Jonah Kinigstein Art

King and queen with clowns and jesters. Bold, colorful, expressionist masterful painting. Jonah Kinigstein (b. 1923) is an American Postwar & Contemporary painter. He works in a figurative expressionist style. His works are featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Academy of Design, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He lives in New York City. Jonah Kinigstein was trained at Cooper Union Art School, The Grande Chaumiere in Paris; and Belle Arte in Rome. He has been a Fulbright Fellow. He has holdings at MOMA, the Ain Herod Museum in Tel Aviv; Smithsonian; the Albright-Knox Gallery and the Nelson Gallery of Art. He lived and worked in Brooklyn New York. Kinigstein was inducted as an Academician into the National Academy of Design in 1997. Exhibits include: Young Americans at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the National Academy of Arts and Letters; ACA Gallery; Rittenhouse Gallery; the Washington Irving Gallery; and the Pindar Gallery. Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture (CAPS) '59, University of Illinois, Arthur Okamura, Fred Farr, Jonah Kinigstein, Lawrence Calcagno, Reuben Tam and Rico Lebrun. Jonatha Kinigstein attended The Cooper Union and Grand Chaumiere, Paris. He received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome, and has also received awards from the Butler Art Institute; American Academy of Arts and Letters; Silvermine Guild; and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Kinigstein has had solo shows at Galerie Bretau, Paris; Alan Gallery, Grippi Gallery, ACA Gallery, and Pindar Gallery, New York; Siembab Gallery, Boston; Rittenhouse Gallery, Philadelphia; among others. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Modern Art; Allentown Art Museum; Albright Art Gallery; Butler Art Institute; and more. He has taught at the Brooklyn Museum and National Academy of Design School of Fine Arts. Born in 1923 in Coney Island, Jonah’s early influences were discovered during visits to the Metropolitan Museum- “When I really saw the old masters, it blew my mind, of course.” He attended Cooper Union for a year before he was drafted into the Army, serving from 1942 – 1945. Soon after, Jonah moved to Paris where he spent time at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, conversing with other aspiring artists, exchanging ideas, exhibiting his work, seeing established artists, and generally soaking up a fertile creative environment. He exhibited in several shows including the Salon D’Automne, Salon de Mai, and the Salon des Moins de Trente Ans, and had one-man shows in the Galerie Breteau and Les Impressions D’Art. After Paris, Jonah moved to Rome on a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at the La Schola Di Belles Artes. After a year, he returned to the U.S. and exhibited his paintings at the Downtown Gallery in Manhattan. A classically trained painter whose ambitions were frustrated by the New York art world’s obsession with Abstract Expressionism and the lucrative industry that grew up around it. Like so many painters, he was unable to make a living solely from painting, so he worked in the commercial art world and did freelance illustration and design. Throughout this time, Jonah’s commitment to his own art never wavered, and he continued to paint and occasionally exhibit. He was included in the MoMA show, Summer Exhibition: New Acquisitions; Recent American Prints, 1947–1953; Katherine S. Dreier Bequest; Kuniyoshi and Spencer; Expressionism in Germany; Varieties of Realism along with Alexander Archipenko, Francis Bacon, Balthus, Will Barnet, Leonard Baskin, Eugene Berman, Reg Butler, Lovis Corinth, Andre Derain, Otto Dix, Raoul Dufy, Max Ernst, Lucian Freud, George Grosz, Alexei Jawlensky...

Jonah Kinigstein is an artist living in Brooklyn. He works in the scorched earth tradition of such 18th- and 19th-century cartoonists as James Gillray, George Cruikshank, and Joseph Keppler, and embraces their somewhat rococo pen and ink technique as well as their penchant to exaggerate the grotesque. In the 1990s, he used to paste...