Anne Kutka McCosh (1902-1994) This entry appears on the Oregon Encyclopedia, a project of the Oregon Historical Society, at www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/mccosh-anne-kutka.
Born in Danbury, Connecticut, Anne was
raised in Yonkers, New York in a large immigrant family with a strong Czech heritage. When she was a young girl, her oldest sister bought art supplies for her and encouraged her to try her hand at drawing.3 Her siblings and friends were delighted by Anne’s early efforts at illustrating stories they all knew which led her to enter the Yonkers School of Design in 1916. During the 1920s, intent now on making art her life, she worked her way through the Art Students League in New York City where she studied with some of the most influential artists and teachers in America including the painters Kenneth Hayes Miller, Thomas Hart Benton, and Kimon Nicolaides. 4 Between 1928 and 1933 she worked as the manager of the G.R.D. Studio Gallery on 57 th street 5 in Manhattan. These were heady years when Anne Kutka McCosh. Leaving the Lecture: The Faculty Wives, 1936. Oil on canvas, 25 x 31 inches. Gift of the artist to the Center for the Study of Women in Society; Transfer to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; 2012:14.1
modernism was sweeping through American art. She often talked about the new trends in painting with the major collectors and the famous artists of the day who visited the Gallery, including Jose Orozco, who had a studio nearby.6
Anne Kutka McCosh, a nationally-recognized and regionally important visual artist and teacher, lived
Her spirit, talent and insight were recognized
in Eugene, Oregon for the last sixty years of her life.
with successive Tiffany Foundation Fellowships and
In the 1930s and 1940s her work in oil and gouache
a G.R.D. Gallery Scholarship which allowed her
was in the narrative tradition of American Scene
to travel and study painting in Mexico (at Orozco’s
painting. Her subject was the character of the urban
urging) where she met the muralist Diego Rivera and
life she knew in New York City and in the college
to work in the Foundation’s studio facilities at Oyster
town of Eugene.1 In the 1950s and 1960s, her focus
Bay on Long Island.
shifted to making insightful and expressive portrait
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studies often of women and children in oil and also
At Oyster Bay she met the young painter, David
in charcoal and ink drawings and lithographic and
McCosh, also a Tiffany fellow,7 and he became the
woodcut prints. Her later work shows the powerful
love of her life.
influence of her mentor in drawing, Kimon Nico-
Eugene, Oregon in 1934 where David accepted an
laides, and of the Mexican muralists she had known,
appointment to teach painting at the University of
Jose Orozco and Diego Rivera.2
Oregon.8 They both lived in Eugene for rest of their
They were married and moved to
