My Love Affair with Modern Art
By Katharine Kuh, edited by Avis Berman

Bloomberg News:

In January 1937, Katharine Kuh was fortunate enough to attend an art sale in Chicago where the auctioneer had "no idea what he was doing," as she put it. That day she bought two Kandinskys, two Man Rays, a Gabriele Muenter and a Bonnard lithograph -- for a grand total of $110.

Her conclusion? "Prices, then as now, are interesting social barometers having nothing to do with the quality or staying power of art," she wrote in her posthumously published memoirs, "My Love Affair With Modern Art.''

At different periods of her long life (1904-1994), Kuh acted as a dealer, gallery owner, critic, museum curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, and confidante of great artists. In all those roles, she was passionately engaged and frequently embattled. The bulk of this splendid book -- edited and completed by her friend Avis Berman -- is made up of pen- portraits of major modernists.

Rothko, Leger, Brancusi, Mies van der Rohe, Franz Kline, Edward Hopper -- Kuh knew them all. Her insights into their characters are striking. Rothko, she wrote, had thrived on neglect and may have been undermined by success. Hopper told her that he had never tried to paint the American scene: "I'm trying to paint myself," he said.

The amazing range of Kuh's acquaintances can be partly attributed to her crisp intelligence and sympathetic insight, which are evident on every page. Equally important was that modern art in those years was a small and beleaguered movement.

Sanity in Art

Nowadays, the works of Pollock or Picasso are highly valued and revered in the U.S. This wasn't always the case. In the late 1930s, Kuh's little gallery in Chicago barely survived on exhibitions by figures such as Miro and Paul Klee.

To make matters worse, the gallery was besieged by overweight ladies from a local organization known as Sanity in Art. "Much behatted" and "exploding with rage," they would denounce Kuh's exhibits as "meaningless garbage." On occasions, she had to call the police. "The term `modern art' was anathema in the Midwest -- a label of opprobrium," she recalls.

Kuh continued to encounter this attitude in the 1940s and '50s while working as a curator at the Art Institute. The trustees were unwilling to accept a great de Kooning, even as a gift. They considered the purchase of a Mark Tobey such "a frivolous indulgence" that they flipped a coin to decide the matter. (MoMA in New York got it instead.)

Enraging Nixon

Later, as a critic, Kuh aroused the fury of President Richard Nixon by branding two Chinese ceramics that his daughter Tricia had loaned to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as "shoddy little tourist items." Though they were withdrawn, Kuh's income-tax returns were audited for some years "with a ferocity and tenaciousness" more appropriate for the filings of Al Capone.

Even when she was well into her 80s, Kuh continued to articulate trenchant views on art and artists. In her memoirs, she declared that the great critic Bernard Berenson, another acquaintance, was almost as dismissive of the pioneers of modernism as those ladies in Chicago. Was he blinded by age?

"Now that I'm approaching ninety myself, I stop to question why I find the art of the first half of our century so much more exciting than that of the last half," she wrote. "But in the end, no matter how bleary my eyes, I stand by that judgment."

Time will tell if she was right there, too.

ARTnews:

"My life has been a long vista dominated by the fecundity of art," declares Katharine Kuh at the beginning of this exuberant memoir, which she began writing in 1992, at the age of 87. Her life as a curator, critic, writer, and friend to innumerable major artists of the mid-20th century stretched from the 1930s, when she was the first gallery owner in Chicago to show avant-garde artists (Kandinsky, Leger, Klee) through the 1940s and 1950s, when she organized many of the city's first museum exhibitions of modern art and eventually became the Art Institute's first curator of modem art. In the busy decades that followed, she moved to New York, was art critic for Saturday Review magazine, curator for the First National Bank of Chicago collection, and author of several books on modern art that remain important to this day.

 
When Kuh died, in 1994, this memoir was only three-quarters finished. But she had astutely chosen art historian Avis Berman, her longtime friend and colleague, as her literary executor. Berman was in a unique position to edit and complete the work in Kuh's own voice. She had access to Kuh's letters, publications, and scrapbooks, as well as the 300-page transcript of interviews she had conducted with Kuh during 1982 and 1983 for the
Archives of American Art's oral-history program. With these sources, Berman explains, she could fill gaps in the manuscript by using and editing Kuh's own words. In addition, Berman's preface provides insight into vital facts and relationships that shaped Kuh's life. While respecting the older woman's desire for privacy and decorum, Berman recognizes that certain revelations--of Kuh's lifelong battle with the effects of polio, and of her deep personal relationship with Art Institute director Daniel Catton Rich--add significant texture to the narrative and increase our understanding of her life.

