Walt Kuhn (1877-1949)

Executed with simplified curving lines, a refined, largely monochromatic palette and a palpable solemnity, Walt Kuhn's Lady in Robe (The Performer) of 1935 embodies many of the characteristics of the artist's most famous painting, The White Clown (1929, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). In the present painting, as critic Frank Geitlin wrote of that seminal work, "The coloring of the picture...can hardly be called emotional. It is austere, almost black and white. But 'Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare,' and it is from this austere geometry that the haunting beauty of Kuhn's art arises. The face of the White Clown is not particularly tragic. It is sad, somewhat, tired no doubt. Mostly, it is simply there: no longer crinkled into professional smiles, but now at ease in normal introspective concern. The effect comes from the powerful, constricted geometry built up to and around to that face." (as quoted in P.R. Adams, Walt Kuhn, Painter: His Life and Work, Columbus, Ohio, 1978, p. 118)

In Lady in Robe (The Performer), rather than a clean muscular form leading the eye to the face, as in The White Clown, Kuhn has instead bedecked his female performer in a ruffled ensemble that at once draws the viewer up to her distanced expression and down to her revealed décolleté and crossed legs. As a result, the work not only explores the psychology of performers once they leave the stage, but can also be seen as an exploration of the male gaze on the female form.