I’ve been promising a look at my library, so herewith commences the first in a sporadic series of posts about my propensity to collect art books.
At some point, I’ll take a photo of the whole shooting match (whenever I can get off my lazy butt to do it) and show everyone the large amount of shelf space in my studio that’s dedicated to books.
In the meantime, I’m starting with Da Man, Da Master. I have 4 books of his total - I don’t know if there are other Kuhn titles available - but could only find cover images of 3 of them online:
- The Animal Art of Bob Kuhn, (no cover image available online) published 1973 by North Light, and apparently written by Kuhn himself. Mine is softcover. Has LOADS of his life sketches, arranged by topic (lots you’ve not seen elsewhere: dogs, apes, camels, cows…) along with natural history notes and his own drawing notes. Also has several pages on “the making of a painting” and his approach to same - invaluable. Then pages of sketches plus paintings and more of his charmingly informal information that an artist would appreciate more than a collector. The color and quality are not great, but this is as close as it gets to a Kuhn “how to” book for other artists - he even has compositional diagrams and drawings show he achieves some painting effects. I wouldn’t give mine up for anything.
Cover: two bull moose in an Alaskan landscape - The Art of Bob Kuhn (Masters of the Wild series), Tom Davis, published 1989 by Briar Patch Press Inc. Sections of text and B&W photos (Kuhn’s family, Kuhn on safari) give personal and artistic history and philosophy (and plenty of that), and also include working sketches and life sketches. These sections are interleaved with plenty of gorgeous reproductions of Bob’s work, with a fair amount of story about each piece. Another of my treasures.
Cover: “A Stillness by the Pool”, Bob’s amazing study in red and orange of a tiger over a kill - Wild Harvest: The Animal Art of Bob Kuhn, published 1997 by Chuck Wechsler (Sporting Classics, Wildlife Art Magazine). Much more a typical coffee table book, this is almost all color plates and the artist’s commentary on each. Absolutely wonderful as a compendium of some his best, but doesn’t replace the others.
Cover: “Lair of the Cat”, a cougar painting that won the Prix de West purchase award - Bob Kuhn: Painting the Wild, published 2002 by the National Museum of Wildlife Art. This is a nice little softcover catalog that accompanied the retrospective exhibition the museum held for Bob that summer (2002). Has about 20 pages of monograph covering his history, style, approach, and so on, then about 40-50 pages of color plates. The museum may still have some of these books in its gift shop - worth a call to find out.
Cover: “Pas de Deux”, a snowshoe hare and red fox in a winter landscape
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August 6th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Yup, got ‘em all, too. I found The Art of Bob Kuhn at a art print gallery on the Riverwalk in New Orleans. I spotted it sitting in the window. I knew him as an amazing illustrator and was fascinated to discover that he had become a wildlife artist.
An acquaintance was cleaning out some stuff for her mother and found The Animal Art of Bob Kuhn, which she thought I might like to have. Uh, yeah. I love the fact that it has so many drawings.
Ordered Wild Harvest as soon as it came out. It included an “Artist’s Bookplate”, certifying that it was one of 4800 first edition copies; repro of a drawing of a grizzly bear and signed by the man himself. Now more of a treasure than ever, of course.
Got to see the retrospective in Jackson and snagged the show catalog.
I do a “Bob Kuhn” search on EBay every once in awhile and and last year I scored a nice little catalog of “The Wildlife Art of Bob Kuhn” from the National Cowboy Museum, no copyright date, but the text says Kuhn was 86 years old and the museum appeared to be celebrating its 50th anniversary. The guy seemed to have multiple copies, so you might do a search and see if any are still listed. There are usually a bunch of prints listed and the books show up too sometimes. None of it as expensive as one might think or at least not the last time I looked.
When I get stuck, his books are the first ones I go to to “see what Bob did”. He is such an inspiration. It’s so good of you to let other artists know about his books.