Everett Raymond Kinstler: Journeys West And Beyond
by Matthew Innis |
Everett Raymond Kinstler:Â Journeys West And Beyond
July 26 – October 2, 2016 – Temporary Exhibition Gallery
Ray Kinstler is one of America’s greatest portrait painters. Seven U.S. Presidents have sat for him, as have 50 cabinet officers and many of the brightest stars in business and entertainment. Yet he began his art career like many in the Booth collection, doing illustrations for Western pulp magazines and book covers. This exhibition is a retrospective of his Western subjects covering over 60 years.
Director’s Statement Booth Western Art Museum
It seems the word legend has been so overused in referring to celebrities or athletes that its meaning has been watered down. Make no mistake; Everett Raymond Kinstler is an art world legend who has established his legacy painting other legends in elds ranging from music to literature and politics to business and beyond. His tutelage included time at New York’s famed Art Students League, where he later taught. Kinstler is one of the last remaining artists whose professional associations stretch back to some of the greatest illustrators America has ever produced.
The core of the Booth Western Art Museum permanent collection is made up of work by illustrators who became ne artists in their later careers. Within this context we are excited to focus on the Western related works of Ray Kinstler, from his pulp magazine covers to his portraits of Western movie stars, artists and collectors. Drawn from his career, covering over 60 years and including nearly 40 works, Everett Raymond Kinstler: Journeys West And Beyond running July 26 through October 2, 2016 at the Booth Museum is sure to be popular with guests of all ages. Best of all, visitors will have a chance to meet a living legend when he visits the Booth Museum September 15-16, 2016.
Seth Hopkins, Executive Director Booth Western Art Museum Cartersville, GA
Journeys West And Beyond Evere Raymond Kinstler and the Personality of the American West
Everett Raymond Kinstler is a household name, even if you have never heard of him. In his long career, Ray (as I have come to know him working on this exhibition) has not only painted the portraits of countless American icons, but his early work as an illustrator was incredibly in uential in forming the American popular imagination of the mid-twentieth century. Kinstler’s work for dime novels and comic books changed the way we, as a nation, pictured the American West, the outer space of science fiction, and the pervasive hero and villain tropes in popular culture. Kinstler’s portraits, similarly, shape our perception and understanding of figures who are equally instrumental in the creation of our national identity, including presidents, astronauts, actors, artists, musicians, and prominent businesspeople. Perpetually in tune with the pulse of the popular, Kinstler’s work not only represents a storied career (one in which he is still producing) but also has a notable impact on the formation of the popular itself.  This is perhaps most evident in his work on Western subjects, evidenced in Journeys West And Beyond.
Throughout his career, Kinstler has secured a place as one of America’s most successful portraitists, no small feat in an age that is increasingly photographic and digital. Kinstler’s portraits go far beyond producing a likeness of his sitters; his process is more personal and intimate. While he does photograph and sketch his subjects, one of his most important methods involves conversation. Considerable time is spent between the artist and his sitters before a brush ever touches canvas. Anyone who
has met Kinstler knows he has a penchant for storytelling, opening up to his audience in a way that puts them at ease and encourages portrait sitters to share in turn. He knows his subjects in ways other artists, or the camera, cannot; his portraits present this familiarity. Kinstler is not just painting people, but personalities and relationships as well.
Journeys West And Beyond does not only present images of individual personalities like John Wayne or Roy Rogers, but rather the personality of a region and its place in the American imagination. Kinstler’s Western illustrations from the 1940s and 1950s helped shape the identity and the romance of the American cowboy. In the same way he demonstrates an understanding of the character of his sitters, Kinstler’s engagement with the American West captures its identity. His covers for Western novels are exemplary of this, containing as much action as a comic page and describing an entire narrative within one image. Kinstler’s comics and pulp illustrations present the West as most Americans imagine and want it to be, a wide open space of gun-slinging cowboys personifying the American free spirit.
The West, of course, is much more than a symbolic land of wildness and cowboys. And while this vision still exists in the popular imagination, Kinstler understands the more complex reality of the region’s character. His portraits of gures from John Wayne to Senator Alan Simpson demonstrate this complexity. While the abstract spirit of the West may be embodied by the icon of the Hollywood cowboy, the lived experience of these places is more similar to the banalities of everyday America, save for the inklings of a speci cally Western paradigm and the important historical meanings they connote. In Kinstler’s portraits, this essence is demonstrated through details: Ronald Reagan’s denim jacket and the saddle he leans on, or the marble horse sculpture charging behind Senator Simpson. While nuanced, these elements present the character of the West as a testament to the position and politics of these important gures. The West is a potent symbol, whether demonstrated overtly in Kinstler’s comic illustrations, or more subtly in his landscapes and portraiture.
The West, as an abstract, is an incredibly important force in the cultural imagination of the United States. Journeys West And Beyond represents the signi cance of the work of artists like Kinstler in the formation of this symbol. While the historical actualities of the West informed depictions of it, the popular imagery is also embodied in the identity of the region. Kinstler’s work is important not only for understanding the representation of the West, but the signi cance of this representation in American culture and history.
Jessie Landau
Associate Curator
PhD. Student, Art History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Where: Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville (GA)
When: July 26 – October 2, 2016