American Art Collaborative

"However abstract the forms and colors seem, they should somehow give off an aura of human experience." The artist, quoted in Agee and Berman, Jacob Kainen, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1993.
For several decades, Jacob Kainen held two careers: one as an artist and the other as a curator and research scholar for the Smithsonian Institution. After his retirement in 1970, Kainen devoted all of his time to painting. He had begun his career in New York City, where his friends included artists Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Arshile Gorky. In Woman with Dark Hair, Kainen used the energetic brushwork associated with abstract expressionism and bold dark blues, deep greens and reds to give the figure a sense of dominance with very little detail of her features