On the Verbal Art of a Modern Painter: the Work of Jules Kirschenbaum

Abstract

Jules Kirschenbaum, a modern American artist whose work integrates inscriptions and figurative painting, studied in New York under masters belonging to the abstract expressionist and to the purely abstract school, yet he exhibited at the Whitney Museum with Cadmus and other protagonists of "magic realism." Later, his work took a wholly different turn; it became an art about meaning and about the ‘meaning of meaning.’ Kirschenbaum writes: "One contemporary concept is ‘what you see is what you see.’ In contrast to that, I am for an art in which what you see is only the beginning of an endless chain of illusions…"