Anne McCosh: One Remarkable Woman Karin Clarke Gallery, February 2008

Anne McCosh: One Remarkable Woman

February 2008

Anne Kutka McCosh Head Study, n.d. Oil on board, 201/2 x 18 inches McCosh Memorial Collection; AKM.0006

Anne McCosh sitting by stream, circa 1940. Unknown photographer (possibly David McCosh), McCosh Memorial Archive.

I MUST HAVE KNOWN ANNE for about two years before we had our first real conversation about her art. She loved talking about art, especially about her husband, David’s work. She freely and vigorously shared her candid and often scathing opinions and ideas about painters famous and local, historic and living. Her candor sometimes put people off, but Anne came out of a tradition that had a strong set of values about art. She expected nothing less than the highest professional standards from those who held themselves out as artists. She was a great supporter of artists who met those standards, and a harsh critic of those who did not.

But her work was gently, but firmly, off limits during those conversations. She would deftly steer my questions about how she handled various issues or subjects toward a discussion of Matisse or Diego Rivera. She never told me why she didn’t want to talk about her work, she just made it clear that there were other, more important topics for us to consider.

The studio in her home on Fairmount Boulevard was filled with David’s work. Racks were built into the walls to hold his paintings. Cabinets and shelves had been specially constructed to store his drawings and watercolors. Work tables were cluttered with the objects he used as still-life models. Cans filled with his brushes and painting tools were everywhere. Tubes of paint, drawing materials, sketchbooks, a massive easel—everything he used was right where he left it. His paintings were hung throughout the house. But her work was nowhere to be seen.

Anne never seemed to resent this attention to David. She believed, quite sincerely, that his work was important, and that her responsibility was to attend to its preservation. She felt this way because of her love for him, of course, but this was also her professional assessment of the value of his work. I suspect that the lack of attention she gave to her own work in her later years was a reflection of her assessment of its relative value as well.

We were sitting in the studio one day, as we often did, at the corners of a table. I was going through a stack of David’s watercolors one by one. We would talk about some aspect or another of each. Often, the talk about a painting led Anne to tell me about their life together at the time the painting was made. His art was such a focal point for them. I was quiet for a few minutes, trying to figure out a passage in one of David’s complicated tangles, when Anne said, matter-of-factly, “You know, you’d be very interesting to draw. Just look at the way the collar of your shirt lays on top of that sweater. You see people differently

when you draw them—you get to know such interesting things about them—you pay attention to the distance between the bottom of their nose and the top of their lip—the shape of their ears—but none of that means much unless your drawing finds the person underneath all of that information. Oh, it’s such fun.”

In the last few years of Anne’s life, she began to bring her work out and show it first to friends (all this time it had been stored in a wretched situation in the laundry room next to the studio) and then at a show at the UO museum and a gallery in Seattle that featured art from the 1930s by women artists. It’s worth noting that Anne’s work came out of storage only after she created an endowment with the University of Oregon Foundation that ensured the preservation of David’s work.

The drawings and prints in this show, which span her entire career, demonstrate how well she had mastered the professional standards that she held in such esteem. Anne studied drawing in Kimon Nicolaides’s classes at the Art Students League in New York City in the 1920s. Nicolaides was a master draftsman who wrote The Natural Way of Drawing, which remains one of the best and most influential books about drawing ever written. Nicolaides provided the foundation, but the sensitive, empathetic quality of this work shows how often Anne found the person underneath all of that information.

We can speculate about what Anne’s career as a painter might have been had she never met David McCosh or become so committed to his work. But I think it is a mistake to characterize her in terms of David. I asked Anne once if she would like to have her work shown together with David’s. “Never!” she said. “All people will do is compare the two of us and argue about who does this or that better. I hate that sort of thing.” She was right, of course. Anne’s drawings occupy a world of their own. Each is as confident, serene, and insightful as Anne was. I originally was going to call this show “Art as an Instrument of Compassion” because these drawings are so filled with her feeling for others. But I felt Anne giving me a good, swift kick, and I imagined her saying “That’s too fancy. These drawings aren’t about me. Can’t you see, they’re about these remarkable women.”

The time I’ve spent with the work in this show has been like a conversation with Anne. This is not her highly finished and sometimes rather stylized (sorry, Anne) painting of the 1930s and ’40s. Many of these drawings are sketches, studies that show her at her intuitive best. They carry the creative spark, the candor, the sense of complete immersion that characterized a conversation with Anne about art. Her great mentor, Nicolaides, could have had Anne in mind when he wrote:

. . . drawing depends on seeing. Seeing depends on knowing. Knowing comes from a constant effort to encompass reality with all of your senses, all that is you. You are never to be concerned with appearances to an extent which prevents reality of content. It is necessary to rid yourself of the tyranny of the object as it appears. The quality of absoluteness, the note of authority, that the artist seeks depends upon a more complete understanding than the eyes alone can give. To what the eye can see the artist adds feeling and thought. He can, if he wishes, relate for us the adventures of his soul in the midst of life.

So, Anne, I think maybe we’re both right. Yes, your drawings show us what made these women remarkable. But we wouldn’t know these women today, if it weren’t for your special ability to understand character and then recreate it for us in your art. Like it or not, Anne, these drawings speak to us about you. They are, as Nicolaides would say, the adventures of your soul.

And now, dear reader, please allow yourself to engage in conversation with the remarkable women in these drawings, including, most especially, the remarkable artist who found them for us, Anne McCosh.

Anne Kutka McCosh Catherine Hudson, circa 1930s Lithograph on paper, 121/8 x 8-1/2 inches McCosh Memorial Collection; AKM.0011

Below Anne Kutka McCosh Untitled (Head of Woman), circa 1960s Ink on paper, 12 x 9 inches McCosh Memorial Collection; AKM.0026