John Kane - Begins As A Painter

Begins As A Painter

He left his watchman job to paint steel railroad cars at the Pressed Steel Car Company in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, on the Ohio River just south of downtown Pittsburgh. He began to draw on the side of railroad cars on his lunch hour to "fill in the colors". His sketched landscapes disappeared after lunch beneath the standard, solid color of the railroad car paint. For a short time he tried to earn money by enlarging and tinted photographs for working-class families.

Kane had married Maggie Halloran in 1897 at St. Mary's Catholic Church in downtown Pittsburgh. The death of an infant son in 1904 led him into a vortex of drinking and depression, which caused long periods of wandering, during which he worked as an itinerant house painter and carpenter. In Akron, Ohio in 1910 he first began to do pictorial paintings on discarded boards from construction sites. By the end of World War I, Kane was again in Pittsburgh, where he spent the remainder of his life. He remained separated from his wife and children.

In both 1925 and 1926 he submitted paintings to the Carnegie Internationals sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art, but the works were rejected. The next year, however, Kane found a champion in painter–juror Andrew Dasburg, who persuaded the jury to accept Kane’s Scene in the Scottish Highlands (Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh). The story of the untrained 67-year-old painter's success was trumpeted by the newspapers. The publicity around the show came to the notice of Kane's wife, who was living in West Virginia, and with whom he'd lost contact for over ten years. They reconciled and remained together during the last years of his life.

When it was discovered that he had painted over discarded photographic images, purely for financial reasons, he was hounded by newspapers and unsuccessful artists who claimed him a sham. Kane continued to paint his primitive landscapes and self-portraits, including his famous Self-portrait (1929) in the collection of MoMA, New York. He had his first New York one-man show in 1931.

John Kane died of tuberculosis on August 10, 1934 and is interred at Pittsburgh's Roman Catholic Calvary Cemetery.