Louis I. Kahn, Street of the Elms, No. 1, Gloucester, Cape Ann, Massachusetts, 1934-35, charcoal on paper, 8 2/3 x 11 3/5 inches. (BP#1742)
By Gred Cook
Cape Ann, Massachusetts, is the subject of a pair of Depression-era travel studies by the famed, late Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn that New York’s Lori Bookstein Fine Art is presenting at the Works on Paper fair in New York this weekend.
A watercolor said to depict Cape Ann seems (in reproduction) to depict a few houses or shacks along a road that winds through sandy hills. Its loose, open composition brings to mind John Marin’s work. A charcoal drawing depicts a shadowy elm-lined Gloucester street.
Both works date to the mid 1930s, putting Kahn among the long line of American modernists who vacationed or summered in Gloucester and Rockport during the 1930s and ‘40s, including Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Adolph Gottlieb, Aaron Siskind, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.
“Louis I. Kahn: Architect as Artist,” Lori Bookstein Fine Art booth at Works on Paper fair, Feb. 29 to March 3, 2008.
Related: The New York Sun has an article about the Bookstein exhibition of Kahn’s travel drawings here.