The result is a vivid tale of engagement with many of the artists and events that shaped modern art. Kuh's voice rings with the freshness of one who was there, as she describes arduously climbing four flights to Léger's studio in Montpamasse, drinking with Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning while choosing titles for the paintings she would show at the 1956 Venice Biennale, meeting with Clyfford Still at his home in Maryland when the artist would see no one else from New York, or sifting through the drawings and watercolors that Mark Tobey dumped from his suitcase all over her dining-room table.

Through it all, Kuh focuses a sharp, critical eye on the art, the artists, and the small, extraordinary world in which they all struggled and triumphed. It is invigorating to be by her side, discovering anew the revolutionary paintings stacked up in corners, piled under beds, or spread out on the floors of studios--works that today we can only view on the walls of museums. Kuh wrote this last book because she felt she had stories to tell and insights to offer that no one else could. She was right, and the story of modern art is richer for it.

Booklist, starred review:

Visionary gallery owners and curators were essential to bringing radical works of modern art before a recalcitrant public. Born in St. Louis in 1904, and inspired by the innovative art historian Alfred Barr, Katharine Kuh valiantly opened a gallery in Chicago to show the likes of Klee and Kandinsky. Kuh went on to become the first curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago and art critic for the Saturday Review. So full was her life, she didn't start writing her memoirs until she was 87 and then died before completing the project. Berman has done a superb job of tying up loose ends and in his moving introduction reveals Kuh's struggles with polio and the many dimensions of her impressive life. Kuh herself is scintillating, incisive, and elegantly offhanded as she relates eye-opening anecdotes about her seminal curatorial adventures. She focuses most on the artists she knew best, astutely assessing both temperaments and aesthetics as she portrays, with rare intimacy and insight, more than a dozen brilliant artists, including Duchamp, Rothko, and Hopper. Kuh's evocative, engaging, and unique reflections enrich the stirring story of modern art and introduce readers to a refined and unstinting arts advocate who significantly enriched American culture.

Publishers Weekly, Signature review:

This love affair provides for those who care about art and artists a piercing, passionate glimpse of creative activity in America during the first half of the 20th century. Kuh (1904-1994) saw everything, knew everybody, went everywhere and in the miraculous lucidity of her old, old age still had the wit and discernment to tell the story of her vision, knowledge and travels. It is, of course, a very personal tale. The raison d'être of memoirs is not merely to relate experience but also to reveal the personality of the author. Thus, Kuh discloses how and why art became, as it were, the very backbone of her physical and spiritual adventure. It required exceptional courage and intellectual discipline. The revelations are aided and abetted, so to speak, by Kuh's friend, admirer and accomplice, Avis Berman, who edited and completed the manuscript after the author's death, at 89, and who disclosed vital information that Kuh's reticence would have set aside, describing, for example, details of the love affairs which contributed essential elements to the passion of art.

Passionate as it indeed is, this around-the-art-world voyage invited mainly the happy few as fellow passengers. And Kuh possessed the resilient temperament enabling her to sail audaciously along when the happy few were very few. Almost all of her professional and emotional life was spent in Chicago, the pivotal center of the aesthetic doldrums then prevailing in America's cultural badlands. New York was artistically far more exciting, but Katharine was determined to create excitement within spitting distance of the stockyards.She opened her own gallery there in 1935, the nadir of the Great Depression, when even in New York it was difficult to give away a drawing by, say, Bonnard. Nonetheless, the gallery prevailed, introducing unheard of and unwelcome artists to Chicago, where a handful of prescient adventurers were prepared to pay a pittance for pictures their neighbors considered evidence of madness. Kuh's courage was rewarded when she was appointed to the prestigious post of curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, a museum which her sharp eye enriched with fine examples of avant-garde modernism.

