The curious case of Jacob Kainen
The challenge and appeal of bringing the life and legacy of an overlooked DC artist to the screen
The studio of the late Jacob Kainen is located in a slightly run-down, light industrial area of Kensington, Maryland. It houses hundreds of his paintings, prints, and drawings, testimony to Kainen’s extraordinary career spanning from the 1930s until his death in 2001.
As accomplished a curator, scholar, champion and connector of fellow artists as he was a painter and printmaker, Kainen indelibly shaped DC’s postwar art scene through both his long-term post in the Smithsonian and his own oeuvre. Without Kainen, our art scene wouldn’t be what it is today.
But if you haven’t heard of him, you’re not alone. The director of one of DC’s leading contemporary art spaces admitted, when asked recently, she hadn’t either. No leading regional or national museums have done a major Kainen exhibit in more than a decade (though his longtime gallery Hemphill Artworks put up a show of his paintings and works on paper in late 2023), nor have prominent individual or institutional collectors made notable recent acquisitions of his works.
Now, a documentary film crew is trying to ensure he gets his due.
For several days at the end of April, the small team visited Kainen’s studio to immerse themselves in the man’s accumulated creative output and use the space as a backdrop for interviews with art historians, family, and colleagues. From behind the camera, director Mark Covino peppered the guests with questions, with producer Jon Gann joining in from time to time. They hoped that the setting would help channel Kainen’s distinctive spirit to a modern audience. With their short film — slated for a fall 2024 release — the duo aim to give Kainen the renown he deserves, before it fades for good.
“Artists are remembered because they’re spoken about. You have to have a team behind you pressing your legacy forward,” Gann said in an interview with 730DC. With this film, they could be the storytellers that every overlooked and underappreciated artist like Kainen could use in their corner. “We’re making sure that people remember him.”
Remembering one of DC’s consummate artists and founding figures in the city’s visual arts scene
Kainen pieces are in the holdings of premiere institutions including the Phillips Collection, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. “He is as good as many who are household names” in 20th century modernist American painting, said writer and expert on DC’s art history Jean Lawlor Cohen in a recent phone interview.
The Wall Street Journal review of the just closed National Gallery of Art’s The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy lauded Kainen and his wife Ruth Cole Kainen “as among the most munificent patrons of the National Gallery of Art” in contributing more than 2,000 works from their collection to the museum.
Moreover, Kainen was a mentor, teacher, and connector for DC’s most well-known visual artists in the second half of the 20th century, including Alma Thomas, Lou Stovall, and Sam Gilliam, and the members of the so-called Washington Color School, such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis. The Washington Post’s obituary noted not only Kainen’s artistic, scholarly, and curatorial and collecting accomplishments but also his role as “an elder statesman of the Washington art scene.”
Kainen was born in 1909 into a Russian Jewish family in Connecticut. He studied painting at Pratt Institute in New York and palled around with artist peers who became among those household names, including Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. During the Depression, he worked for the Works Progress Administration, where he learned printmaking. Through long study and practice, he would become a master of varied printmaking techniques as well as oil painting.
In 1942, he moved to DC with his young family to take a position in the Division of Graphic Arts at what’s now called the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Within a few years he became the division’s curator. He worked in curatorial posts for the next almost 25 years.
Leaving what would become the white-hot center of American modernism for DC would have wide-ranging consequences on Kainen’s career. Scholar Avis Berman has described the Washington arts scene at the time of Kainen’s arrival as “embryonic.” Kainen himself characterized the DC he first encountered as a “backward, spread-out, Rip Van Winkle of a Southern town just beginning to feel the tug of the twentieth century.”
At the same time, the District’s “small, erratic but lively arts scene” as Lawlor Cohen has written, suited Kainen’s gifts as a consummate networker, superlative historian and scholar of art, and identifier of talent. In both formal and informal capacities, Kainen “was a central node in the creative activities of the city,” according to Kainen scholar Seth Feman, Executive Director and CEO of Nashville’s Frist Art Museum, in a phone interview. “There do seem to be in every kind of creative community these figures like Kainen that have this gravity to them and pull a lot of people together.”
In building up to world-class levels the print collections at the Smithsonian, for instance, Kainen raised the visibility of countless other artists by acquiring their pieces, organizing exhibitions, and writing scholarly articles about their work. For seasoned colleague artists in the DC area, Kainen provided critique sessions at their studios and was an erudite companion with whom to take in the latest exhibits.
