them an "astonishing vitality." In 1932 the new Whitney Museum of American Art showed one of Schmidt's paintings in a group exhibition and the following year the museum purchased it.Schmidt began showing at the Downtown Gallery in 1933, following the closure of the Daniel Gallery the year before. Of her first solo show at the Downtown Gallery in 1934, Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times said she showed a lingering influence of both Miller and Renoir in some figure studies but added "it never does to pigeonhole Katherine Schmidt's art with too much easy confidence." He called her painting, "Tiger, Tiger," humorous, exotic, and, in all, the best work she had done in a long time. Noting her skillful handling of portraits, figure studies, landscapes, and still lifes, he added, "Katherine Schmidt may well be styled the Ruth Draper of the art world." Writing that "she has by no means attained the position as one of the foremost painters of the younger generation that she deserves," a critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called this show "one of the outstanding exhibitions of the year." Schmidt continued to receive thoughtful reviews of both solo and group shows held at the Downtown Gallery, the Whitney Museum, and other venues in the middle and late 1930s.
Fellow artist, friend, art historian, curator, and critic, Lloyd Goodrich said that Schmidt's technical command increased during the early 1930s and this command was most apparent in her still life work: "Every object was modeled with a complete roundness and a sensation of solidity and weight... The relations of each element to the others, and to the space in which they were contained, were clearly understood. The result was finely conceived, closely knit design. Color was full-bodied, earthy, neither sweet nor brilliant." At this time she began to make figure studies of the Depression's victims and for portraying these subjects Edward Alden Jewell wrote that she was "the right artist for the right task." Describing the paintings in a 1939 solo show at the Downtown as "delightfully congruous," he said they revealed "a charming, subtle style that has ripened and that has real stature." Goodrich described one of these figure studies, "Broe and McDonald Listen In," as different from "the idealized pictures of the proletariat common at the time" and said "every element" of the painting "played its part as form, even Broe's shirtsleeves, whose folds were as consciously designed as the draperies in old masters."