The love affair with the art of her time came fully into its own after WWII, when the enamored connoisseur developed close friendships with the artists, collectors and curators whom she had intimate cause to admire. The larger part of her autobiography is an account of her devotion to these individuals, almost all of them celebrated today: Brancusi, Mies van der Rohe, V.W. van Gogh, Rothko, Clyfford Still, Tobey, Berenson, Albers, Léger, Franz Kline et al. Her reminiscences vividly draw the reader into a deep sympathy for her love affair. Succinctly written, it is a fine memorial to a memorable journey.

Chicago Tribune:

Art can be shocking and baffling as well as transfixing and transforming. With her discerning eye and interpretive mind, Katharine Kuh reveled in the daring inquiries and revelations of modern art, but Chicago, her home base, proved to be aggressively resistant to the work she found so powerful and urgent. Fortunately, her brio was limitless and her sense of mission sure, and Kuh persevered in her efforts to bring modern art to the heartland, ultimately parlaying her passion for art into a life rich in adventure, discovery and accomplishment.

Kuh opened Chicago's first modern-art gallery, was appointed the first curator of modern art for the Art Institute of Chicago and, after moving to New York, became the art critic for the Saturday Review, a post she held for 19 years. Kuh loved to travel, and she met and befriended many prominent artists. She wrote several books over the course of her splendid career but didn't find time to commit her personal reminiscences to paper until she was 87. Art historian Avis Berman, a close friend and Kuh's literary executor, was amazed by the precision of her memories. Kuh came close to completing the manuscript before she died in 1994, trusting Berman to finish the book for her. With "My Love Affair With Modern Art" she has magnanimously fulfilled Kuh's wish, and the result is a scintillating collection of incisive essays profiling the artists who most intrigued Kuh--artists who just happen to be among the most significant painters and sculptors of the 20th Century.

But before the reader encounters Kuh's lively and candid authorial voice, Berman does the reader and Kuh a great service: She succinctly profiles Kuh, revealing key facets of her life that Kuh does not divulge. These measured disclosures make Kuh all the more impressive and her modest, even self-deprecating essays all the more compelling.

Born Katharine Woolf in St. Louis in 1904 and distantly related to Leonard Woolf, Katharine was struck with polio as a child. Unable to walk for 10 years, she spent her youth encased in a plaster cast, isolated and lonely. Her father and uncle collected prints and paintings, and encouraged her to study art. But once she was able to walk again--albeit with a limp, because her left leg remained atrophied--she chose to study economics at Vassar College.

Then, on a whim, she signed up for a class on Italian Renaissance art taught by the now-legendary Alfred H. Barr Jr., the future founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. Suddenly she realized that, indeed, art history was her calling. She earned her master's degree at the University of Chicago and was about to work toward a doctorate at New York University when instead she married George Kuh, a prominent businessman.

Thwarted in her attempts to pursue her interest in art, Katharine Kuh found life as a housewife on the North Shore as confining as the plaster cast that weighed her down as a girl. She left after five years. In 1935, with far more chutzpah than money, she opened a gallery at 540 N. Michigan Ave. and became the first in the region to exhibit the work of such stellar modern artists as Paul Klee, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Fernand Leger, Josef Albers and Joan Miro.

But thanks to what Kuh bluntly describes as Chicago's "general know-nothingness about contemporary art," these groundbreaking exhibits were met with outright hostility, even vandalism. Kuh became the target of "art vigilantes" calling themselves Sanity in Art, a group rallied by Chicago Tribune art critic Eleanor Jewett, who also happened to be the cousin of Robert McCormick, the Tribune's publisher. Vociferously opposed to modernism, Sanity in Art demanded that only American art be shown in Chicago. So obstreperous did the group's protests become, Kuh was frequently forced to call the police. But as she notes, there was one benefit to Chicago's contempt for modern art: She was able to buy a Kandinsky at auction for $5.

Kuh is a marvelous writer: arch, knowing and nimble. Her crisp, to-the-point prose is spiked with uncommon observations and arresting opinions. A master of restraint, she sidesteps the personal matters Berman gently unveils, such as the fact that the great love of her life was her boss, and a married man, Daniel Catton Rich, director of the Art Institute. Berman also catalogs the inequities Kuh faced because of her sex. Kuh focuses on the thrill of curatorial sleuthing and zestfully shares juicy inside stories about manipulative collectors, detrimental museum politics and mishaps associated with one of the Art Institute's most famous works, Georges Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." Kuh also writes with vigor about the difference between seeing and looking, the catalysts for and evolution of modern art, and what she believes the mission of art museums should be.

