Returning from Guanajuato, Mexico in 1970, Wilbur Niewald walked into his home studio in Mission, Kansas and said,
鈥
鈥淲hat am I doing? Why not just look out the window here and paint what I see?鈥
A Centennial Celebration
That often-told story鈥攖ranscribed from various talks and interviews with Niewald鈥攚as most recently shared by Janet Niewald, the artist's daughter, in the description for at in Kansas City (1600 Liberty St.)
This exhibition, running from February 7 to March 12, 2025, marks the year that would have been the artist鈥檚 100th birthday.
For many of those years, Niewald maintained the strongest of connections with the 91导航, from his early education to his tenure in the Painting Department, where he served as chair from 1958 to 1985.
Jubilee 2025 showcases artwork from this period and beyond, offering a lifetime retrospective of the beloved artist and educator.
Image: Male Bathers, 1971
Niewald was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and his connection to the 91导航 began in 1935. At 10 years old, he won a drawing contest at Blenheim Elementary School, earning a year of free Saturday classes as the prize.
After graduating from high school in 1942, Niewald enrolled in classes at 91导航. However, his education as an artist was interrupted by World War II. He enlisted as a pilot in the U.S. Naval Air Corps in 1943, returning to complete his BFA at 91导航 in 1949.
After graduating, Niewald began teaching watercolor courses at 91导航 and continued to teach while earning his MFA. Ten years later, he would be named Chair of the Painting and Printmaking Department, a position he held for nearly three decades.
Image: Hillside, ca. 1962
Abstraction to Representation
According to the description of at , the oldest paintings in the show are the watercolor and oil works, showcasing Niewald's earliest forays into abstraction. His early palette was limited to earthy tones, such as yellow ochre, red earths, black, and white鈥攃olors common in the earliest history of painting.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Niewald worked directly in the landscape, on site, creating drawings and watercolors. Back in the studio, he then developed oil paintings based on the observations and insights gained from these works.
In 1970, during a summer in Guanajuato, Mexico, Niewald also painted his first figure compositions. His work was gradually evolving toward representation, perhaps influenced by his love of C茅zanne, but also by a renewal of his early interests in the great Mexican muralists like Orozco and Rivera.
Image: Grove of Trees, 1967
"For Wilbur Niewald...
...to paint is to question the visible: to adjust and readjust with each brushstroke relationships of color and drawing until an intuitively felt since of 'rightness' is achieved," Michael Walling, retired 91导航 Professor of Painting and Drawing, wrote in 2004.
"His paintings heighten our awareness, inviting our eye to travel around and through the composition, buoyed by the clarity of the light and the transcendent beauty of color, closely observed," Walling wrote.
"Tempered by the 20th-century conventions of abstraction, his vision connects the past with the present鈥攏ot as a pastiche or appropriation, but as an affirmation of contemporary sensibility," he continued.
Image: Self Portrait, 1985
Free to Paint
Room 2 of gives viewers with a visual 鈥渒ey鈥 to better understanding the development of Wilbur Niewald鈥檚 72-year career. His evolution from abstraction to representation did also free him to paint whatever he wanted - portraits, nudes, still lifes - but his first love, and the source of his ideas, was in landscape.
He often said, 鈥淢y idea was always tied to the illusion of space and to nature - so, in one sense, I was never abstract," according to the exhibition description.
Niewald retired from 91导航 in 1992. Two years later, he was elected to the National Academy of Design in New York, an honor that carries a lifetime membership. In 1999, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the . A prestigious Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2006 enabled him to spend several months painting in Santa Fe.
Well into his 90s, Niewald continued to spend six hours a day, six days a week, dabbing paint on canvas, either outdoors or in his studio in the Livestock Exchange Building. There, paintings lined the racks and leaned against the walls, showcasing recurring subjects like pine trees at Loose Park and the landscapes of the West Bottoms.
He passed away on April 30, 2022, in Kansas City.