At 84, an Artist Tries Something New: Displaying His Work
Arthur Kern with his sculpture in a retrospective of his work at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
NEW ORLEANS — One of the benefits when people think that you are dead is that you do not have to attend social occasions. This is how Arthur Kern sees it, though he has been so detached from local art circles for so long that he was unaware that some of his former colleagues had assumed the worst.
But since his retirement as a Tulane University art professor in 1996 — and for many years before that — the reclusive Mr. Kern has been working quietly in his basement studio, sculpting exquisitely grotesque bodies and surreal horses out of fiberglass, filling up his shelves and mantels and a large homemade storage shed in the backyard. Few were aware he was working at all. With the exception of a small show in Lafayette, La., in 2005, Mr. Kern, 84, has not put his work on display for decades.
That changed on March 19, when “Arthur Kern: The Surreal World of a Reclusive Sculptor,” a major retrospective of his work, began at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art here in New Orleans, his first solo show since the 1970s. The exhibition, which runs through July 17, is being curated by John Berendt, the author of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and a part-time New Orleans resident.
“What I loved about it was not just the sculpture but the sculptor himself,” said Mr. Berendt, who encouraged Mr. Kern to consider an exhibition after he heard about his work from a friend who had heard about it from one of Mr. Kern’s cousins.
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Mr. Kern.Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
Mr. Kern, who had already been mulling what to do with his life’s work, agreed. Sort of.
“I wasn’t sure I really wanted a show,” he said in an interview at his modest but sculpture-filled house. “I’m still not, to tell you the truth.”
If this all came about somewhat unintentionally, so did much of Mr. Kern’s artistic career. He grew up in New Orleans, drawing and painting seriously but not exactly consumed with ambition, at one point during an interview comparing the urge to create art to having a disease.
“I was not all that gung-ho about being an artist,” said Mr. Kern, a slight and soft-spoken man with a gray thumbprint of a mustache. “It just happened to be something I did all the time.”
In the late 1950s, after a couple of years of military service, he went to work as a designer at a flooring company in Pennsylvania. He was good at it, and he dryly joked that other artists would envy how widely his work had been seen, though it had mainly been viewed beneath shoes in elevators and office buildings.
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“Self Portrait” (1968).Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
Still, it was here where Mr. Kern was introduced to epoxies that were left as samples by traveling salesmen. He began using epoxy to add texture to his artwork — later turning to polyester resin, which is cheaper and, as it goes into boat building, easy to find. During his years in the flooring business, Mr. Kern never stopped painting, displaying his work in solo and group shows, including as part of a 1962 group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
But after he left Pennsylvania to teach art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in the late 1960s, Mr. Kern destroyed virtually all of his paintings and drawings. Though he would teach painting for the next three decades, he devoted his private time exclusively to sculpture.
Most of his work is still molded out of polyester resin in a process similar to old-fashioned bronze casting. All of the sculptures feature either humans or horses.
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“Silent Myth II” (2008).Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
“He’s chosen forms that go back to the early cave paintings,” said Bradley Sumrall, the chief curator for the Ogden Museum, who compared Mr. Kern’s work to pieces ranging from ancient Chinese statuary to Luis Jimenez sculptures to steampunk art.
“We went wild over it,” he continued, recalling his first visit to Mr. Kern’s house. “As someone who’s worked in the art world for 20 years, I was shocked that he’d never come up in conversation.”
Some of the works feature the human figure, often with some macabre distortion or a portion peeled away to expose an eerily lifelike eye underneath. A large room of the exhibition is dedicated to the horse sculptures, some life-size, some purse-size, all surreal variations on a small horse model he made in the early 1970s because, he said, “one day I decided now I’m going to make a horse.”
Perhaps most striking are the strange contraptions that look like standing spotlights, but in place of the bulbs, there are faces, distorted by transparent but thick molded lenses. Depending on where you stand, the face behind the lens looks different, just as you would look different to the face inside as you moved around to look at it. Though Mr. Kern is stubbornly resistant to interpretation, he eventually volunteers an idea about these.
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“Self Portrait” (1969).Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
“I can never get into somebody else’s brain or their experience,” he said. “We are all isolated in that sense in our own worlds.”
It is fair to say that Mr. Kern has been more isolated than most, having long ago decided that “divorcing myself from everyday life would allow me to let things happen.” He did not show and did not sell, except a piece here and there, and did not hire an assistant, preferring to work alone in his dark studio with his bizarre tools: reconfigured cheese graters, kitchen knives and dental instruments.
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“Clown Emeritus” (1985).Credit William Widmer for The New York Times
Though Mr. Kern is fine with the term hermit, it could be somewhat misleading; he may have withdrawn from the art world, but he has a wife of 60 years, three daughters and a friendly manner. He also has a cousin in town, who several months ago happened to have photographs of Mr. Kern’s work lying on her coffee table, where they were spotted by her friend Dr. Brobson Lutz, a physician in New Orleans with a keen appreciation for the uncommon.
Dr. Lutz is a friend of Mr. Berendt’s, and several days later, they were visiting Mr. Kern’s house. Eager museum officials soon followed, and now Mr. Kern is having to decide how he is going to make it through the next few weeks.
“A lot of the things that are going on, and what will go on, are the very things I tried to escape from before,” he said, apparently referring to the interview he was giving at that very moment. “I’m 84 years old and I have never given a talk about my work.”
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