"Farmer's Market", Milton Kemnitz

This oil/acrylic painting by Milton Kemnitz is 12" x 20", minus the frame. The gallery label says it is a watercolor but guessing the label was made before the gallery received or looked at the painting as it is obviously not a watercolor or gouache. In the original frame, likely made for this odd sized painting. Kemnitz's biography is pretty amazing.

Around 15 years ago acquisition of works by Kemnitz was bitterly contested on auction sites. I decided to add one of his paintings to my collection and was outbid at the last second on drawings, lithographs, sketches, watercolors, oils, acrylics, etc. Finally, frustrated, for this painting I decided to play the game and bid a healthy sum in the final seconds and was still quite surprised to win it by $6 over the next bid. Not sure if there were numerous avid collectors seeking his work or if there was some sort of acquisition effort by a regional museum to build a collection. That being said, this was possibly the best work by him that I had seen for sale. Now, 15 years later, I trust that those frustrated by their loss have called off the contracts on my life.

"Farmer's Market", Milton Kemnitz, 12" x 20", oil on board

Biography:

Milton Kemnitz was born was born on 31 March 1911 in Detroit, Michigan to William Hermann and Amanda Neumann Kemnitz. He was a well known Ann Arbor Michigan artist. For some reason the gallery label on the back of this painting says it is a watercolor, but it is either an oil or acrylic painting. Several articles were written about him during his life and there were at least three obituaries written at the time of his death. I am including one very lengthy obituary as an example:

Early Civil-Rights Leader and popular Michigan artist. Milton Neumann Kemnitz died peacefully in his sleep on 26 February 2005. He was born in Detroit, Michigan on March 31, 1911 to William Hermann and Amanda Neumann Kemnitz.

He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1933 and immediately took a job as a social worker in Washtenaw County. He was fired from that position in 1935 for his activities in organizing the welfare recipients. Although he was rehired, he was launched on a career of social, political, and union activism. He took part in the sit-down strike at the General Motors facility in Flint, shared a house with Walter and Victor Reuther and Norman Thomas when they founded the UAW, and became secretary of the Detroit-based Conference for the Protection of Civil Rights [CPCR].

Milton Kemnitz remained secretary when the CPCR grew into the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties [NFCL]. In June of 1941, he moved the NFCL to Washington, D.C. While many of the causes they took up were futile, all had to be fought, and they had many successes. Among them was getting an unconditional pardon in January of 1939 for Thomas J. Mooney who had been sentenced to death for bombings of the 1916 San Francisco Preparedness Day parade. A grateful Mooney sent the pardon to Milt Kemnitz with an inscription thanking him. In Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, they won the freedom of an African-American farm labor union organizer named Clinton Clark. Their modus operandi was to win a case, and with each victory they put authorities throughout the country on notice to cease and desist practices that were as clearly unconstitutional as they were widespread.

In April of 1942, the NFCL held a National Action Conference for Civil Rights in Washington to protest Jim Crow, the poll tax, the internment of the Japanese, the suspension of the rights of labor to strike, and many other war-time measures. As secretary, Milton Kemnitz voiced from the podium his protest against the attempts to create a national unity at the expense of the constitutional liberties of all Americans. Time has endorsed the vision of the delegates to this conference. Every law that they said was wrong in 1942 has been repealed. Every action they protested in 1942 the country now regrets. Every right they said should be guaranteed in 1942 has been established as a right.

In 1942, the sources of support of the NFCL shifted, and Milt Kemnitz moved to New York City to continue to run the NFCL. He spent much of World War II as a merchant seaman on Liberty ships in the European theatre. During his time on board ship, he aided the National Maritime Union and was a delegate to its congress in 1945. The National Maritime Union had a program to teach seamen to paint, and Milt took advantage of the opportunity. After the war, he returned to New York to the NFCL, but now he had his eye set on a return to Ann Arbor and a career as an artist. His great friend Dashiell Hammett took him to Ben Shahns studio where they discussed how he might make a living as an artist in southeastern Michigan. In October of 1947, Milt moved his family back to Ann Arbor determined to spend as much of his life as possible making art.

Through the rest of his life, Milton Kemnitz painted the buildings, old homes and street scenes of Ann Arbor and University of Michigan; he did many paintings of ships-particularly the Great Lakes ships-and of birds and landscapes of Georgian Bay, and of trains and automobiles. Repeatedly, he painted, drew and made prints of the buildings he thought should be preserved, and he played a great part in efforts to preserve the character of Ann Arbor. He was always interested in learning and using new media: watercolors, oils, pen and ink, silk screen, collage, stained glass.

By a variety of means, Kemnitz managed to make his art widely owned. Among the books he produced are Michigan Memories, Ann Arbor Now and Then, and London and Back. His car drawings were collected in Cars That Caught My Eye, and lately his paintings have been extensively used in a series of grammar books called Grammar Island, Grammar Town, and Grammar Voyage.

He married Esther Lichtenstein on August 18, 1939, and she was the central focus of his life until her death in May of 2000. Thereafter, he moved to Monroe, New York where he lived in the house of his son. He is survived by his son Dr. Thomas Milton Kemnitz and his grandson Thomas Jr.

For many, he's to Ann Arbor what Toulouse Lautrec is to Pigalle, what Al Hirschfeld is to Sardi's, or what Norman Rockwell is to romanticized Americana.

His renderings--signature views of State St. and the Michigan Central Depot, among countless others--thread the fabric of this town like Ann Arborites you only know by sight. His pictures are so much a part of how Ann Arbor remembers itself that those who've lived here long enough might be excused for taking them for granted.

But like the unassuming uncle you're startled to learn was a bartender at Studio 54, there's so much more to Milt Kemnitz than his paintings. To peel back the layers of his life is to be continually astonished at the diversity--and historical significance--of his work. His is a Zelig-like tale in which famous names crop up with textbook regularity.

Kemnitz was involved in the earliest days of union organizing, sharing a house with UAW founders during the union's creation. In the earliest rumblings of the Red Scare, he was fired from his job as a Washtenaw County social worker. And, decades before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he played a central role in the movement for racial equality.

Kemnitz was an activist by nature and by profession. In later years, while literally painting the town, he fought to protect not just people but spaces, both open and built--a beloved Ann Arbor of elm-lined streets and Victorian gables that by the mid-twentieth century had become increasingly endangered.