But the most salient aspect of this eye-opening and engaging book is her uncanny ability to concisely portray artists in all their emotional contrariness and creative fervor in finely crafted essays that are at once delectably anecdotal and keenly analytical.

Kuh reveals volumes, for instance, in her pithy account of a day in 1950 when Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought her to the now-iconic Farnsworth House to help deflect the complaints of his outraged client. Kuh describes painters Fernand Leger and Stuart Davis as vividly as any novelist conjures her characters, then glides into a shrewd assessment of their love for jazz and jazz's enormous influence on modern painting. Whether she's remembering an angry Clyfford Still, an ebullient Hans Hoffmann, or a reticent Edward Hopper, her perspective is fresh, human and expert.

If there is a reigning figure in Kuh's pantheon of artists, it is the great abstract painter Mark Rothko. Kuh struggles with the puzzle of his suicide and traces his pervasive influence. She is equally adept at parsing the personalities and artworks of less-familiar figures, such as Alfred Jensen, a painter obsessed with magic squares, and Mark Tobey, an American artist "never fully appreciated in his own country." Kuh's tale about working with Vincent van Gogh's nephew is deeply moving, and her takes on Bernard Berenson, Constantin Brancusi, Franz Kline, Isamu Noguchi, Josef Albers and Jacques Lipchitz are uniquely intimate, sensitive and enlightening.

In sum, Kuh's witty and reflective reminiscences preserve invaluable chapters in the complex and resonant story of modern art. And how ennobling it is to spend time with a woman of resilience and vision, a writer of clarity and ardor, and an avid and knowledgeable art advocate dedicated to making art an integral part of our lives.

Art in America:

Katharine Kuh lived a long and fascinating life in the service of modern art, having been a pioneering dealer in Chicago in the 1930s, a curator at the Chicago Art Institute, and subsequently a critic and art consultant in New York until her death in 1994 at the age of 89. She knew "everybody" in the mid- to late 20th-century art world at least slightly, and often very well indeed. She was also an engaging and perceptive writer, and this book, her posthumously published memoirs, is a very good one, thought it no doubt would have been better if she had begun it earlier and had been able to finish it before she died. Praise and gratitude are due to Avis Berman, Kuh's friend and literary executor, who, in what has obviously been a labor of love, edited her manuscript, filling gaps as well as providing notes and a brief but crucial preface….

...the book offers real contributions to one's picture of a fascinating period in the art world. It is full of wonderful vignettes, such as the tale of Kuh and Franz Kline climbing through a trap door in Kline's studio and over the rooftops to drop in on de Kooning's studio nearby; or of Thomas Mann and his wife tut-tutting their way disapprovingly through a Klee show at the Katharine Kuh Gallery in the '30s; or of Edith Farnsworth as an unhappy victim of her famous house, unable to afford curtains or proper Miesian furniture; or of Mark Tobey making his precise work amid the utter disarray of his house in Basel, and habitually "carrying his favorite paintings around with him in a suitcase" on his travels abroad. Such flashes of insight, both biographical and critical, make it a great pleasure to have Katharine Kuh's forthright, intelligent and surprisingly timely voice back with us.

Sculpture:

Katharine Kuh's A [sic] Love Affair with Modern Art, skillfully edited by Avis Berman after the author's death in 1994, is a wonderful, thoughtful collection of personal essays about her life in art and the art of her contemporaries. Sculptors as important as Brancusi and Noguchi are discussed and remembered. In Kuh's altogether biographical essays, she not only analyzes their work, but also, at the same time and in the same breath, explains the often intricate nature of her friendships and working relationships with them. She tells terrific anecdotes about her travels and studio visits during the course of a long and notable career that took her from dealer to curator, to art critic for the Saturday Review, and then to independent advisor. Kuh's is a serious examination of artists' lives and works that also discusses the people who surround artists, who not only inhabit their world, but also help to define and determine their individual values and practices. Kuh's ideas and efforts are well worth exploring as something of a role model especially in as disjunctive an age such as ours. The simplicity of her language and the clarity with which she interprets and presents her subjects could serve us well as we continues to build libraries of historic and critical materials about our contemporaries.

