Maude Kerns

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Maude Irvine Kerns (1879 – 1965) was an American artist. Kerns was born in 1879 in Portland, Oregon, where she was raised by her pioneer parents. After high school, she graduated from the University of Oregon, the California School of Fine Arts and later Columbia University, where she received a second degree in fine arts under the guidance of Arthur Wesley Dow. After spending time traveling through Asia and Europe seeing the works of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and others from the avant-garde art movement, as well as a stint with renowned art teacher Hans Hofmann, Kerns returned to teach art at the University of Oregon in Eugene where she was named head of the Arts Department. She remained until her retirement in the 1940s. Many of her early works were destroyed during a fire at the art school.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, Kerns made a name for herself in the world of abstract art, painting in what was called at the time the "non-objective" art movement. A spiritual woman, she embraced the art-as-spiritual expression philosophy of Wassily Kandinsky. Her paintings were recognized and championed by Hilla von Rebay, chief advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, who purchased a number of her paintings, along with art from other standouts in the early American abstract art scene, for his Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later renamed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) in New York. Kerns died in 1965. The Eugene Art Center, to which she was a major donor, was renamed The Maude Kerns Art Center in her honor.

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