Kootz, a controversial personality and a strategy in the American artists’ service

Kootz, a man with an unusual character and personality, opened his first gallery in 1945 after exploring several different paths. He received a Bachelor of Law degree in 1921 and practiced in Virginia, where he showed an interest in American art. Two years later, he moved to New York and began working in advertising, writing articles about modern art on the side. In 1930, he published his first book, Modern American Painters, and then, jointly with artist Stuart Davis, he switched careers, focusing on textile design and organizing shows in a variety of department stores and galleries before opening his own exhibition space. Showing great ambition, he devoted his first show to Fernand Léger in an attempt to persuade the world that his gallery would have an international scope and represent quality art.[i] He showed an interest in American artists early on; in his articles, including an inflammatory open letter to the New York Times in 1941, he urged young artists to break away from the European style and find their own means of expression. However, his enthusiasm for promoting new art was not devoid of a knowledge of art history. Beginning in 1941, when Europe was still in the throes of war, Kootz mentioned Picasso as a point of reference, a model for young American artists. In his October 5, 1941 letter to New York Times, described by the newspaper as "a bombshell," he wrote: "…Picasso, I point out, also made an anti-fascist picture, the Guernica mural. But Picasso contributed a modern impact through invention of a fresh technique to express his thought…what matters is how you use what you inherit. You can reach down in the bag and come up with Greco, Cézanne, Negro Sculpture and a few dozen assorted influences–the way Picasso did. But you can give them a personal twist, as he did, by creative addition, and something comes out that is your own property…The time has arrived for American painters to investigate what they are doing and why…My interest remains in a creative art, one that has the guts and the will to continue, to press on. It is not an interest in the merely unusual or stray difference. It is fundamentally a faith in form–whether abstract or representational–and in the creative growth of form to meet the expanded thinking of artists in the year 1941."

When Sam Kootz flew to Paris in December 1946, the strategy he was attempting, amply discussed in Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art,[ii] was as follows: by representing Picasso, he would be able to show the artist's works jointly with those of the young painters Kootz represented, hence giving them greater credibility. Selling the Picassos would also help move the gallery ahead. That is how he came about carefully choosing the nine works by Picasso that he had agreed to sell for the artist, and which he showed with a great flurry of publicity from January 27 to February 15, 1947– "The First Post-War Showing in America of Recent Paintings by Picasso."

[i] Dorothy Seckler, Oral Interview with Samuel Kootz, April 13, 1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

[ii] Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983, p. 121-141.

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