Life and Work
Otis Kaye carried on the trompe l'oeil tradition of William Harnett, John Frederick Peto, and John Haberle, and is esteemed particularly for his works which include U.S. currency. Kaye, however, in addition to oils, created etchings, watercolors, and pastels, some including currency but others on varied themes.
Born in Dresden, Germany in 1885, Kaye came to Neemah, Michigan with his parents when he was only three years old. In 1904 he moved to New York for a short time and there discovered his passion for art. Kaye and his mother moved to Germany where he studied engineering. He returned to the United States around 1914 and worked successfully as an engineer in the Midwest until the Stock Market Crash of 1929. He began painting trompe l'oeil oils in the tradition of the great 19th century artists, William Harnett, Peto and Haberle. Many of these works include coins and bills. Because the United States enacted a ban on painting currency in 1909, Kaye did not sell his paintings but gave them as gifts to family members and close friends. He also created ink drawings of currency, and made etchings after Rembrandt, Whistler and Picasso, as well as other artists. He expanded on these prints with compositions of his own in ink and gouache.
Kaye created larger paintings which focused on diverse themes: the economy, in De Jia Vu; war, in Land of the Free; religion, in Joshua's Horn; art, in Rembrandt, What's Behind the Painting; and even baseball in What a Hit! In addition to money, Kaye's works sometimes include pistols and musical instruments and almost always show puns and humor. Art historian Bruce Chambers wrote, "we are now accustomed to identifying Otis Kaye by the ambitious scale, layered meanings, and impeccable craftmanship of his trompe l'oeil money paintings..."
Kaye lived in Illinois until just before his death in 1974 when he returned to Germany. Kaye never exhibited or sold his paintings during his lifetime. Beginning in the 1980s his works were sold at galleries and auctions in New York and quickly moved into public and private collections. In 2002 Kaye's prints were exhibited at the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington, DC. and published in Otis Kaye Trompe L'Oeil Master of Appropriation by Mary Anne Goley (2002).
Kaye's paintings and prints have been included in museum shows of American Art in the United States and recently in Florence, Italy.
Read more about this topic: Otis Kaye
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or work:
“What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps most of all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.”
—Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)
“It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other. In a word, my work is digressive, and it is progressive too,—and at the same time.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)