To those still honing their craft and careers, Kainen offered tangible support–such as introductions to gallery owners–and encouragement. Art historian Lawlor Cohen described how Kainen played this role for Ann Purcell, a 82-year-old abstract artist for whom she is currently curating a show. According to Lawlor Cohen, Kainen took Purcell under his wing when she was in her 20s. The young artist “would go around the museums hanging out with Jacob and Gene Davis. They would critique the art. They would look at bad art and good art,” she said. Kainen modeled for Purcell “what the artist’s life could be.”
Kainen also regularly taught painting and printmaking, where he got to know many of the up-and-coming artists in the community, like Alma Thomas — the first Black American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum and to have her work enter the White House Collection — for whom Kainen was a creative sounding board and close friend for several decades. On the occasion of Kainen’s 90th birthday, distinguished DC artist and University of Maryland professor David Driskell wrote appreciatively of Kainen’s boosts to fellow artists, noting in particular “Jake’s devotion to fostering the creative growth of African American artists such as Alma Thomas and myself. We were among many artists crossing racial and gender lines who were the beneficiaries of Jake’s teaching, wise counsel, and critical review.”
While consistently described as humble and self-effacing, Kainen was nonetheless fiercely single-minded when it came to his own artistic practice. The financial security of working in museums sustained his artmaking, while his remarkable work ethic meant that he never faltered from his own artistic endeavors. Scholar Berman has written about the routine Kainen followed for decades: leaving the museum after work, heading to his studio for four or five hours, and then writing and researching for several more hours. “He was,” Mary Early of Hemphill Artworks told me of Kainen’s commitment to his artmaking and scholarship, “really, really, really physically and emotionally driven.”
Via his experimentation with color, form, subject, and technique, Kainen relentlessly pursued a preoccupation with the question of “a sense of a reality beyond his perceptual reality,” said Feman. While many artists are known for a single signature style, Kainen cycled through at least four fairly distinct periods, starting with social realism, then abstraction, a figurative stage, and finally a return to an abstraction that was sometimes geometric and at other times more lyrical.
Kainen’s retirement from his curatorial job in 1970 gave him the time and space to concentrate fully on his artistic practice for another 30 years. He died at the age of 91 as he prepared to head over to his Kensington studio.
Throughout, true to his slightly contrarian nature — or simply in thrall to his own muses — Kainen’s style phases were slightly out of sync with the dominant visual modes of the day. Kainen was, Early said, “the most non-brand person. He was not swayed by public opinion, not swayed by societal trends, not swayed by fashion trends.” Furthermore, being a curatorial champion may have come at the expense of raising his own profile as an artmaker. As Director of Curatorial Affairs & Curator of American Art at the Columbus (Georgia) Museum Jonathan Frederick Walz put it in a recent conversation, Kainen “felt that, as a curator, it was a conflict of interest to basically promote himself as an artist.”
Residing in DC afforded Kainen the space to explore his quest for expression in such an extended and idiosyncratic fashion. But in the long run, “[t]he fact that Washington has never been a major center for contemporary art,” leading modernism curator William C. Agee has argued, “probably has played a part in Kainen’s relative obscurity as a painter.”
Nor does the kind of behind-the-scenes community building that characterized Kainen’s role in DC typically garner the coverage that burnishes an artist’s reputation to the level of widespread acclaim. “Kainen was a great artist that was also good at so many other things,” said Walz. “And those things the art world doesn’t necessarily give you credit for.”
Taken together, these factors set Kainen outside the mainstream national narratives of major American art movements and artists of the 20th century. As the generations that knew Kainen personally as a foundational figure for the DC art community passed on, so too have Kainen’s unique life and achievements faded from public consciousness, abetted by the very same factors of personality and place that also defined him.
Pulling Kainen’s life story out of the past and onto the screen
The effort to kickstart a reassessment of Jacob Kainen had its roots in a short film project about his close colleague Alma Thomas. That 2021 documentary produced by Gann, Miss Alma Thomas: A Life in Color, was released in conjunction with a four-city touring retrospective exhibit (including a stop at the Phillips Collection) and hefty book on her life and work.
The two co-curators of that exhibit, Feman and Walz, had strong connections to DC and a keen appreciation of the role that Kainen played not only in Thomas’ career but in the history of the entire DC visual arts community.
Feman wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on ways in which modernism has interacted with the city of Washington, which included deep analysis of Kainen’s scholarly writings. He has, he says, a print by Kainen over his mantle at home. Walz got his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and worked at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery of Art earlier in his career. He felt a kind of kinship with Kainen that prompted him to float the idea to Gann of a similar film project to spark renewed interest in Kainen.
