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| the semi abstract figurative piece above was painted in 1930's and acquired from a London gallery |
Born in London in 1871 to a wealthy family of German coffee merchants, Cissie Kean - one of six children - was certainly not destined to become a painter. Although her interest in painting was established at an early age, her family did not however think that a career as a painter would be compatible with her social background.
After being crippled as a young adult in circumstances that have never become quite clear, the strong willed Cissie decided to dedicate her life to painting. She went to Paris where she studied for a number of years, completed her studies at the Académie Julian, where she was awarded a medal in 1906. The work of André Lhote and Jean Marchand influenced her painting during this first Paris period. Before the Great War, Kean travelled extensively to Italy, Spain and Brazil, meticulously recording her changing surroundings in her sketchbooks, which she then used to work into watercolours and oil paintings.
During the First World War she returned to her family in London, setting up a studio and travelling around England with fellow women artists such as Bertha Johnson and Lisa Sampson, regularly attending painting groups. During the period 1916-19 she found herself painting in Chipping Campden with New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins.
After the war, Kean travelled back and forth between London and Paris, with breaks in the Mediterranean. During the 1920s she was working under Lhote again, exploring the human figure through the cubist style, and was also attracted to the purism of Léger and Ozenfant. She spent time in Léger’s atelier where she found her true artistic identity working in oils. She started experimenting with keeping the very careful balance between representation and abstraction which the cubists sought to maintain. Following closely Léger’s approach to subjects, the figures and objects in her canvases are often simplified in an attempt to imbue them with a sense of greater vigour, movement and monumentality rather than to analyse their structure.
As an independent, single woman of means, Cissie’s lifestyle, in some ways, exemplified that of Englishwomen in her position, but what makes her life extraordinary is the dramatic development in her work once she was in her 50s.
Alas, Cissie instructed that her papers be destroyed after she died, but one of her closest friends, Lila Sampson, an aunt of Roger Hilton, recounts in her diaries the time these ladies spent studying in Paris before the First World War. Here they developed their skills as miniaturists, Cissie winning a medal for this at the Académie Julian. When Cissie returned to Paris after the War, however, it was to work in oils in the studios of the avant-garde painters, Léger, Ozenfant and Lhote.
In London, Cissie was one of the founder members of the Three Arts Club, and this remained her base for 25 years while she travelled extensively in England, on the Continent, and to Brazil to visit one of her brothers. In 1936 she took up residence in the prestigious new apartment block at 49 Hallam Street, her home until shortly before her death. She returned to London where she died in 1961 in her ninetieth year. She never married.
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