GENIUS AND VIRTUOSITY: The Art of Ray' Kinstler
Wolfe, Tom
Art of Ray Kinstler BY TOM WOLFE VERETT RAYMOND KlNTSLER did a portrait of me that normally hangs in New York City's Lotos Club. It came about because Ray called me up and said he was doing a book...
...Ray, I think, is very much the future of American art...
...It is a picture of a big blond, who is clad solely in a pair of clear plastic eyeglasses...
...Young artists in the art schools today are rebelling, in the nature of youth, against the hegemony of so-called modern art, which of course is aging and becoming exhausted...
...They are turning to artists who have maintained the classic skills of line, form, color, design, and chiaroscuro, and specifically to artists such as Ray Kinstler...
...By the way, Ray eventually did the defining portrait of Flagg, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C...
...We are at the beginning of what I think is a regime shift in American art...
...I think the appeal and importance of his work is going to grow and grow...
...Well, when Ray got to the walking stick—I have never seen a gesture in painting quite like it—with a charcoal stick, he made one stroke from midway down the canvas right to the bottom...
...Of course, I said yes...
...The second one is as brilliant, in a different way...
...So we set up the session and Ray posed me leaning on a walking stick...
...Tom Stoppard, the English playwright of Artist Descending A Staircase, has one of the characters deliver the line: "Modern art is imagination without skill...
...LOUIS A. ZONA DIRECTOR, THE BUTLER INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN AUT warmth, of love of his fellow human beings, of wit, and of great company...
...How do you become the future of American art...
...It captures the rakishness, the jauntiness, the real Flagg, at a time when a lot of it had seeped away...
...Ray became an enormous help to Flagg and great company for a man who was getting on in years...
...Ray is not just genius and virtuosity, Ray is the very personification of appeal is flif unplugged nature of his art—art ivithout the attachment of meaningless theories or rationale systems...
...I do think it is accurate to say that Ray is the John Singer Sargent of our times, with a little bit of Whistler thrown in for good measure, and the completely unique Ray Kinstler above all...
...It came about because Ray called me up and said he was doing a book on portraiture and asked if I would serve as a model...
...Ray is not just a great artist...
...This didn't bother Ray in the least...
...He is the greatest correspondent in the country, as far as I know, because he illustrates his letters...
...At age twenty-two, Ray Kinstler, then still primarily a commercial illustrator, decided to present himself to the great illustrator James Montgomery Flagg...
...I've been told my collection of Kinstler letters is worth more than my Keogh plan...
...At that time, Flagg was in the years of the yellow leaf, as Byron once put it...
...Ray also has done the two greatest nudes of the second half of the twentieth century...
...It's great stuff...
...Well here's part of Ray's story...
...At that time—the first half of the 20th century—illustrators like Flagg, Howard Chandler Christy, and Gibson, were immense celebrities...
...In the one entitled "Model Taking a Break," there is a nude model sitting back in a chair with her left leg slung over the left arm of the chair smoking a cigarette...
...And that was the cane...
...Vm extravagantly...
...It's a showstopper...
...It was a piece of painterly daring that would have made John Singer Sargent blink with astonishment...
...The human form pours out his fingertips...
...I haven't ever in my life seen a painting of a nude wearing eyeglasses...
...Here was a chance to see one of the greatest artists in the country working...
...I think it is because of his early training in illustration and having to constantly produce illustrations against deadlines, that Ray is one of those artists who can paint the human form...
...He can't help himself...
...Much of it is framed, and it is beautiful, absolutely beautiful...
...I admire him extravagantly...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
