Bruce Kurland: Illusion and the Little World

Bruce Kurland was an American still-life painter working from the early 1960s until his death in 2013. Born in New York in 1938, Kurland was initially influenced by earlier European practitioners of the still-life genre such as Fabritius, Chardin and Morandi, whose quiet reveries he inflected with a contemporary vision of mortality derived from the visceral imagery of Francis Bacon. Today, his work can be seen as part of a singular strain of twentieth-century North American painting that includes artists such as Walter Murch and Gregory Gillespie. Kurland infused his paintings with powerful attention to, and a tangible affection for, nature "red in tooth and claw," conjuring "a little world with which I could do anything I wanted, without losing the illusion." This handsome volume, with its cloth binding and tip-on cover, includes essays by poet Lisa Jarnot, gallerist Victoria Munroe and Chief Curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Eliza Rathbone.