The Economist:

KATHARINE KUH'S memoirs, published 11 years after her death, offer a first-hand account of all the anxiety and excitement that went into seeing, showing and making modern art in the second half of the 20th century.

A pioneering art dealer, curator and critic, who witnessed at first-hand the arrival of Modernism in America, Kuh knew everyone who was anyone in the art world at the time. Her first professor was Alfred Barr, the legendary founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Joseph Albers, Constantin Brancusi, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still all became close friends and confided in her. So attuned was she to their hopes and ambitions that her recollections make her into something of a 20th-century Giorgio Vasari.

Kuh was born, according to a preface by Avis Berman, into a well-to-do Jewish family from St Louis—but soon faced adversity when she caught polio. For years Kuh was forced to wear an unwieldy body brace and undergo gruelling daily sessions of physiotherapy. Her father compensated for her isolation as a sick, only child by introducing her to art and teaching her to catalogue his collection of Old Master prints. Kuh's mother, an early feminist, was concerned that her partly disabled daughter should have a proper education and a profession, and she encouraged her to attend Vassar College. Once she had recovered enough to be able to walk—she would limp all her life—Kuh threw herself into everything with a furious energy.

Her short marriage to a Chicago businessman, George Kuh, ended in divorce, and she resolved to spend the rest of her life surrounded by art and the people who made it. In 1935 Kuh opened the first avant-garde gallery in Chicago. There was no market for modern art at the time, but Kuh had the foresight to befriend and exhibit many radical artists, including Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Isamu Noguchi and Stuart Davis, as well as photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. To earn money, she taught art history and after she closed her gallery in 1943 she joined the Art Institute of Chicago, eventually rising to become its first female curator. Kuh worked there for 16 years under its dynamic director, Daniel Catton Rich, who became her long-term lover. Together they organised landmark shows, including the first major Van Gogh exhibition in America, which they arranged in 1948. She went on to curate the American painting show at the Venice Biennale in 1956, although Rich, Ms Berman says, received the credit; at the time, there was no precedent for a woman running the show.

Shortly before she died, Kuh began writing her memoirs. Ms Berman completed the task. Among Kuh's happiest memories, she wrote, were the months she spent working with Van Gogh's nephew, Vincent Willem, when they were planning the famous Post-Impressionist's exhibition. Not only had Willem kept the family collection of over 200 paintings and 500 drawings intact—though he was forced to trade one for provisions during the second world war, when he was hiding a Jewish family and his own family was starving—he also toured it around the world, keeping his uncle's renown alive until the Dutch government built the Van Gogh Museum in 1973.

Kuh's descriptions of her friendships with artists, Rothko in particular, are among the most moving in the book. She describes this troubled genius as a tragic hero, at once obsessed with his own art and insecure about other peoples' opinions of it; completely uncompromising as an artist and yet, even when he was rich and famous, plagued by worries about his financial security and future reputation. She was full of admiration for Rothko's paintings from the 1950s—“those radiant, life-giving canvases electrified by pulsating color mutations”—but watched helplessly as this once pugnacious painter gravitated towards darkness and ultimately suicide nine years after he had attained what had seemed then to be his life's aspiration: a retrospective at MoMA. “It was never lack of ambition that defeated Mark but the physical limitations of paint and brush. He set himself an impossible task and then grieved when he couldn't force canvas and paint to embrace the whole of life,” she writes.

According to Kuh, Rothko claimed an artistic kinship with Rembrandt, believing that they both sought what he called “a maximum of poignancy”. On the surface it is difficult to imagine two more different painters, but both poured their lives into their art and had the rare ability to connect to the human spirit. Katharine Kuh believed this was the key to great art. Luckily, she devoted her life to sharing it with others.

Christian Science Monitor:

A small number of women played a dominant role in the emergence and acceptance of modern art in America. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, with the indispensible assistance of Juliana Force, established the Whitney Museum. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan launched the Museum of Modern Art. Hilla Rebay was the first director of the Guggenheim Museum and commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a building on Fifth Avenue to house it. Katherine Drier and Peggy Guggenheim were enormously important collectors and sponsors of artists.

