Walt Kuhn painted Pumpkins on the porch of his cottage on Lake Buel in the Berkshires, near Great Barrington, Massachusetts, during the early autumn of 1941. ^[1] Seven of the approximately eight paintings that the 64-year-old artist executed that year were still-life subjects. ^[2] After having spent the early part of the year in Chicago and California working on decorative panels for trains, Kuhn felt overworked and ill and was struggling to recover some of the creative energy of his youth. In October he wrote to his wife, Vera Kuhn, “The thing to do is to do more paintings of good size. That’s one thing no other American painter can do. . . . Anyway the two pumpkin paintings have got my swing back. The swing I had 20 or 30 years ago and which I had perforce to give up for the time being to arrive at quality, precision and class.” ^[3]

This large still life represents a variety of pumpkins and squash arranged before a shallow basket. The basket, propped nearly vertically against a wall, acts as a backdrop rather than a container. It does not appear large enough to contain the bounty displayed by the artist. The fruits are delicately balanced so that any shift would initiate a cascade toward the viewer, imbuing the still life with tension. ^[4] In the foreground of the arrangement, the largest pumpkin supports a leaning yellow squash and an oblong orange pumpkin improbably steadied on the larger fruit’s edge. This tenuous grouping holds back the tide of mounded pumpkins behind it. Even the dividing line between wall and floor tips slightly upward at the left, adding to the painting’s imbalance.

Kuhn explored the mottled oranges, greens, and yellows and the curving stems of his subjects, treating each pumpkin or squash like a portrait. Kuhn’s biographer, Philip Rhys Adams, noted that Pumpkins “has an atypical degree of detailed surface rendering almost worthy of a Victorian salon.” ^[5] This attention to texture is applied not only to the skins of the fruits but also to the uneven pattern of the basket and the play of shadows on the wall and floor.

Pumpkins has the latent energy, power, and vibrant color that characterize Kuhn’s most successful still-life and figurative subjects. The triangular arrangement, a classic compositional device, adds weight and seriousness to the painting. Pumpkins, significantly larger than the majority of Kuhn’s object studies, is one of the most imposing and important still-life paintings that the artist produced during the final phase of his career.

The artist initially painted the medium-weight, plain-weave fabric support while it was tacked to an upright surface. A graphite line was used to delineate the perimeter of the composition, and drips of thinned paint extend over the bottom. The fabric was then mounted on its six-member stretcher with one crossbar running in each direction. The very thin white ground was commercially prepared; it is so thin that the top surfaces of the canvas threads are exposed. The artist sketched out the composition with thin washes of diluted paint and then added successively more opaque, brushmarked layers. In the final stages of painting, the artist applied thick, defining touches in low impasto for the highlights and rich, semitransparent to opaque liquid strokes in dark paint to reinforce the outlines around the compositional elements. The painting is in very good condition. The surface is coated with a thin layer of synthetic varnish.

Michael Swicklik

July 24, 2024