About Aaron Kurzen

Aaron Kurzen, born in 1920, lived through the most turbulent and revolutionary period of American artistic modernism. Little known but influential, he has left an oeuvre of unparalleled originality and diversity. Encountering Marcel Duchamp in the 1930s, Aaron became the first and most significant disciple of that seminal figure of contemporary art whose message he transmitted to Robert Rauschenberg and the neo-Dadaists in the 1960s.

Educated by Cameron Booth, himself trained in the Parisian ateliers, and Vaclav Vytlacil and Hans Hofmann whose teaching then pointed towards abstraction, Aaron began with a youthful vacillation between Rembrandt and Matisse.

After three years overseas in the armies of Patton and Mark Clark, where most of his time was spent painting portraits of his fellow soldiers, he returned to an America under the irresistible spell of Picasso and the urgent problem of artistic progress which then troubled the minds of all painters. After almost following his contemporaries into abstract expressionism, Aaron evolved approaches marked by Duchampian irony, poetry, humor and openness to the unexpected and untried. His most original works, the "holograms in assemblage" are uncategorizable and mysteriously evocative poems, at once amusing and melancholy. His late works are "abstractions" which only a classical draftsman with a joyous sense of color could have conceived.

The History: 1920 – 2021

Aaron Kurzen, the child of European Jewish immigrants, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1920. His father, a tailor like his fathers before him, designed the original American aviator's jacket and, as a child, Aaron loved to work with scissors; cutting, bending and folding – processes which would remain essential in his work 

In 1935, Kurzen began attending evening classes in painting, drawing, and sculpture, organized by the WPA. In 1936, he won a statewide scholarship to the St. Paul School of Art, where he first studied with Cameron Booth. In 1938, having graduated from high school, he attended the St. Paul School of Art full time, where he also studied with Leroy Turner, William Ryan, James Ray, Andre Boratko, and Morris Please. The same year, he won a scholarship to the Art Students League, whereupon he went to New York to study painting with Vaclav Vytlacil and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and etching with George Pickens. He also attended the lectures Hans Hofmann was giving to raise money for the Spanish civil war. 

During this period Kurzen met his future wife. Saja – Lenore Dunn, which is her real name, became an important element in the Duchampian word-play of his “Valentine” works – was an acting student, model for Vogue magazine, friend of Marcel Duchamp, and secretary to collector Walter Arensburg (whose donation to the Philadelphia Museum of Art included important works by Duchamp). Through Saja, in the 1930s, Kurzen was made aware of the full scope of Duchamp's work, beyond already famous pieces such as the Cubist masterpiece "Nude Descending a Staircase” (1912). 

In 1941, Kurzen was drafted and sent overseas with the 751st Tank Battalion. He participated in the invasions of North Africa and Italy, and the Anzio Beachhead. The members of his unit protected him as an artist and his company commander organized a portrait business for him. In basic training he had spent his time on such chores as decorating the mess hall, such that, though qualified as a tank driver, he had never once entered a tank. Overseas he painted camouflage, designed war-bond posters, and made sheaves of drawings, while also serving as company clerk. These drawings, along with his papers, are now in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. In Italy, he made the acquaintance of De Chirico who invited him to become his student. He visited the Duomo in Florence where Michelangelo's “Descent from the Cross” (1530) was hidden in a cellar: he had to climb over it and examined it by flashlight. In 1945, he managed to attend the Academia di Brera, in Milan, then directed by Carlo Carra, where he studied anatomy, drawing, and etching. He also attended the Academia in Florence for an art history course with Colonel Gardener, former director of the Kansas City Museum of Art, in charge of protecting art and monuments in the war zones. 

After three years overseas, now 25 years old, Kurzen returned to New York where, with the GI Bill, he resumed his studies at the Art Students League with Vytlacil, as well as his teacher from St. Paul, Cameron Booth, now in New York. Booth, though strongly influenced by modernism, had been trained in Paris in the academic tradition, which emphasized accurate observation and forceful expression of volumes. Vvtlacil was a student of Hofmann, a student of Matisse. Hofmann was a major influence on American art and at the heart of the Abstract Expressionist movement, the first internationally important American form of painting with which Kurzen flirted in 1948. In 1951, he attended the School of Fine Arts at Guadalajara, Mexico, where he studied pre-Colombian art and photography. As a student, Kurzen was as much attracted by the old masters as modernism, by Rembrandt as Matisse. The encounter with Duchamp in the 1930s stimulated other aspects of his artistic preoccupation. 

Prior to WWII and even into the 1960s, the American art scene was an obscure and tatterdemalion microcosm, heady with the elixirs of progressive ideals. In this arena Kurzen was something of a personality. 

In 1947 Vytlacil helped Kurzen into a part-time teaching position at The Dalton School, a progressive K-12 school where Vytlacil, as well as artists such as as Alexander Archipenko and Rufino Tamayo, had also taught. Kurzen also taught life drawing at NYU, at times, summer sessions at Quinnipiac College, and a seminar on Duchamp at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Yet, the position at Dalton gave Kurzen leisure to pursue his personal work in tranquility. Kurzen developed several important relationships with former students, in particular the artist Susan Weil. The Weil family offered Kurzen land in Stony Creek (near New Haven, CT) on which he built "Zen Acre" – a pun on his own name – using elements of an army surplus Quonset hut. Susan married Robert Rauschenberg, and through Kurzen, he and other younger artists were exposed to the influence of Duchamp. 

After Saja's death, in 1999, Kurzen lived for many years with sculptor and Washington D.C.-based art dealer Beatrice Perry (d. 2011), in the Hudson Valley. For the remainder of his life, he lived and worked at Zen Acre. 

On November 22 of 2021, Aaron Kurzen died at the age of 101.