What’s the most important quality in a portrait?Light? Color? Likeness to subject? According to Everett Raymond Kinstler, arguably the greatest living portrait artist, it’s capturing the feeling of the subject and rendering an emotional likeness. This ineffable feature is common to the world’s greatest portraits by Diego Velásquez, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent — and Kinstler is the torchbearer in that venerable lineage.
Over the course of Kinstler’s six-decade career, five presidents have posed for him (Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton). His portraits of Ford and Reagan are the official White house portraits. He’s also painted First Ladies Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson; over fifty cabinet officers (more than any artist in the country’s history); governors; Supreme Court justices; movie stars from Cagney to Hepburn to Peck to Newman; and university presidents, prominent socialites and business leaders. At last count, the list topped 1,200 portraits.
These days, at eighty-one, Kinstler is slowing down only slightly. Splitting his time between the Easton home he shares with wife, Peggy, and his New York City studio/apartment, he still accepts commissions but says his favorite projects are the noncommissioned works. “It is important for my growth as an artist that I paint landscapes, figures and interiors in oil and watercolor and noncommissioned personal work,” he says. A commissioned work has two inherent limitations, he explains. “A responsibility of the portraitist is to achieve a likeness. But what does a ‘likeness’ mean? When you paint for yourself, it’s your own interpretation. A commissioned portrait generally has restrictions as to size and place to hang. This may reduce my flexibility and freedom and limit my personal interpretation.”
“Had Ray Kinstler lived at another time, he might very well have been called a court painter,” says Louis A. Zona, director of the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. “Like Goya or Rubens, Ray’s abilities move well beyond the portrait. What is truly special about his body of work is that he is able to take the pulse-beat of his subjects, capturing their character and their mind-set. The spirit of who they are emerges and is defined through the brilliance of his vision.”
High praise indeed for a son of the Great Depression whose first job was as an apprentice to a comic book inker at the rate of $15 for a six-day work week. But to sixteen-year-old Ray, who had just dropped out of a New York City technical arts high school, it was a dream job. He had grown up fascinated with comics, illustrated magazines and motion pictures, and at an early age resolved that he would make a living making art. It was here, he says, that he “learned to portray action, suggest mood and render accurate detail.” He couldn’t know it at the time, but it was the ideal training ground for the man who would grow up to become the greatest portrait artist of the twentieth century.
Today, sitting in his National Arts Club studio/apartment in New York City, inside a snow dome of his portraits, Kinstler merges into the background like Kandinsky’s Russian Woman in Landscape, or as his own subjects do in their portraits. There’s a timeless quality to this studio that overlooks Gramercy Park. Sunlight streams in during the day, and because, as Kinstler puts it, light is his mistress, the artist doesn’t do lunch. He is only in the city one or two days a week and when he is, he feels obligated to stay with his mistress and paint.
This is a hallowed space here, beneath twenty-foot ceilings and surrounded by portraits of familiar faces hanging on the walls, leaning against them, set up on easels. On one end of the room, an elegant rendering of Ronald Reagan; on the other, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, John Wayne, Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill and Rudy Giuliani. Tools of the trade mark the space as that of a working artist: paint tubes, easels, shelves of art books and the pièce de résistance — J. S. Sargent’s own palette, which Kinstler uses to this day.
With his full head of hair, prominent brow and tall stature neatly turned out in khakis and a tweed jacket with blue pocket handkerchief, the only telltale signs of his craft are the paint stains on his blue oxford shirt. From his work get-up to the politesse with which he addresses a guest, you know this is a gentleman artist from another era. Not surprisingly, he is no fan of the modern-art movement. “A work of art is the result of the artist’s point of view and personality,” says Kinstler. “Regrettably, we are in an age of sound bytes, instant gratification and celebrity … deadly stuff for a dedicated artist.”
Writer Tom Wolfe befriended Kinstler when he first sat for a portrait and speaks of a shared talent: “Ray is the greatest correspondent in the country because he illustrates his letters. I’ve been told my [framed] collection of Kinstler letters is worth more than my Keogh plan.”
Wolfe is not the only one collecting those missives. The Library of Congress contacted Kinstler for his letters, but too late: Well over 1,000 of them are housed at Boston University, including twenty-nine exchanges with Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and thirty with Katharine Hepburn.
“I am the consummate letter-writer,” Kinstler admits. “I still use a fountain pen. What a loss that today people would save their faxes and emails.”
A day with Kinstler is a stroll back in time: lunches at the 21 Club with James Cagney, dinners at Kate Hepburn’s served on TV trays, private sessions in the Oval Office and Supreme Court chambers. And though Kinstler has a gift for getting people to open up to him, conversations are sacrosanct. He remembers being accosted at an exhibition of his in Washington, DC, during the Watergate era, and one of the works was his portrait of President Nixon.
“I was told a Post reporter wanted to meet me, but I was advised not to talk to her,” he recalls. “She was tough as nails and tried to get me to tell her anything Nixon or his people might have said. I told her I didn’t know anything.
“ ‘Weren’t you curious?’ she asked snidely. ‘Why didn’t you ask?’
“I told her, ‘Taste.’ ”
While the artist insists “there’s no shortcut to experience” and that “most of what I’ve learned is by being burned, scorched or complimented,” he was exceptionally fortunate in his choice — or good luck — with mentors. Looking forward as a teen he had no idea where he was headed. Looking back, though, it all seems fated. Even as an inker’s apprentice, his talent was evident. He shot up the ranks to become an illustrator, going on to work on top comics like Hawkman, Zorro and The Shadow and illustrating covers for books and the popular magazines he adored. While in the army during World War II, he continued illustrating, sending his work from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to New York City.
After returning to civilian life, he attended classes at the Art Students League (ASL) under the legendary artist F. V. DuMond. He eventually befriended him, but not before absorbing one of his most valuable lessons: middle tone. Because he had never worked in color or oil, Kinstler had never learned the nuances of those mediums. It was DuMond who taught him to mix up a soupy blur of colors and create a veil-like texture over the distant background to give a sharper focus to the subject.
“I am not trying to teach you to paint,” DuMond told his student, “but to observe.”
Kinstler took that profound advice to heart. “When painting portraits, I engage in constant conversation,” he says. “Ninety percent of my talking relates to my subject. I’m not being polite; I’m genuinely interested in my subjects. Hopefully, my ‘victim’ becomes relaxed and, in doing so, assumes a natural and characteristic pose. This helps develop my point of view and determines how I portray someone.”
It would be easy to spend an entire day with this man, to probe his brain and come away with a living history lesson. But as daylight wanes, one would inevitably sense conclusion. Still, there are a few questions that must be asked:
Does he have any favorites? “Painting John Wayne, Hepburn and Cagney were singular commissions. I grew up watching their movies, it was a part of my childhood. I think America’s contribution to culture is primarily movies and jazz. Both have affected my creative life.”
What was Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun like? “While painting him, he said, ‘Judgment is important, but as I get older, I place a higher value on compassion.’ ”
Bill Clinton? “The only other person I painted with his level of charisma was John Connally, the former governor of Texas.”
The last word, rightfully so, remains the master’s: “My great mentor, artist James Montgomery Flagg, who created the famous Uncle Sam ‘I Want You’ poster, taught me that all art was feeling and the medium was secondary.”
To see more of Everett Raymond Kinstler’s extraordinary body of work, see his website at everettraymondkinstler.com.