Paul Kauvar Smith – Artist Bio

in Artist, Smith, Paul Kauvar

(1893-1973)

Colorado, Mining Town-Landscapes, Still Life Painting, Abstract

Paul Kauvar Smith, sometimes known in Denver as the “Hermit of Stuart Street”, was a solitary man and a singular artist.  He was part of the American and International movements toward abstraction but did not follow abstraction’s established schools.  Instead he created a uniquely personal style of painting with an emphasis on color and shape and the almost magical transformation of ordinary life.

Smith began his professional training studying commercial art and design at the St. Louis School of Fine Art from 1915 to 1916.  World War I interrupted his studies, after the war he returned to the School of Fine Art. Smith also studied art at Washington University in St. Louis.  He headed to Denver in 1921 where he studied at the Denver Art Academy, and with Fred Carpenter and John E. Thompson, master teacher of the Denver avant garde.  In Denver he found considerable success as a full-time painter.  Smith avidly pursued a variety of subjects.  He painted Colorado landscape, mining towns and decaying buildings, relics of the past, still life, and Mexican genre subjects. Smith’s modernist emphasis in design stylized his work into a “mosaic of abstract pattern” without losing the recognizable representational elements. 

Smith was a member of the Colorado and the Denver Art Guilds, and the American Artists Professional League.  He also exhibited with a Denver group called The Colorado Fifteen.  “The Fifteen” came into existence in 1948 as a supportive association of professional artists dedicated to the avant garde.  The group was well known and considered to be an important contribution to Denver’s cultural landscape. Membership was by invitation only and the group often staged their own exhibitions.

Smith also had the distinction of having two solo shows at the Denver Art Museum. The museum bestowed a purchase award and added his work to their Anne Evans collection, as well as reproducing his painting, Houses at Victor, for their Western Heritage exhibition catalog in 1959.  Smith held an unofficial record at DAM for being accepted into shows by various juries more than twenty times.