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Kenneth Hayes Miller
1876–1952
BirthplaceOneida, New York, United States of America
Death placeNew York, New York, United States of America
BiographyAn influential teacher, Kenneth Hayes Miller focused on the public life of the modern American middle-class woman in paintings and prints that draw on the monumentality and timelessness of Italian Renaissance art. Miller was born in the upstate New York town of Oneida, a utopian community from whose nineteenth-century founders he was descended. At the age of four he moved with his family to New York City, where he attended the prestigious Horace Mann School. Miller then studied at the New York School of Art, run by charismatic teacher and painter William Merritt Chase, and at the progressive Art Students League with such prominent figure painters as Kenyon Cox (1856–1919) and H. Siddons Mowbray (1858-1928). Following a trip to Europe in 1900, he taught at Chase's School and, after it closed in 1911, he became a revered instructor at the Art Students League, remaining there for the rest of his career.
Miller's early paintings of nude figures set in idealized landscapes were largely inspired by the work of visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917). After World War I, however, his work shifted toward a more realist approach. Following the precedent of the so-called Ashcan School artists, who painted the grittier social and physical aspects of urban life, he began to seek his subjects in contemporary New York, but with a particular emphasis on the fully delineated, volumetric human figure. Female shoppers and pedestrians dominate his canvases of the 1920s and 1930s, and he painted nudes as ordinary women of the present day. He also explored these subjects in etching, which he took up in 1918, and in the centuries-old media of casein and tempera painting.
In 1923, Miller acquired a studio on Manhattan's Fourteenth Street, a dense working-class neighborhood whose bustling shoppers became his characteristic theme. There, he was the core of the so-called Fourteenth Street school of social realist artists, among whom were several of his former students, notably Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and Raphael Soyer. To his many pupils, Miller imparted his respect for the classical principles informing the great art of the past and his fascination with modern urban life.
Miller's early paintings of nude figures set in idealized landscapes were largely inspired by the work of visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917). After World War I, however, his work shifted toward a more realist approach. Following the precedent of the so-called Ashcan School artists, who painted the grittier social and physical aspects of urban life, he began to seek his subjects in contemporary New York, but with a particular emphasis on the fully delineated, volumetric human figure. Female shoppers and pedestrians dominate his canvases of the 1920s and 1930s, and he painted nudes as ordinary women of the present day. He also explored these subjects in etching, which he took up in 1918, and in the centuries-old media of casein and tempera painting.
In 1923, Miller acquired a studio on Manhattan's Fourteenth Street, a dense working-class neighborhood whose bustling shoppers became his characteristic theme. There, he was the core of the so-called Fourteenth Street school of social realist artists, among whom were several of his former students, notably Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and Raphael Soyer. To his many pupils, Miller imparted his respect for the classical principles informing the great art of the past and his fascination with modern urban life.