The LIFE and ART of HARRY KANE
This interview took place over 2 days and 4 hours of in-person conversation in October 2009
I'm here with Hadiya F., daughter of artist Harry Kane. Welcome, Hadiya.
Let's start from the beginning, tell me what you know about your father at a young age?
His parents had come from the Ukraine. His father was a tailor. They lived in Odessa and they came to the U.S. to avoid the persecution. His mother died when he was 5, she was sickly from when they came to the U.S. His father didn't know what to do with him, so his sister took care of
him. She was quite a bit older than him. She took care of him in Philadelphia.
When he was in high school he used to cut school and go to the zoo to draw the animals. He worked on an apple orchard in the summer when he was 17 in Pennsylvania. He did drawings of the orchards. He moved to New York after high school, maybe 18 or 19. He and his friends came from Philadelphia to New York when they were pretty young. They all came and they were gonna be artists. It took a while before he was able to really make a living. It was the depression and they were very poor and my mother said that he and a roommate got in a fight over an egg. That's how bad it was. He kept working and eventually he started getting jobs. I could tell from looking at those drawings that he'd done when he was 17 that he had obviously been drawing for a long time.
When he finally got in, he was doing really well and it was the war that sort of pulled him away.
Tell me about your dad as a person. What kind of guy was he?
He had a great sense of humor. He had a funny way of looking at life. It drove us crazy when we'd
ask him a question and he made a joke for an answer. Did you ever see the old Groucho Marx Show? Groucho had a secret word and if you said the secret word, this bird would come down. So my dad was always imitating that. "If you say the secret word..." (laughter). He was always clowning around. He played the piano by ear, and loudly too. He was well read and self-educated. He could tackle difficult material and was interested in many things. He was chronically late; we were always waiting for him. If I was going to the theater with him, I always took my ticket and met him at the
seat because I didn't want to miss the beginning of the play. He was meticulous about his work
and things like a family snap shot on vacation were always like a real photo shoot. He had a short
temper and guests left our house early on more than one occasion.
Do you know why he changed his name from Kirchner to Kane?
I never asked him. I think he probably changed his name because of the anti-Semitism. There was a lot of anti-Semitism in those days. It was just a given that he was Harry Kane at work and if someone called asking for Harry Kane, it was a work thing. It was funny because when he was in the nursing home they were calling him Mr. Kirchner and he says, "Look, I'm Mr. Kirchner again" (laughter).
Do you have any other siblings?
I have a sister who is an amazing artist. I also have an older brother who has been severely mentally ill since birth. He was in and out of institutions. My father had a close relationship with him. He was very loyal to my brother. When the doctors told him that he should be institutionalized my Dad refused to do that to his son, so he agreed to spend his free time with my brother. He was true to his word on that. He spent every Sunday with my brother, up until he was too ill. My dad saw to getting SSI and care when my brother became an adult. My brother is doing as well as can be expected now, a testament to my dad's tenacity and devotion. My brother and my dad, the two of them, would go off on these silly imitations like Groucho Marx and Hitchcock,
like "Good Eveninggggg"(laughter). Being a big movie fan, he was into Hitchcock.
So, just as Harry was getting his footing as an artist, World War II began?
He was drafted and was sent to Hawaii and did mapping. They were all artists in that unit and they
drew maps. For fun, he painted all these old little shacks he saw in Hawaii. That was the only non-commercial painting that he did. They would paint and they would actually have an exhibition. He wrote to my mother and said he was getting ready for this exhibition. We actually had those pieces hanging in our dining room.
My mother and my brother went to live in Philadelphia with a relative and it was pretty hard and she had petitioned the army to send him home as soon as the war was over. He was one of the first
people to come home.
Click to Enlarge
So, he got sent home and then tried to resume his illustration career?
