Morton Kaish

The first monograph on American artist Morton Kaish, whose light-filled paintings bridge the traditional and the experimental.

Morton Kaish (b. 1927) has long been known as a “painter’s painter.” His work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and numerous other leading institutions, and he has served as a teacher and mentor to generations of American artists. His work, which bridges the abstract and the representational, the traditional and the experimental, is marked by a ceaseless exploration of light and colour that has led one critic to liken him to “a latter-day Bonnard.” Throughout his eight-decade career, Kaish has worked in series, returning to the same theme again and again and always finding something new; his series range from The Irish Chair, depicting wildflowers heaped on a wooden chair, to America, showing weathered doorways bearing a palimpsest of patriotic imagery.

This oversize monograph presents exceptional reproductions of a generous selection of Kaish’s works, arranged by series and including his formally innovative prints and drawings as well as his paintings. A text by the noted critic David Ebony, an interview with the artist, and an illustrated chronology lend new insight into Kaish’s life and work. A foreword by Annette Blaugrund, former director of the National Academy of Design, explores how the artist’s studios—including the one he shared for some fifty years with his wife, the celebrated sculptor Luise Kaish—have influenced his work.

David Ebony, a contributing editor of Art in America and a columnist for Artnet News, is the author of numerous artist monographs. Annette Blaugrund, an independent art historian, curator, and museum consultant, is the former director of the National Academy Museum. Her other books include Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect; The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist-Entrepreneurs from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists; Paris 1889: American Artists at the Universal Exposition; and The Way Back: The Paintings of George A. Weymouth.