Kruse Bridges Ashcan, Social Realism

By 1940, two groups of American artists became modern, not through abstraction but by bringing tough new realism to subject matter: the Ashcan School of the 1900s and the Social Realists of the ‘30s. An absorbing exhibition at the Huntington’s Scott Gallery presents an artist who could be seen as a bridge between these schools.

“From Pushcarts to Paradise: The New York Art of Alexander Z. Kruse” presents a group of drawings, prints, manuscript material and a painting selected from a recent gift of more than 100 works from the artist’s family. Huntington research assistant Carrie Haslett did clear, sensitive work as the show’s curator.

Kruse’s art looks generally familiar, and no wonder. He was the protege of such well-remembered Ashcan artists as John Sloan and Robert Henri. George Luks discovered Kruse drawing on a street corner and encouraged him to take formal training. A direct result of this advice was “Sketch of an Art Class With John Sloan.” A wonderful 1918 period piece, it depicts the model nude, while students wear suits or dresses.

If Kruse’s style marks him as an Ashcan acolyte, a couple of objective differences certainly influenced the way he employed the manner. Kruse, born in 1888, was about 15 years younger than his mentors. Most of them were middle-class Gentiles who came to New York as adults. Their views of the urban underbelly were sympathetically objective but also marked with the romanticism of outsiders who found it all a bit thrilling.

Kruse, by contrast, grew up in a cold-water tenement flat on the Lower East Side, a filthy crime-infested immigrant slum. His heritage was Russian, German and Jewish. Among his works are images of a Kosher butcher shop and a rabbi at morning prayer.

Kruse’s mother was particularly spiritual, believing devotion had cured her of ills doctors couldn’t treat. His father was a philosophical leftist intellectual who worked in a cigar factory; if the employment was demeaning at least he shared it with good company. Among his fellow workers were social reformer Samuel Gompers and Oscar Hammerstein Sr. Alexander Kruse painted scenery for him when Hammerstein became an important musical impresario.

Some clue to how all this affected Kruse’s art may be found in a portrait of his father and a self-portrait. Both men appear carefully dressed, suggesting a shared desire of the poor of those days to “look respectable.” But where Kruse senior has an aura of modest diffidence, his son is natty. There’s a raffish edge to him. His face is shadowed in a way that prefigures film noir photography, but his features could be those of a stand-up comedian.

Kruse must have enjoyed having a simple, decent career. He lived to 91. Teaching and exhibiting like many another, he did WPA projects, made prints, wrote criticism, a semiautobiographical novel and a couple of successful instructional books on drawing. He inherited the old man’s interest in leftist politics, attending lectures by John Reed, Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman. A sketch for a poster he did for the benefit of the legendary volunteer Lincoln Brigade of Americans who fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War is included.

Clearly there was part of Kruse that was a candidate for membership in the more openly political Social Realist movement of the ‘30s. Adherents like the Soyer brothers, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine and William Gropper were roughly a decade younger than Kruse, but their work has obvious affinities. They constituted something close to a Jewish American Expressionist movement. It’s not inconceivable that Kruse influenced them, but he didn’t join them, sticking to a slightly more conservative style and celebratory attitude.

Two groups of work virtually jump off the walls. They have the kind of vitality that reveals an artist in a state of intense pleasure and engagement. One combines humor and theater. “Amateur Bout” is a fight scene that inescapably recalls George Bellows’ famous “Stag at Sharkey’s.” Kruse replaces its relish for dynamic blood sport with a kind of slapstick version in which the fighters might be Laurel and Hardy. He clearly holds the vaudeville schmaltz of acrobats at Hammerstein’s theater or a tuba-playing clown in deep affection.

In the second group Kruse blended the humorous and the pastoral. His “Sunday Outing” shows an ice cream man taking his family on tour atop his little vendor’s cart. Idyllic scenes of nature find Kruse equating the New York countryside with the peasant landscapes of Brueghel. Somehow there’s a message embedded in all this from a guy who grew up smart and poor. It’s about the silliness of posturing and heroics and the virtue of enjoying the mirthful miracle of the ordinary.

* The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, through Sept. 21, closed Mondays, (818) 405-2141.