Frank C. Kirk (1889 - 1963)

A Studio Corner, c. 1930s - 1940s, oil on canvas, signed lower left, 30 x 30 inches, perhaps exhibited Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, unknown date (label verso), presented in a new frame

$4750

Frank Cohen Kirk was a New York-based realist oil painter who was best known for classically composed landscapes, thoughtful portraits, and meticulously crafted still lifes, such as A Studio Corner. Writing in the introduction of the 1956 monograph on the artist, A. J. Philpott, art editor for The Boston Globe wrote, "he sees and appreciates many ... things - for he is a genuine artist at heart. He has a rare sense of color as may be seen from his flower pictures and still life paintings. But even in these you feel that strength and power with which he imbues his figures." In a world that was was increasingly filled with modernist twists on still life painting, Waldemar George, reflected that "The art of Frank C. Kirk may be considered as a return to reality." But, he was not merely engaged in mimetic renditions of objects. Rather, "The art of Frank C. Kirk carries the profound impress of the artist's humanity," is how the critic Z. Weinper described it and he continued, "[Kirk] humanizes everything he touches. He animates the inanimate. He renders objects eloquent. He gives voice to all those things that are silent companions of our joys and our sorrows."

Born in Russia, Kirk arrived in the United States in 1910 and became a naturalized citizen. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under Daniel Garber, Celia Beaux, Philip Hale, and Hugh Breckenridge. While at PAFA, Kirk won a Crescent Travel Scholarship which he used to study and paint in Europe, where he was attracted to the Spanish artist Sorolla. Kirk exhibited nationally in the United States and was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Fine Art, the Society of Washington Artists, Audubon Artists, Boston Art Club, Allied Artists of America, North Shore Art Association, the Copley Society in Boston, the Springfield Art League and Grand Centre Art Galleries in New York City. Significantly, he became an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design in 1944, and exhibited over twenty paintings there over the course of nearly every year between 1928 and 1950. Kirk also exhibited at other major institutions, including the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery, the Society of Independent Artists, the Carnegie Institute, and the Salons of America. He won prizes at the Connecticut Academy of Fine Art in 1934, 1939, 1951 and 1953; the Oqunquit Art Center in 1935, 1948 and 1954; Allied Artists of America in 1943, 1945, 1959 and 1960. The Museum of Western Art in Moscow, the State Museum of New Jersey in Trenton, the Binghamton Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Cayugha Museum of History and Art hold his work in their permanent collections. He is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.