Kenneth Hayes Miller
Kenneth Hayes Miller
1876 - 1952
American painter and teacher. He studied with Kenyon Cox and William Merritt Chase before travelling to Europe in 1899. In the same year he also joined the staff of the New York School of Art. In 1911 he moved to the Art Students League, where he taught intermittently until 1951. As leader of the 14th Street school of urban genre painting, Miller was one of the most influential teachers of American artists since Robert Henri; his students included Isabel Bishop, Edward Hopper, George Bellows, Reginald Marsh and George Tooker (b 1920). His early work consists of romantic depictions of nude or semi-nude figures inhabiting dreamlike landscapes (e.g. The River, 1919; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.), evocative of the work of his close friend Albert Pinkham Ryder.
For a period in 1919 Miller worked in the style of Auguste Renoir, but he soon became more interested in Renaissance composition and techniques, including the use of underpainting and glazes. From the early 1920s he began to concentrate on painting contemporary themes with allusions to Renaissance compositions, for example Ice Skaters, after the ‘Conversion of St Paul’ by Signorelli (1942; ex-William Benton priv. col., see Rothschild, fig.). In 1923 he acquired a studio on 14th Street, New York, near Union Square, in the heart of a shopping district. His greatest subject was the sociology of women shoppers, seen in such works as the Shoppers in Passing (1926; Washington, DC, Phillips Col.), and the consumer culture of bargain hunters at S. Klein’s department store. In their classical poses and formalized compositions, Miller’s shoppers become ovoid and columnar forms in cloche hats and chokers, a study of geometricized volumes in space trying to inhabit a single shallow picture plane. Although his work was immensely popular during his own lifetime, he was all but forgotten during the 1950s and 1960s; it was not until the 1970s that Miller’s work was greeted with renewed critical acclaim. [M. Sue Kendall. " Miller, Kenneth Hayes." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T058277.]
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