Artist

William Kienbusch

born New York City 1914-died New York City 1980
Also known as
  • William A. V. Kienbusch
  • William Austin Kienbusch
Born
New York, New York, United States
Died
New York, New York, United States
Active in
  • Maine, United States
Biography

A magna cum laude graduate of Princeton, Kienbusch studied at the Art Students League, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the Academy Colarossi, and with Abraham Rattner in Paris. Despite additional work with Anton Refregier and Stuart Davis, Kienbusch did not find his true identity as an artist until he spent the summers of 1940 and 1941 in Stonington, Maine. There he discovered the powerful Maine landscape that had attracted Winslow Homer, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley. Hartley's work, especially, provided a stylistic model, and his desire to express the "inner reality of the world of nature" coincided with Kienbusch's own feelings. Best known for semi-abstract landscapes, Kienbusch spent summers photographing and sketching the pine trees, buoys, and shacks of the Maine coast, and during the winter months, while teaching at the Brooklyn Museum School, translated his summer's work into geometrically formulated landscapes. During the 1960s Kienbusch adopted a looser technique to capture better the dynamic rhythms of natural forces.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)

Works by this artist (4 items)

Charles White, The Children, 1950, ink and graphite on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Julie Seitzman and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2009.13
The Children
Date1950
ink and graphite on paper
Not on view
Charles White, Love Letter, 1971, color lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of June Wayne, 1991.179.14, © 1971, Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles
Love Letter
Date1971
color lithograph on paper
Not on view
Charles White, Love Letter, 1971, color lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of June Wayne, 1991.179.15, © 1971, Heritage Gallery, Los Angeles
Love Letter
Date1971
color lithograph on paper
Not on view
Charles White, Hasty B, 1970, lithograph on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1979.155.1
Hasty B
Date1970
lithograph on paper
Not on view