Before the Art Institute of Chicago: Katharine Kuh's early career and American art.

Katharine Kuh (see Fig. 1) made her name as an advocate of the international avant-garde during her tenure as a curator specializing in modern painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. She joined the museum in 1943 and in 1949 she was the first museum professional to catalogue and exhibit the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, with its incomparable examples of the work of Marcel Duchamp (see Fig. 1), Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Paul Klee. Subsequently, she organized important one-person shows for Fernand Leger (1881-1955), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), and Mark Tobey (1890-1976). Among the memorable works she acquired for the Art Institute were Birth of 1911-1912 by Marc Chagall (1887-1985). Excavation of 1950 by Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), and Edtaonisl of 1913 by Francis Picabia (1879-1953).

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However, Kuh's history as a champion of the new did not begin with her tenure at the Art Institute of Chicago, nor was it confined to members of the school of Paris or the New York school. Her appreciation also extended to a generation of leading American painters, sculptors, and photographers who came of age before World War II. During her earlier career, when she founded a commercial gallery devoted to contemporary art, Kuh exhibited the great European innovators side by side with Americans who were struggling for recognition. As her warm support of a number of adventurous artists in the mid-1930s and early 1940s makes clear, her activities enriched their careers and cemented relationships that would span the rest of her life.

Katharine Woolf was born on July 15, 1904, in Saint Louis, one of three daughters of Morris and Olga Weiner Woolf (1877-1971). Morris Woolf was a successful silk importer, and the family enjoyed a comfortable life. In 1909 the Woolfs moved to Chicago, and five years later Katharine contracted paralytic polio. The family was traveling in Europe that summer and, while they were in Geneva, just after World War I broke out, Katharine was diagnosed with the disease and unable to walk. For the next ten years she had to wear a plaster body cast. At first she was bedridden and then progressed into a wheelchair, but she remained a shut-in. During this time, Morris Woolf, who collected prints, taught Katharine how to catalogue them. She had had no interest in art before, but studying the prints was a happy distraction in a childhood that had turned out to be lonely and isolated.

When Katharine reentered school at age fifteen, she had to wear a heavy cast under her clothes to support her spine. She had recovered enough to walk again, but she limped, and her left leg never developed properly. But no matter how onerous her condition, she was thrilled to be among people her own age and threw herself into being "normal." Art was put aside.

After she graduated from high school, Katharine entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1921. She looked back on Vassar with mixed feelings, yet it was there that her connection with art intensified into a lifelong passion. She entered college as an economics major, but during her junior year, she signed up for what she was sure would be a snap course--a class on Italian Renaissance art taught by a young new instructor named Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902-1981). Barr, the visionary art historian who would become the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1929, electrified Katharine with his lectures and opened her eyes to a whole new world. In his fervent teaching, he never isolated art, but integrated it with history, design, industry, psychology, and society. Barr was only two years older than Katharine and most of the other students. While "he talked our language," she remembered, "he was light years ahead of us." (1) Katharine was so inspired that she immediately changed her major to art history, taking all the courses she could.

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