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In the summer of 1976, married artists Luise and Morton Kaish were residents at MacDowell, the revered artist colony in New Hampshire. “They did that a lot,” says their daughter, Melissa Kaish. Luise and Morton were a team, traveling together all around the world throughout their 65-year marriage: Italy when Luise won the Prix de Rome in sculpture at the American Academy in Rome, Dartmouth when they had another joint residency, Alaska to get inspired by the otherworldly landscapes.
One perk of their tandem residencies was no doubt observing each other as they puzzled through their work. So when Luise was frustrated by her experiments with canvas one afternoon at MacDowell and threw her scraps into her studio’s fireplace, Morton was there to witness the epiphany that followed. He later recalled: “As the canvas burns and curls, she sees rich black and brown tones that are created by the fire. They’re bold, they’re subtle, and she knows they could never be made or matched by paint or pigment…. She snatches it all out of the fire, dragging the burning strips onto the stone floor, and begins to recompose, to layer, to cut, and to arrange.”
Right then, crouched on the floor of MacDowell’s Cheney studio, Luise discovered a whole new way of working. She called these collages of scorched canvas her Burntworks. Up to that point, she was mostly known as a trailblazing sculptor of monumental bronze figures, but it is the Burntworks that would define the next chapter of her creative life; she made more than 15 of them over the next decade.
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“It really was this radical moment for her, where she is kind of destroying something to create it,” says curator Susan Fisher. Fisher is the director of the Kaish Family Art Project, which stewards the legacies of both Luise, who died in 2013 at age 87, and Morton, who died just last week at 98.
The Burntworks allowed Kaish to treat canvas like a sculpture, building it up in subtle but tactile layers, each possessed of varying degrees of char, like used coffee filters. The artworks she created at MacDowell, and soon after she returned home to New York City, are compelling in their contradictions: raw and spare in parts and aggressively singed in others; precisely glued but with intentional asymmetries and fraying edges throughout. (These really are works to take in up close.) She would bring these elements into later, smaller Burntworks, to which she added paint and natural materials like tree bark, but these early monochromatic pieces have a kind of poetic austerity. It’s astonishing how much she said with just fabric and fire.
MacDowell’s exhibition space in Manhattan will display Kaish’s early Burntworks publicly for the first time ever, alongside her later collages and three metal sculptures. The show kicks off a centennial celebration of the artist’s life. Titled “Luise Kaish: Fire on the Mountain,” the jewel box exhibition illustrates the wide-ranging practice Kaish pursued over her six-decade career and makes the case that a few, mostly unknown, works she made in her 50s served as a turning point. (The centennial celebrations culminate in an exhibition at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, opening in late 2027.)
“Fire on the Mountain,” organized by Fisher, is “a powerful testament to a pivotal moment in the creative life of an artist,” says Chiwoniso Kaitano, executive director at MacDowell. “For over a century, our formula has been time, space, and freedom to create, and the natural environment of MacDowell that inspired Kaish’s unique body of work is a large part of that.”
The inspiration Kaish found in nature is potent, with references to the New Hampshire landscape in Firepond I and Monadnock I, both from 1976. Looking through sketchbooks of Kaish’s time at MacDowell, Fisher found many drawings of the flowers and birch trees that would have surrounded her. Kaish’s abstract collages certainly seem to incorporate their shapes. She kept up the nature theme in later painted Burntworks like Aspen (1981), with the spectacular color range of a peak-foliage forest.
Kaish, like many artists of her era, was also deeply interested in outer space. “She was a NASA fanatic,” says Melissa. Take her 1977 collage Creation, which at five feet tall is a towering homage to a celestial life force. A canvas disc at the center is like the sun, with squiggly, segmented rays radiating outward.
