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Prince Igor

Prince Igor

(American, 1909–2001)
1987
Medium/TechniqueWoodcut
DimensionsSheet: 104.1 × 67.3 cm (41 × 26 1/2 in.)
Framed: 109.2 × 72.4 cm (43 × 28 1/2 in.)
Credit LineGift of Jennifer and Harry Rand in honor of Fredrika and Paul Jacobs
Accession number2021.321
On View
Not on view
ClassificationsPrints
Description
American painter and printmaker Jacob Kainen was also a collector of German Expressionist prints, and a Print Curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from 1942-70. Kainen was born in 1909 to Russian immigrant parents in Waterbury, Connecticut, and grew up in the Bronx. He received his early artistic training at the Art Students League, and in 1927 enrolled at the Pratt Art Institute. During the 1930s, Kainen lived in Greenwich Village and cultivated friendships with John Graham, Stuart Davis, and Arshile Gorky. From 1935-42, he worked for the Works Progress Administration, where he made prints in a Social Realist style. In 1942, he moved to Washington, D.C. to accept a position in the Graphic Arts Division at the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum (now the National Museum of American History). As curator, he began adding to the print collection for the first time in fifty years, and was the first curator there to purchase prints by living artists. In 1966, he moved to the National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), to become part-time curator of prints and drawings. During the postwar period, Kainen was instrumental in bringing modern American art to Washington audiences, through his exhibitions of prints by Stanley William Hayter, Josef Albers, Adja Yunkers, Werner Drewes, and others. While teaching evening classes in painting and printmaking at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts, Kainen served as a mentor to Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, and helped to foster the Washington School of Color Field painting. Though he never considered himself a Color Field artist, the abstract prints from late in Kainen's career exemplify his own reckoning with that style.
InscriptionsIn graphite, l.l.: 9/25 Prince Igor; l.r.: Jacob Kainen '87
Provenance1990, sold by Hom Gallery, Washington, D.C. to Daniel Katz and Ellen Ranzman, Chevy Chase, MD; 2016, sold by Daniel Katz and Ellen Ranzman to Harry Rand, Chevy Chase, MD; 2021, gift of Jennifer and Harry Rand to the MFA. (Accession Date: April 14, 2021)