Aaron Kurzen (American, 1920-2011), Valentina (1st Version)

1969, welded sheet steel mounted to a rectangular wooden base, ink signed, dated and inscribed to the underside.

22 3/4 x 11 3/4 x 7 5/8 in.

Author Paul Rhoads reveals, "The yearly ritual of a Valentine card became serious Art for Kurzen. He owned a ‘Valise’ and other works by Duchamp; the Valentines are exemplary of Duchamp’s influence. It consists in considering word play and humor, or ‘banal’ or surprising objects like modified post-cards, as “Art”. In Kurzen's case the Duchampian influence has original aspects, such as how the cutting, folding, covering, partially exposing and layering, or constructing an object such that the way it is discovered is part of the poetry."

Aaron Kurzen, born in 1920, lived through the most turbulent and revolutionary period of American artistic modernism. He has left an oeuvre of unparalleled originality and diversity, covering a variety of complex themes and media including drawings, paintings, sculptural works and other art forms. Encountering Marcel Duchamp in the 1930s, Aaron became the first and most significant disciple of that seminal figure of contemporary art whose message he transmitted to Robert Rauschenberg and the neo-Dadaists in the 1960s.

Educated by Cameron Booth, himself trained in the Parisian ateliers, and Vaclav Vytlacil and Hans Hofmann whose teaching then pointed towards abstraction. These artists along with Duchamp would be lasting influences on Kurzen throughout his long career. Vytlacil helped Kurzen into a part-time teaching position at The Dalton School, a progressive K-12 school where Vytlacil, as well as artists such as as Alexander Archipenko and Rufino Tamayo, had also taught. Kurzen also taught life drawing at NYU, at times, summer sessions at Quinnipiac College, and a seminar on Duchamp at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Reference: The Work of Aaron Kurzen: A Monograph, by Paul Rhoads, published 2023.

Some spotting and marks to metal with some minor mis-shaping.