Weekend, August 28-29, 2021 – LADIES SHOPPING WAS A FAVORITE SUBJECT

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WEEKEND EDITION

 AUGUST  28-29,  2021

OUR 454th EDITION

Kenneth Hayes Miller

ARTIST AND TEACHER

FROM THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

Kenneth Hayes Miller, Shopper, 1930, oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Harold G. Wolff, 1972.49

Kenneth Hayes Miller, 1934, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum J0001902
Painter and teacher. An influential teacher of artistic theory and technical methods, he counted Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop among his students at the Art Students League.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

During the forty years that Kenneth Hayes Miller taught at the Art Students League, he inspired a generation of American painters to find the sources of their art in both the Renaissance and contemporary urban life. Miller himself had sought traditional academic training from Kenyon Cox and H. Siddons Mowbray at the Art Students League and had worked with William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art. After a trip to Europe he joined the staff at the New York School in 1899, and in 1911 began his teaching career at the League. Miller’s early romantic paintings revealed the influence of his friend Albert Pinkham Ryder, but during the second decade of the century he turned to the Renaissance compositional devices and technical media later adopted by Reginald Marsh, Paul Cadmus, Edward Laning, and other Miller protégés. For his subjects, Miller looked to 14th Street and Union Square. His sales girls and shoppers seem frozen in space, the forms of their bodies described in terms of interlocking ovals that are contained within carefully conceived contour lines.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)

Kenneth Hayes Miller, Pause by a Window (Waiting for the Bus), ca. 1930, etching on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Virginia Zabriskie, 1978.23

Kenneth Hayes Miller, Bargain Hunters, 1940, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation, 1986.6.65, © 1940, Kenneth Hayes Miller

During the forty years Kenneth Hayes Miller taught at the Art Students League in New York City, he encouraged a generation of American painters, including Reginald Marsh, Paul Cadmus, and Sara Roby, to find inspiration in contemporary life. Yet he also counseled compositional balance and the value of classic form. For his own work, Miller looked to the shoppers, salesgirls, strollers, and streetwalkers he encountered around Fourteenth Street and Union Square. In Bargain Hunters, he captured the crush of femininity on sale day. Although the women seem frozen in space, their eyes sparkle with the excitement of bargain hunting. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, 2014

Kenneth Hayes Miller, Play, 1919, etching and drypoint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1972.36

Kenneth Hayes Miller, Leaving the Shop (Shoppers Leaving the Shop), 1929, etching, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Zabriskie Gallery, 1972.126

WEEKEND PHOTO OF THE DAY

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FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

SARATOGA RACE TRACK
SUSAN RODETIS, NANCY BROWN, ANDY SPARBERG, LAURA HUSSEY, ED LITCHER GOT IT RICHT.

OOPS!!

THURSDAY’S PHOTO WAS THE ENID HAUPT CONSERVATORY AT BRONX BOTANICAL GARDEN

Text by Judith Berdy
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