Alexander Kruse

Alexander Kruse (1888-1972) was an Ashcan School-trained realist whose paintings, lithographs, etchings, and prints of New York City’s working class were infused with empathy, theatricality, and wit, reflecting his belief that “art functions as entertainment.” He was also a well known art critic, writing regular columns for the New York Post, the Brooklyn Eagle, and Art Digest in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. 

Kruse was born and raised in New York — his interest in art developed young (he sold his first work at age 12) and a job painting scenery for Oscar Hammerstein while he was still in high school sparked a fascination with both the theater as a subject and theatrical lighting as a way of portraying everyday people. From 1900-1904 he studied art at the Educational Alliance; he went on to the Art Students League, where he took classes alongside Abraham Walkowitz and the Soyer brothers, and his teachers included John Sloan, George Luks, and Robert Henri.

Kruse’s often showed scenes of the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and Coney Island. “Amusing notes from Brooklyn...[with a] side-glance type of wit” wrote one reviewer of a solo exhibit in 1941. Influenced by socialist and anarchist thinkers like Eugene V. Debs and Emma Goldman, Kruse was also known for portraying the noble character of laborers. In some works he explicitly linked labor with Christian symbolism, showing workers to be martyrs and Christ to be a champion of the underclass. In the early 1930s, several of Kruse’s pieces were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and shown at the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum. 

In his work as an art critic and art how-to columnist, Kruse was a staunch defender of realism art over newer movements in modernism, speaking often about the need for artists to have a solid basis in representational art rather than following the “fads” of the day.