Gustave Kaitz: American Art Deco Master 1913-1992


The singular art of Gustave Kaitz may be described as a highly stylized wellspring of illusion, imagery and symbolism. Gustave Kaitz died in December of 1992 and is considered the last American Art Deco artist of the twentieth century. He leaves behind an extraordinary collection of over 150 paintings and sketches spanning seven decades.

Born in Brooklyn in 1913, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Gustave Kaitz started painting professionally as a teen-ager, selling his Art Deco originals to Gim bel's and Fortunoff department stores. At the same time he was also selling his paintings to individuals, private shops and Greenwich Village galleries. As a young man he attended  the Art Student's League while maintaining his own studio. He started to develop his own style at a young age beginning with a six fold media of water colors, pastels and pencil, painted on board which he perfected through the years. He is best known for his Gatsby Girl, and stylized nudes.

Kaitz's mythologies are peopled in celestial beings -- women who are not really women at all; they are goddesses, Electra or Spiritus, or mythical subjects like Leda and the Swan, Lake Goddess, and his well-known work The Gatsby Girl, illusions beyond the confines of time. They are intellectual concepts, more than tangible creatures of beauty. At the age of seventeen, Kaitz created Sacrifice, woman of universal bondage, acclaimed as one of his great ritual achievements.

It is not only the great artists, but the great sages that have influenced me. I identify with the host of thinkers who taught the Maya-veil of existence - that all is illusion. The world is transformed by the mind. And so it is in life; we each create our own mythology.  ---Kaitz---

Kaitz created many of his works as a gift to a particular ethnic community. His American Opus, was an expression of both empathy and hope to the Native Americans, which he accompanied with a moving essay of their years of struggle and despair. Jesus The Jew  was inspired by Kaitz's Jewish heritage and impassioned spirituality. As a true visionary, Kaitz's triptych, Voyager, of the New York skyscrapers, ascends to the heights of the heavens, where one's inner world of illusion can be envisioned as reality. Completing the triptych, Hope and The Search painted in the mid 1970's, were a celebration of the millennium to come.

Along with his acclaimed international reputation, Mr. Kaitz's philosophical thoughts and essays also won him a place of honor with the International Platform Association, and in 1981, he was included in the Directory of Distinguished Americans for his "Contribution to the Arts". Castle Books, an art and literature publishing company in New Jersey, issued a series of hardcover momento books "Keepsake" featuring six of Kaitz's fantasy images which appeared in 25,000 book stores, art galleries and other outlets throughout the United States.

Although honors were bestowed on him from the art and literary communities, Kaitz remained humble, even reticent. His longtime friend and Noble Prize nominee, the late poet Menke Katz once wrote that Gustave "is always walking the mountaintops, but he knows what's going on in the streets."

Kaitz left behind a cherished legacy to be appreciated for generations to come. It is one in which we mortals co-exist within the worlds of the Gods and Goddesses of our fantasies.

The Kaitz legacy goes beyond his art - it is what he instilled in all  who were part of his world. It is the ability to have great vision - to look beyond - to seek beyond - and to realize your dreams through your passions.

-- Kaitz --

Kaitz's body of work expounds an era of Art Deco in its supreme form. Whether its one of his early works, done in his twenties, or his last, Love Poem, completed at the age of 79, Kaitz's legacy stands alone. The body of work remains unsurpassed in its Deco magnificence taking on the thrust of the twenty-first century.

The Gustave Kaitz Gallery is located in Monticello, New York.
For inquiries regarding the Kaitz estate collection or to purchase selected works, please contact: