Cubist Still Life

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1884, Frederick Kann trained as an artist in Prague and exhibited with the German Expressionist group Die Brücke before immigrating to the United States. He worked in New York as a freelance artist and became a naturalized citizen in 1910. Then, from 1927 to 1936, Kann moved to Paris, where he exhibited alongside abstract artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Robert Delaunay. He returned to the United States in 1936 to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Kann was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, a group dedicated to promoting the understanding and acceptance of abstract art, and notably exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in the 1940s. His three-dimensional purist compositions, as embodied by the present work, stress the dynamic power created through the linking of lines and color planes.