If you enjoy learning about women painters through the men of closest adjacency, this season has given you the singular delights of Pollock/Krasner at the Met, Olney Gleason’s Elaine de Kooning offering at Independent and Berry Campbell’s grander presentation, and you may be searching for a Boy Genius peg on which to hang the resplendent Diana Kurz.
Kurz comes from the Greatest Generation of Painters—those painter’s painters who hit their stride in the 1950s and 60s when for some reason the world seemed transfixed by paintings about painting, and if you are predisposed to search the canon for a man to hide a women behind, Philip Guston makes a good candidate. Kurz studied with Guston at Yaddo in 1969, and there’s a consonance between her arc, from radical abstraction to painterly figuration—and not a little of Guston’s virtuosity in her stroke. But then, you can see a similar arc in Elaine de Kooning, or Bill de Kooning; past the broad strokes the comparison breaks down. Kurz’s return to figuration, portraiture, and narrative, has an elegiac fabulation to it—more painterly than Franz Marc, but expressionist in that earliest usage of the term.
Kurz’s 2026 painting of the dancer Isadora Duncan hanging now at the Trenton Museum is intriguing for the shrill palette and billowsome forms—both Kurzian signatures—as well as its subject. Elaine de Kooning’s JFK has a seasick quality by comparison with this powerful woman.
The jewel-box exhibition at Lincoln Glenn showcases works from the late 1950s and early 60s when comparisons, match-ups, and isms fail: here is a woman painting like nothing else. The informative catalogue essay mentions the brief but impactful encounter between Kurz and Hans Hofmann, and there is a strange echo between Hofmann’s canvases of the same period.
Hofmann is a Yoda-like figure: you hear his name spoken in hushed reverential tones but after a few encounters it’s like, what’s the big deal? Do or do not, there is no try! Push-pull you will! I filed Hofmann in the same manila tab as Robert Henri and left it at that. But then I saw: Veluti in Speculum at the Met. I was probably in high school? I don’t know, but the mind still boggles at how amazing his canvases of 1959-62 were, even though he had been the most talked-about teacher for decades before he set to work. Where did this come from?!
Kurz was cooking with the same gas. Tho mostly smaller, Kurz’s canvases have nearly the same aspect ratio as Hofmann’s, oriented vertically, addressing the body to activate the space between viewer and painting. Lines seem to fall from the edges of her canvas like shed snakeskin—Kurz uses a different device than Veluti to affirm the primacy of the picture plane, but her strokes are acutely aware of the bounds of the rectangle as she vibrates her space against them.
Kurz reflected recently on that period of her career. After moving away from pure abstraction, she found that it was impossible to paint in the same way again. She could go through the motions, but it was just an imitation. The painter she once was was fired with the excitement of the struggle. Now knowing how to do it, she can make a fine picture, but the excitement—the discovery, the fear of not landing it—the danger’s gone, and with it, some of the excitement. Kurz has not shirked from exploring new territories, scaling new heights, but the razor’s edge she walked in those halcyon years produced magical objects.
Nothing but paint—but in the hands of a master, that’s enough.
