Negligee
Walt Kuhn (1877-1949), Negligee, c. 1920, etching, signed and titled in pencil lower margin. In good condition, on cream wove paper, printed with a light veil of plate tone, with wide margins, 6 x 8, the sheet 8 1/2 x 11 1/4 inches, archival mounting.
A fine impression of this great rarity; it is listed as number 39 in the Kennedy Galleries Walt Kuhn Checklist, made for an exhibit of his prints in 1967; it is cited as a print where no more than 6 impressions are known to exist.
Walt Kuhn was born in Brooklyn, and after a period of study art in Europe, he returned to the US to work as a cartoonist; illustrator, and developing artist. Aware of the great surge of modernist artistic activity in Europe, he joined with others to encourage Arthur B. Davies to get behind the idea of bringing a great European modernist art show to the US, and traveled with Davies to Europe to select art for the occasion (which became the 1913 Armory Show).
Negligee was probably done c. 1920 when Kuhn, Davies, and a few others in the US were experimenting with modernism as they developed their printmaking skills. Kuhn successfully continued printmaking and painting in a modernist mode for the next 30 or so years.