In contrast to the Thomas project, where the research and story arc came to Gann fully baked, the producer relished the opportunity to do the groundwork about Kainen for the film. “It was weeks of just figuring out who is this guy, on my own,” he explained of his process. “With most artists, there’s always a predetermined story. We were trying to find something different for Kainen.”
Gann brought on board Covino, co-director of the crowd- and critic-favorite music documentary A Band Called Death (2012) about a 1970s Black punk band of the same name. While at first glance the Kainen project’s subject matter and style couldn’t seem more different, A Band Called Death likewise revolves around reviving long overlooked artists for a new generation and digging into archival material to do so.
Both men found personal connections to Kainen. Covino could relate to Kainen’s own drive to create, often against the mainstream grain, when the odds of achieving recognition and sustaining a livelihood seem stacked against an artist. “There’s a whole mountain of negative things about the [film] industry,” Covino said, shaking his head. “All I ever want to do is to make art and be happy making art.” His father was a painter and teacher who shared Kainen’s dogged artmaking mindset and obsession with art history.
As a native Washingtonian, one of Gann’s passions is to get “DC’s unique history out for others to explore.” Additionally, he identified with Kainen’s insistently independent vision: “Jacob did it on his own terms, outside the popular styles at the time and working at his own pace. I think that’s fascinated me as an artist myself.”
Gann and Covino also leapt at the rare chance in independent documentary-making to have sufficient start-up funds (provided by the Jacob Kainen Art Trust, though fundraising is ongoing). Prior to this project, Covino had been working seven years without any pay on a documentary that was yet to get into production. And to have ready access to a plethora of materials from Kainen’s oeuvre, personal memorabilia, and extensive public archives, as well as cooperation from Kainen’s estate, family, and colleagues.
The film’s likely biggest challenge is its main subject. Jacob Kainen wasn’t a larger-than-life character at the beating heart of an exploding art scene that could propel a conventional character-driven documentary. His life does divide fairly neatly into three parts, but they don’t conform to the epic lows and highs that fuel a traditional three-act structure. How do you dramatize an unassuming character who served as “the glue that was keeping everything together” in the DC art community, as Walz describes Kainen, to audiences outside the region? Or distill the many decades of work of “such a gifted and seemingly paradoxical an artist,” as he was described in his 1993 retrospective exhibit catalogue, who also lacked a singular stylistic breakthrough?
Those drawn to telling Kainen’s biography are sure they have compelling storylines, which especially speak to their own identities as fellow creatives. “[Kainen’s] legacy is as a really talented artist who didn’t care to promote himself, who painted because he just had to paint,” said Gann.
“Jacob seems like a very independent spirit,” Covino told me later. “There’s a lot of integrity in that. His story is inspiring to anybody that wants to be original at all.”
The film team will be using the editing process this summer (led by director Covino) to continue to piece together the storytelling elements of this artist who defies simplification. They plan to use audio from Kainen talking about his life — supplemented with some minor AI-generated snippets of his voice — as the structural skeleton. “The fact that we can actually hear from Jacob in his own voice is huge,” said Gann, with the dozen or so interviews “clarifying and discussing certain aspects of what he said.”
Gann and Covino are aiming for a local DC premiere of the film this fall. In their minds, this film would be the fuse that ignites a re-appraisal of Kainen’s own compelling paintings and prints, as well as his contributions to the history of DC visual arts and its community of creators.
In the meantime, those who want to get in early before the Kainen renaissance blows up can see some of his work by appointment at Hemphill Artworks. Or grasp the vapor trails of his influence on fellow DC artists through the exhibit Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas at SAAM through August 4 and the show of Kainen mentee Ann Purcell’s work at the Provincetown (Massachusetts) Art Association and Museum in September. “Like Kainen, Purcell has had moments of fame, but she’s had some invisibility,” according to that show’s curator Jean Lawlor Cohen “And it’s her time now. It’s kind of a vindication and legacy of Jacob: a living artist getting her due finally.”
In an interview with the Washington Post on the occasion of a major retrospective in 1993, the then 83-year-old Kainen expressed some regrets about his move to DC and disappointment at his yet to be fully realized ambitions for his art career. Still he insisted, “I don’t feel like a failure. I have a body of work, right? They’ll find it some day. I expect to be discovered in the year 2020.”
If the film team has its way, that moment is not far off. “The history of art is of discovery and rediscovery,” said curator Walz. “It’s time for Jacob’s rediscovery.”
