The Education of John Kane

Abstract

This article considers the imbrication of labour and painting in the work of John Kane (1860–1934), one of the preeminent ‘self-taught’ painters of the 1930s. Over the course of nearly five decades, Kane worked in Pittsburgh’s mines, railroads, and steel factories, and as a paver and housepainter. By tracing the commonalities of facture and materiality in Kane’s labour and painting, this article demonstrates Kane’s challenge to conventional divisions of art and labour and aesthetic hierarchies, and illuminates the fraught status of amateurism in American art of the 1930s.