Kaish also plays with celestial shapes in 1978’s Poet in Two Worlds (Deep Space), a standout work of her entire oeuvre. “This is one of her major, major works,” says Fisher. In the archives she found a photo of the artwork when it was still monochromatic, closer to the early Burntworks made at MacDowell. Later, Kaish filled it in with color: blues in shades from robin’s egg to royal, with bits of yellow accenting the burnt orb at the center. In its heaviest sections the work is built up layer by layer: canvas, paint, ink, canvas. Yet in others, there’s the lightness of an untouched base. Instead of a sun, Poet in Two Worlds looks like a space shuttle shedding the parts it no longer needs.
Nearby, echoing the central orb of Poet in Two Worlds is a small bronze sculpture called Cosmos with Unborn Planet, from 1970, which Kaish made when she was at the American Academy in Rome—a prestigious residency during which she had studio visits from Philip Guston and Buckminster Fuller. At that point she was in her late 40s and had already been included in multiple Whitney Biennials and in the influential 1959 show “Recent Sculpture U.S.A.” at the Museum of Modern Art, alongside Ruth Asawa and Alexander Calder. She was even the subject of two New York City solo exhibitions, one at the Sculpture Center and another at the Jewish Museum—impressive accomplishments for any mid-career artist, especially for a woman in 20th-century America, and especially for one working in the macho world of sculpture.
“My mother was a very passionate person,” says Melissa. No doubt ambitious and intrepid too.
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Luise Meyers was born in 1925 in Atlanta, but she mostly grew up in Flushing, Queens, where her family moved in 1930. She studied at Syracuse University, where she met Morton Kaish while ice-skating, and completed her bachelor’s in 1946. She won a postgraduate traveling fellowship and studied in Mexico (instead of the original plan of Europe, which was then besieged by war). At that time Mexico City was a hotbed of radical thinking and artistic experimentation. She studied art history with Diego Rivera, joined a choir, and rode with the Mexican Olympic riding team.
She returned to Syracuse for her MFA, studying under acclaimed Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović and winning a competition to create a statue of the school’s mascot at the time. In 1948, Morton and Luise married (while accepting his proposal, she warned him the white-picket-fence life was not for her), and after graduate school they both took jobs doing fashion illustration. They lived off of one income and saved the other, using it to travel through Europe, which they would do several times throughout their lives.
In the ’50s and ’60s, Kaish received steady commissions—often from temples and churches for religious-themed modernist sculptures—and exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States. By the late ’70s, she was a well-respected art world name, and in 1980, she was appointed chair of the painting and sculpture program at Columbia University.
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Kaish had a deep connection to spirituality, particularly Jewish mysticism. She once wrote that “the Bible…the Zohar…the [Kabbalah] have been sources of poetic and symbolic imagery” for her work. Though her early figurative sculptures like The Great Blessing of Abraham and Angel of Joshua are overt in their religious references, her abstract Burntworks feel no less reverent. In an essay in Kaish’s 2021 monograph, art historian Norman L. Kleeblatt writes that “[h]ighly relevant to the physical fabrication and psychological foundations of Kaish’s Burntworks is the kabbalistic notion of the ‘breaking of the vessels’ and the related concept of tikkun, or healing the world.”
Is it possible that in layering strips of charred material, Kaish was trying to heal something? I think of Monadnock I, one of her first Burntworks created at MacDowell, in which large rectangular patches of raw canvas are layered on top, almost like a bandage applied to stem the bleeding. By using the destructive force of flame, and balancing the scorched bits with pristine counterparts, she made the case for harmony between light and dark.
Though forged with simple materials, Luise Kaish’s canvas collages do indeed evoke a sense of wonder. In 1981 she showed a selection of them at Staempfli gallery. For the exhibition’s catalog, she wrote: “I like ambiguity, I like clarity. With the ‘Burntworks’ I found paths to both…I like to think of these landscape collages as brief poems, as worlds in themselves, where through the very smallness of a window, we can glimpse the stars of the universe.”
“Luise Kaish: Fire on the Mountain” is on view at MacDowell NYC, 521 West 23rd Street, from October 28 to 31.