To this list we must add Katharine Kuh, who opened the first gallery of modern art in Chicago, became the first curator of modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and later was the art critic for the Saturday Review. Born in 1904, Ms. Kuh lived a long life and knew a huge number of artists, collectors, dealers, and museum officials.

Shortly before she died in 1994, Kuh began to write her memoirs. The book was not completed at her death but, happily, Avis Berman, herself an accomplished author, took the unfinished product and turned it into a complete volume: My Love Affair with Modern Art.

The book can be divided into three parts. The first is a long preface by Berman that provides biographical information about Kuh and her accomplishments. This is an important step - the reader will soon discover that Kuh almost never provides personal details about her own life. Berman's complete but sensitive summary enhances the rest of the book. For instance, Kuh writes that she had great difficulty climbing stairs, but she doesn't tell why. Berman fills in the gap, explaining that Kuh had suffered from polio.

The second part is a series of reminiscences by Kuh about her career as an art dealer and curator, and a collection of musings about the art world. This is not the strongest part of the book because these chapters seem to lack an obvious structure or direction. The chapters do make clear, however, that Kuh was opinionated, deeply knowledgeable, and feisty.

The remaining 16 chapters are a collection of unrelated essays about individual artists that she knew well. So we get her take on such diverse figures as Mies van der Rohe, Stuart Davis, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Léger, Clyfford Still, and Edward Hopper. Many of her subjects are famous. Others - like Mark Tobey and Alfred Jensen - are important but not as well known. All but two essays are devoted to practicing artists. The exceptions are legendary art historian Bernard Berenson and Vincent Willem van Gogh, nephew of the artist and the motivating force behind the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In some cases, Kuh builds the essay around a single incident - such as the medal that sculptor Jacques Lipchitz made for President Lyndon Johnson, or a visit with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College. In other cases, the essay is simply her assessment of someone she knew for many years.

These essays make wonderful reading. They are not simply biographical summaries (though such details are provided), nor are they an analysis of an artist's oeuvre (though that also appears). Rather, these are character studies that reveal extraordinary powers of description. More concisely than most biographers, Kuh summarizes what made each of her subjects tick, and the factors that drove their careers. Even readers who are very familiar with the artists will find that Kuh brings fresh insights to the subjects.

The best chapter may be the one on that tortured genius, Mark Rothko. In Kuh's words: "No artist ever looked less like his work than this overweight, untidy man with his high bald pate, bifocal spectacles, rumpled suit, and shirt untucked, but when we talked, some of the magic came through. He was surprisingly expressive, selecting the mot juste with infallible intuition. His sonorous voice always reminded me of certain resonant Hebraic chants. It rang with the same mellow inflections."

Her description of his descent into the loneliness and despair that led him to suicide is poignant. But despite obvious personal affection, she doesn't mince words. At one point she describes a set of late works as "an occasional triumph interspersed with perfunctory repetitions of the past."

Berman makes clear in the preface that she admired Kuh, and that is apparent in the sensitive way in which she has assembled the book. With the exception of the preface, it is impossible to tell where Kuh stops writing and Berman picks up the thread.

These careful, sensitive, and well-written portraits of several giants from the 20th-century art world make this a deeply rewarding volume. One only wishes that Kuh had been able share her insights about more artists before she died.

Art + Auction:

As a contemporary art dealer in Chicago during the Depression, Katharine Kuh was unabashedly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her roster of artists, including Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró and Isamu Noguchi, attracted scarcely a sale, drawing instead the ire of wealthy housewives morally opposed to cosmopolitan moderism in their backyard. However, over the next couple of decades, corresponding roughly to Kuh's tenure as the first curator of contemporary paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, the public's attitude changed so radically that the trustees at the Institute ultimately refused to purchase a Tintoretto because, Kuh notes in her memoirs, My Love Affair with Modern Art (Arcade, $27.50), "they found it 'old-fashioned' and out of step with contemporary life."

