19 Facts About Jacob Kainen

Jacob Kainen was an American painter and printmaker.

Jacob Kainen is known as an art historian, writing books on John Baptist Jackson and the etchings of Canaletto.

In 1918, the family moved to New York City, where Jacob Kainen's budding passion would further advance with trips to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library.

When Jacob Kainen graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School at sixteen, he was too young to be admitted to the Pratt Institute.

Jacob Kainen used this time to further exercise his interests by working in the classics department of Brentano's bookstore, as well as developing his skills as a boxer.

Jacob Kainen would go on to become an expert in the classics and quite a skilled amateur prizefighter.

Jacob Kainen was finally granted admittance to Pratt in the fall of 1927.

Jacob Kainen found interest in stylistic experimentation meant to convey expressive meaning.

Jacob Kainen was a member of "The Ten", which was a group of artists who promoted Expressionist art, exhibiting together from 1935 to 1939.

Jacob Kainen's wrote a highly regarded and informative essay on the WPA Graphic Arts Division in a collection of essays called The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs.

Jacob Kainen frequented cafeterias that had become the places where urban artists met to debate and develop ideas, both social and aesthetic.

Jacob Kainen was an active participant in the WPA's graphic arts program during the second half of the decade, but he eventually parted with the aesthetics of social realism in favor of abstraction.

From 1942 to 1970 Jacob Kainen was curator of the Division of Graphic Arts at the Smithsonian's US National Museum.

Jacob Kainen began to participate in substantially more exhibitions in Washington after he met his wife, Ruth Cole, in 1968.

Jacob Kainen retired from the Smithsonian in 1970 in order to paint full-time.

Jacob Kainen taught evening classes in painting and printmaking at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts, and was instrumental in introducing Morris Louis to Kenneth Noland and hiring Louis to teach painting at the Workshop.

Shortly thereafter, Louis and Noland began collaborating on "staining", the fundamental notion of Washington Color Field Painting, and a groundbreaking technique with many influential practitioners, although Jacob Kainen did not consider himself to be a member of the Washington Color School.

Jacob Kainen died in his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at the age of 91 as he was preparing to go to his studio to paint.

Jacob Kainen was the father of mathematician Paul Kainen and inventor Daniel Kainen.