32 Facts About Katherine Schmidt

Katherine Schmidt was an American artist and art activist.

In 1912, at the age of 13, Schmidt started taking Saturday classes at the Art Students League under the artist Agnes Richmond.

At that time the League was popular with girls and young women who wished to study art and its Saturday classes made it accessible to those, like Katherine Schmidt, who were attending school on weekdays.

In 1917 after graduating from high school Katherine Schmidt took regular afternoon classes at the League.

Katherine Schmidt found Miller's teaching style to be emotionally and intellectually demanding.

Katherine Schmidt said that in addition to teaching technique Miller helped each student bring out his or her unique talents and as a result, she said, "all of us were enormously different" in manner of working and artistic style.

Katherine Schmidt became founding member of Whitney Studio Club in 1918.

Katherine Schmidt later recalled that the young League students in the club were among the first League artists of her time to be given exhibitions.

In 1919 Katherine Schmidt married fellow student Yasuo Kuniyoshi at an artist compound that had been established by Hamilton Easter Field in Ogunquit, Maine.

Katherine Schmidt met Field through Kuniyoshi and was herself invited to attend.

Katherine Schmidt ran the lunch room at the League during this time and later ran an evening sketch class and performed odd jobs for the Whitney Studio Club.

Unlike Kuniyoshi and other American artists who traveled in France, Spain, and Italy during the 1920s, Katherine Schmidt did not find in those places subjects that she wished to paint and she returned to the United States feeling that the American environment suited her artistic outlook better than the European.

In 1927 Katherine Schmidt was given her second solo show, the first of an annual series of them held at the Daniel Gallery.

Katherine Schmidt held her last solo show at the Daniel Gallery in 1931.

Katherine Schmidt began showing at the Downtown Gallery in 1933, following the closure of the Daniel Gallery the year before.

Toward the end of the 1930s Katherine Schmidt had begun to feel dissatisfied with her work in general and particularly with her technique.

Katherine Schmidt's subjects were ordinary objects of no obvious beauty, crumpled paper and dead leaves.

Katherine Schmidt built up each painting systematically over as many as five months.

Katherine Schmidt had used objects such as these in some of her earlier still lifes but never as the main element of a painting.

Katherine Schmidt respected and admired the work of abstract and non-objective artists, but she never felt inclined to work in that style.

Katherine Schmidt's work appeared most frequently in group and solo shows held in the early 1920s by the Whitney Studio Club, in the later 1920s by the Daniel Gallery, in the 1930s by the Downtown Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in the 1960s and 1970s by the Isaacson and Durlacher Galleries.

Katherine Schmidt appeared in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Newark Museum, University of Nebraska, and Zabriskie Gallery.

In 1923, the same year in which she was given a solo show at the Whitney Studio Club, Katherine Schmidt's work appeared in the New Gallery on Madison Avenue.

Katherine Schmidt was born on February 6,1899, in Xenia, Ohio.

Katherine Schmidt had one sibling, Anna, who was a year younger.

Katherine Schmidt met Yasuo Kuniyoshi in 1917 while studying at the League.

When Kuniyoshi and Katherine Schmidt divorced in 1932 she stopped spending her summers in Woodstock.

Katherine Schmidt was at his bedside when he died in 1953 and subsequently remained on good terms with his wife Sara.

Katherine Schmidt welcomed the change because it was time-consuming and frustrating for her to maintain an old townhouse during wartime labor shortages and apartment living gave her more time to paint and draw.

Katherine Schmidt's new husband, Irvine J Shubert, had been born in Austria in 1902.

Katherine Schmidt's family emigrated to New York in 1910 and he became a lawyer on graduating from Columbia University Law School in 1925.

Katherine Schmidt nonetheless remained at work and survived until 1978 when she died of a recurrence of cancer.