Because she appreciated modernism before it was fashionable, Kuh retained an admirable freedom from trendiness throughout her career as dealer and curator--an aloofness from the widely held 20th-century view that art advances, like technology, on the premise of novelty. These reminiscences, assembled posthumously by art historian Avis Berman, retain their freshness, more than a decade after Kuh's death, on account of her tendency to take in each new experience as it came, uninfluenced by prior expectations. She encountered practically everyone, from Marcel Duchamp to Buckminster Fuller to Alfred Barr, but held nobody in awe--least of all herself. She's quick to admit that her memoirs serve no purpose other than to "offer firsthand observations...which with my death would otherwise pass into oblivion." While the lack of larger argument makes for much meandering, Ku'h informality and candor are welcome antidotes to a century overloaded with manifesto and dogma.

Newsday:

A pioneering gallery owner, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, art critic for Saturday Review and self-described "art bum," Katharine Kuh merits an honored place in art history - and lays claim to it with her engaging memoir "My Love Affair With Modern Art." When she died at age 89 in January 1994, Kuh had written three-quarters of the manuscript, which has been seamlessly completed by her literary executor Avis Berman, author of "Rebels on Eighth Street," an excellent book about the founding of the Whitney Museum. The text consists of 17 essays about Kuh's career and the artists she knew; taken as whole, they provide a good sense of the author's personality as well as a thoughtful guide to the groundbreaking art she nurtured.

When she opened the Katharine Kuh Gallery in Chicago in 1935, the public by no means shared her belief in the importance of Fernand Léger, Stuart Davis, Isamu Noguchi, Joan Miró, Paul Klee or Josef Albers, all of whom she exhibited and most of whom are profiled in her book. The Chicago Tribune's art critic voiced the popular view that abstract art was the incomprehensible work of weirdos who were probably all communists. A member of a group calling itself "Sanity in Art" smashed the window of her gallery.

Kuh was unfazed by this opposition. A funny passage describes Mexican painter Carlos Mérida, confronted at an exhibition of his work by two ladies from Sanity in Art, responding to their outraged gestures by kissing their hands - Mérida was deaf and assumed they were enthusiastically complimenting him. "The uninformed public per se cannot be the final arbiter for art, any more than it can for science," Kuh argues. Private collectors such as Walter Arensberg and Chester Dale may have ruthlessly exploited Kuh, who during her years at the Art Institute (1943-59) exhibited and catalogued works that they ultimately donated to other museums. Nevertheless, she writes in hindsight, the quixotic manipulations of men who genuinely loved avant-garde art were preferable to the "degrading political interference" of "unenlightened public officials."

Although Kuh was no snob - she loved teaching an art class for immigrant garment workers who barely spoke English - she firmly believed it was a museum's duty to educate, not pander to, public taste. Unsurprisingly, her book has little good to say about blockbuster shows, even though the Art Institute's 1948 Van Gogh exhibit was one of the first: its goal, she explains, was to elucidate his artistic vision rather than merely illustrate his tragic life.

Her mission is the same in chapters devoted to key figures in modern architecture (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) and sculpture (Noguchi, Constantin Brancusi and Jacques Lipchitz) as well as many notable painters. Kuh knew these men well, and the text displays her sharp eye for their human characteristics: Mies van der Rohe had "a somewhat impenetrable but thoughtful face that lit slowly when he smiled"; Hans Hoffman "looked like a fresh-cheeked, beaming peasant, a product of soil and sun"; while Edward Hopper was "private and withdrawn, almost unapproachable." Yet the primary focus is on how these traits affected their art. Contrasting the works of Hoffman and Hopper, who both spent their summers painting in Cape Cod, Kuh comments, "If Hopper's surfaces were dry, Hoffman's were juicy; where Hopper understated, Hoffman was euphoric." She paints a poignant portrait of Mark Rothko, "gnawed by ambivalence and doubt" about the commercial success he assiduously courted, but the chapter's most eloquent words delineate his aims for his art: "He set himself an impossible task and then grieved when he couldn't force canvas and paint to embrace the whole of life."

It's difficult to write about abstract art without lapsing into cloudy generalities, but Kuh's straightforward prose concentrates on color, texture and other specifics to illuminate a work's essential qualities. Berman, who acknowledges that she wrote "extended portions of this volume," has done such a good job of matching Kuh's tone that the additions are impossible to spot. Her preface delicately fills in personal background the curator resolutely refused to supply - a childhood bout with polio that resulted in a permanent limp, love affairs with Mérida and with the director of the Art Institute, both married - but only to the extent she feels it's necessary to explain Kuh's point of view. Thanks to her sensitive editorial support, Kuh speaks directly here to 21st century readers, allowing them to profit from her intimate understanding of the 20th century art and artists she supported so ardently and observed so intelligently.

