“Self Portrait,” 1985, oil on canvas, 24” x 20.5”
Wilbur Niewald’s legacy cannot be overstated. For more than 70 years, Niewald lived and painted in Kansas City, right up until his death in 2022. “JUBILEE 2025: A Centennial Celebration of His Painting” at Haw Contemporary marks what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday and features upwards of 50 paintings and drawings, including works from the 1950s and his final painting. Niewald was truly a master painter, his skill and talent rivaled by few in Kansas City or beyond.
Wilbur Niewald was born in Kansas City in 1925. At age 10, he won an art contest and began taking weekend classes at the Kansas City Art institute. He joined the Navy Air Corps during World War II and then returned to Kansas City where he got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from KCAI. He taught at the school for over 40 years, becoming chair of the painting department, and he also taught summer courses at Yale, the New York Studio School and other colleges. He lived most of his 97 years in Kansas City, married to his wife Gerry, who died shortly before he did.
Niewald was a prolific painter. The 50 works on display at Haw Contemporary offer a cross section of his various styles and subjects but represent only a small fraction of his total output.
In the warm months, Niewald could be frequently seen around Kansas City, painting its parks, buildings and wilds. It wasn’t unusual to spot him in Penn Valley Park, painting the same trees, year after year. The exhibition includes four such paintings, ranging from the 1960s to 2015. The paintings in this long running series are among Niewald’s most iconic and well known and show his clear mastery of brushstroke and color.
During the winter months, Niewald retreated to his home studio, painting still lifes and portraits. The exhibition includes two pairs of portraits of the artist and wife, the first pair made in 1985 and 1990, and the second from 2021 and 2013. These paintings show the couple aging through the years and again show a mastery of color choice and brushstrokes, depicting the small nuances of their faces and subtlety of the shadows with great expertise.
Another scene that Niewald painted many times is “The View from Quality Hill.” It’s an iconic vista of Kansas City, capturing the high cliffs of downtown KC and the West Bottoms Stockyards, including the imposing double decker 12th Street Bridge and iconic buildings like the Livestock Exchange Building and Kemper Arena. Somewhere behind the imposing bridge, a thin strip of white paint likely represents the very building of Haw Contemporary where the exhibition resides.
Niewald experimented with a wide variety of styles, ranging from nearly totally abstract to quite realistic, but never anything approaching photo realism. Niewald’s paintings are always paintings, you can see the brushstrokes, you can see the transparency of overlapping colors. While Niewald was clearly very interested in the subjects that he painted, he was equally interested in the paint itself. What unifies his work, whether representational or abstract, is an economy of brush strokes, and a love of brush strokes. He was not a master in the Renaissance ideal of perfect illusions, where the paint cannot be seen and the brushstrokes are invisible, but rather a modern master, more comparable to Paul Cézanne or Pablo Picasso.
His still life paintings, including “Compote of Apples” from 1990, especially recall Paul Cézanne. From a distance, the apples look entirely real; up close, it is shocking how their round forms are depicted in just a few simple daubs of color. Niewald makes it look effortless. Other paintings also recall Cézanne, like “Male Bathers” from 1971. Here Niewald doesn’t use realistic colors, but instead moody shades of red, yellow, green and blue, to depict human bodies with a careful selection of broad expressive strokes. Though the painting is 50 years old, the thick varnish makes it glisten as if it is still wet.
There are works on display that recall a more cubist style. The oldest work in the exhibition is “Trees and Branches” made circa 1950. Its straight lines and black and tan colors are clearly reminiscent of Picasso and Braque. While it wouldn’t be unusual for a student today to make such studies, this art style was still quite new in 1950 and shows Niewald’s interest in the early 20th century masters of Europe. “Facade II” from 1953 shows remarkable growth in just a few years. Depicting the facade of an apartment building with many windows, the zig-zagging parallel lines could feel completely abstract, but the use of color and shadow ground the image as highly realistic, as if one were looking at the building in the moonlight.
Niewald’s final painting, “Plate of Apples and Green Drape,” is included in the exhibition. It is, in some ways, exactly what the title says it is. But it is also a painting, a few thousand expertly chosen brushstrokes and shades of color, that somehow magically combine to show you apples and a green drape. In many ways, it isn’t a remarkable painting; in fact, the exhibition includes a couple other paintings of apples with the exact same green drape. But this final painting looks a bit shakier. It’s unframed and the sides are still covered with the artist’s fingerprints. Knowing that it was his final painting, it seems more vulnerable, but the fact it was just one more work in a long line of very similar paintings shows Niewald’s dedication to his craft. He probably knew his time was running out, but that was no reason to stop.
It is truly amazing to see these 50 works together in one place. But the exhibit features only a small fraction of his total work, just a cross section of the career of a master artist. One can only hope in the years to come, as Niewald’ s legacy grows, that his next retrospective will be even larger.
“Wilbur Niewald JUBILEE 2025: A Centennial Celebration of His Painting” continues at Haw Contemporary, 1600 Liberty St. through March 12. Hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday – Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday. For more information, visit www.hawcontemporary.com or call 816.842-5877.
