At New York’s MacDowell, the Fiery Epiphanies of Artist Luise Kaish Unfurl

The inspiration Kaish found in nature is potent, with references to the New Hampshire landscape in Firepond I and Monadnock I, both from 1976. Looking through sketchbooks of Kaish’s time at MacDowell, Fisher found many drawings of the flowers and birch trees that would have surrounded her. Kaish’s abstract collages certainly seem to incorporate their shapes. She kept up the nature theme in later painted Burntworks like Aspen (1981), with the spectacular color range of a peak-foliage forest.

Kaish, like many artists of her era, was also deeply interested in outer space. “She was a NASA fanatic,” says Melissa. Take her 1977 collage Creation, which at five feet tall is a towering homage to a celestial life force. A canvas disc at the center is like the sun, with squiggly, segmented rays radiating outward.

Kaish also plays with celestial shapes in 1978’s Poet in Two Worlds (Deep Space), a standout work of her entire oeuvre. “This is one of her major, major works,” says Fisher. In the archives she found a photo of the artwork when it was still monochromatic, closer to the early Burntworks made at MacDowell. Later, Kaish filled it in with color: blues in shades from robin’s egg to royal, with bits of yellow accenting the burnt orb at the center. In its heaviest sections the work is built up layer by layer: canvas, paint, ink, canvas. Yet in others, there’s the lightness of an untouched base. Instead of a sun, Poet in Two Worlds looks like a space shuttle shedding the parts it no longer needs.

Nearby, echoing the central orb of Poet in Two Worlds is a small bronze sculpture called Cosmos with Unborn Planet, from 1970, which Kaish made when she was at the American Academy in Rome—a prestigious residency during which she had studio visits from Philip Guston and Buckminster Fuller. At that point she was in her late 40s and had already been included in multiple Whitney Biennials and in the influential 1959 show “Recent Sculpture U.S.A.” at the Museum of Modern Art, alongside Ruth Asawa and Alexander Calder. She was even the subject of two New York City solo exhibitions, one at the Sculpture Center and another at the Jewish Museum—impressive accomplishments for any mid-career artist, especially for a woman in 20th-century America, and especially for one working in the macho world of sculpture.