The Boston Globe:

''My Love Affair With Modern Art: Behind the Scenes With a Legendary Curator" (Arcade, $27.50), by Katharine Kuh, was written as Kuh approached her 90s. She died before her memoir was finished, leaving the completion to Avis Berman, noted art historian and her literary executor, who began to shape Kuh's writings into a book. It wasn't always easy. As open as Kuh was about the artists she championed (a star-studded roster that included Pablo Picasso, Jóan Miro, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Anni Albers, and more) Kuh was notoriously close-mouthed about her own love affairs and ill health caused by childhood polio. Berman has filled in the gaps, smoothed the rough edges, and, in doing so, produced a mesmerizing portrait of the genius behind the geniuses.

Kuh was the ultimate pioneer. In 1935, in the midst of the Depression, she opened her gallery in Chicago. In the '50s, she became the first curator of modern painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Kuh pursued paintings with a passion, even as she cared for them, taught about them, and acquired them -- and she loved and nurtured the artists who created them.

Kuh said that the purpose of her memoir was to show the hidden moments, to illuminate her artists. And what exhilarating and surprising moments they are. We see Thomas Mann and his wife hissing disapprovingly at her exhibit of Klee's work. Frank Lloyd Wright sweeps into a party and insults all the painters there, calling their art ''useless and ephemeral," while his architecture is ''life-giving." And for me, in the book's most powerful portrait, we're privy to the life, depression, and disintegration of Mark Rothko.

Kuh's tone brims with authority and prickliness. She refuses Mark Tobey's desire to have his painting cropped to a postcard patrons could take away with them because she knew it would be a disservice to downsize his art. And when Rothko's daughter is unhappy at college, it's Kuh who takes the reins and pats herself on the back for it, writing, ''Let it be said, that, after my report, he brought her home immediately." Art was more important than commerce, and because her passion for it, and her compassion for the artists, are so palpable, the book is exhilarating. Filled with wonderful photos of the artists and the art, all captioned with Kuh's or Berman's astute commentary, this book does what Kuh always wanted art to do -- it opens your eyes.

Cincinnati CityBeat:

To call it a love affair is a severe understatement -- modern art was Katharine Kuh's life. It consumed the legendary curator, which explains why there's nothing terribly personal about her memoir other than revelations on her professional experiences and insights into friendships with the artists she so admired (Mies van der Rohe, Mark Rothko, Fernard Léger, to name a few). Compiled and edited by friend and art historian Avis Berman, Kuh's final look at what first caught her eye delves into the world of the curator -- specifically, the female art dealer and curator in 1930s-'40s Chicago (she was the Art Institute's first curator of modern art and painting), at the time a city with a "know nothingness" mentality when it came to modern, let alone visual, art. Kuh not only lived when America was beginning to turn its eye to contemporary art, she also got to know the artists, some of them as they rose to fame. Imagine mailing a photo to Picasso asking him to verify that a work is his. What Kuh doesn't reveal, Berman explains, are personal details like her lifelong battle with polio -- she died in 1994 from post-polio syndrome -- or possible romantic relationships with certain artist friends. Such omissions are justified, however; for Kuh, it was all about the art and artists themselves.

Studs Terkel, author of Conversations with America:

I was deeply moved and exhilarated in reading the memoir of Katharine Kuh--a prophet and art critic. She had the eye of a pioneer [and] she wrote about her true love with enthusiasm and ebullience...This book is as exciting as seeing a Hopper for the first time.

Robert Rosenblum, Guggenheim curator:

I dove right into Kuh's terrific book and kept swimming. It's a fresh experience, a tonic excursion into the private and public story of modern art, as told by a curator who was a living legend. Happily for posterity, Katharine Kuh offers one account after another of her encounters with everybody from Brancusi and Mies van der Rohe to Hopper and Rothko, resurrecting these now remote masters in a vivid, anecdotal fusion of their personalities with their work.