A few months ago, I began giving a tour of American portrait painting at the Brooklyn Museum. The tour, titled “Fantasy and Reality in American Identities,” includes nine paintings in the Museum’s collection of American art. Though I find all nine works to be fascinating and valuable cultural documents, I must say that my very favorite painting in the collection is the last one I discuss on my tour: Walt Kuhn’s Dressing Room of 1926.
I love ending my tour on a meditation of Kuhn’s bold, arresting, and intimate image of a vaudeville performer in a quiet moment backstage. Kuhn is most closely identified with these portraits of vaudeville and circus performers, and in the early 1920s, he made his living by directing and designing stage shows as he continued to paint. He was influenced in equal measures by this experience as well as that of his travels in Europe. In Europe, he encountered the work of the German Expressionists and Cezanne, who he claimed remained his strongest influence throughout the course of his career. These elements coalesce in his best-known works, forming a word of clowns and dancers painted with exaggerated features in bold colors.
Dressing Room is a striking work. A withdrawn female performer stands in her dressing room, ready to go on stage. She is wearing a small, revealing costume, and her short, dark hair is adorned with a large, red bow. Her makeup is heavy, and the blush and lipstick on the dresser imply that she has just completed the task of getting ready. She poses in a seductive stretch, though her face is devoid of emotion and her eyes are empty. Though she is physically prepared for the stage, dressed up in her affected unselfconscious sexuality, she is not yet engaged in the task of performing for the pleasure of others.
The dressing room as a place is a curious space for the staging of self: as a space, it is neither public nor private. One enters a dressing room as their whole self and exits as a character or as an idea of a specific element of their personality. It is a tangible place dedicated to creating character, erasing flaws, putting on costumes. Kuhn subtly reminds the viewer that although the dancer looks pensive in this private moment, that this is definitely not a private space. A sign on the wall is a clue that this is a shared room, and a hat stand topped with many different hats is provides more evidence to support that fact. The dancer’s face and pose, combined with the public/private space of the painting, lends to the general air of tension and unease in the portrait.
Kuhn’s colors are also challenging and uncomfortable. The blood red of the dancer’s lips and hair ribbon scream loudly against the pallor of her skin. His strong brushstrokes and his use of bold blues and reds evoke Cezanne’s blocks of color and an interest in cubism, while he manages to pull feelings of discomfort and confrontation from whites and creams. Kuhn’s clear fascination with Fauve colors and Cubist space make this portrait an unforgettable and arresting image.
Dressing Room makes such an impact largely because he used real vaudeville and circus dancers and performers as his models. He manages to portray these characters in the quiet, reflective moments in which they are dressed in joyful stage costumes, though they remain removed from the stage and the people they are paid to play for the pleasure of others. Kuhn’s Dressing Room is a solemn incubator, holding the dancer in a world between the city and the stage, between herself and the character who dances and smiles for an audience. Staring intently out into the world beyond the walls, Kuhn’s dancer is burdened by her awareness of the impending performance and its disconnect from her interior life.
Visit Kuhn’s Dressing Room in the American Identities installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Live in New York City? Contact me if you’d like information about my gallery tour.
