Walter Kuhn

Walter Francis Kuhn (1877 –1949) was an American painter and an organizer of the famous Armory Show of 1913, which was America's first large-scale introduction to European Modernism.

Clown with Beret, 1942 (oil on canvas)

By the 1940s, Kuhn became increasingly irascible and distant from old friends. When the Ringling Brothers Circus was in town, he attended night after night. He also became frustrated by the lack of attention his own work was receiving and was particularly strident about the Museum of Modern Art's support of abstraction and neglect of American art in the postwar period.

In 1948, he was institutionalized, and on July 13, 1949, he died suddenly from a perforated ulcer.