Well, before he went into the army in the 40's he was doing these ads for a big studio. Then when he came back from the war they didn't take him back. Someone else had taken his place. My cousin Murray gave him a studio space and he worked there for a long time. He mostly worked there, but he would come home and work in the basement and he had this studio set up. He had a drawing table and a taboret, he had all that. Brushes and everything. We would go down and look if he wasn't there. We would pick up the tissue paper and see what he was working on. Sometimes we would ask him about it. He only worked at home when he needed to work on the weekends to get a job done. He was freelance so he wouldn't get paid until he did the job. If he was working at home it meant he was on a deadline, so we didn't bother him much. He was really slow all the time. He didn't manage his time well. He would wait until something was due and then he would be up all night. Several nights in a row sometimes. And then he wouldn't sleep (laughter).
I used to love the basement. His work area always intrigued me. He had a filing cabinet that my mother had been filing clippings from magazines. There were a lot of magazines. LIFE magazine going way back. LOOK, HOLIDAY and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC as well. There was a large cartoon mural pinned to one wall that my father had won at a party in which many artists attended. There were also books, which I found interesting. These were books containing illustrations by artists that he admired like Howard Pyle, NC Wyeth and some children's books. There were always those hard drawing pencils that were sharpened with single edge razor blades. I have such strong memories of this. The smells were distinct and the objects intrigued me. There was photo equipment; he had done some photo developing with my brother. In the closet, where the fuse box was, there were some old paintings, there was one of my mom nude that he had done when he was getting started.
Did your dad take art classes?
He was completely self-taught. He used to go to The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. This guy, I forget what he made his money on, but he was buying the great art. He had Matisses and Picassos, his collection of early modern 20th century art is amazing and he had this house and it was full of this stuff and it's crazy. He also sponsored classes and had art students. I don't know how much help he got, but some of these people were
sent to Paris to study but I don't think my dad got to go, but some of his friends did.
These were all these boys that came to New York together. My dad had access to this collection. He was knowledgeable about art. That was one thing. He'd spend a lot of
time in museums. He was always looking at art and he knew all the artists and used to joke about this one or that one.
What other thngs did your dad work on?
He did movie posters in the late 60's. Oh and Seagrams. He did a lot of work for Seagrams. A lot of advertising work. They always gave him glasses on Christmas so I know it was a lot of years because we got a lot of glasses (laughter). He would say,
"Why dont they give me some whiskey? They always give me glasses!". (laughter)
There were times when he was having trouble getting work and he would ask my aunt, his sister, for help. Her son worked in advertising, so there were a couple of times when he got jobs for him through the companies that he represented, like Stella D'oro.
Probably in the early 70's. I know there were times when he was complaining that he hadn't had work. My aunt Hanna was always trying to help him. She was saying Murray should help his uncle because he made good money. So he got some work for Stella D'oro through that. They make like Italian cookies. He also did two covers for Gourmet magazine as well.
In the Mid-60s he got The Three Investigators. What do you remember about that?
The only thing that I remember was like, "Oh dad got this really great job from Random House"; especially at that time it was hard getting work. He thought that it looked like it would be a lot of work and he could make some money. I know that my mom helped him reading the books because my mom was a children's librarian so she was really good
at that and she helped him to develop the characters, and picking out which scenes to illustrate.
Did your dad ever use real models for any of The Three Investigators books?
I dont know about Three Investigators, but he used models throughout his career.
It was general practice for illustrators to set up models in the poses exactly as they wanted to paint and photograph them and then work from the photos. I know Norman Rockwell did this. There were stacks of model photos in his apartment and we tried to
sort through them, but it was sudden (Harry's decline) and we took what we could. He had regular models that he would use. Actress Ellen Burstyn would model for him quite
a bit when she was early in her career. We found her in the model shots when we went
to clean his place out. He also would look for reference material in books and
magazines. He liked the Sears catalog for reference. My sister said he used models
for The Three Investigators; she was living at home then.
Was he surprised by the popularity of The Three Investigators?
I don't think he knew. It's kind of funny that this is what he's been remembered for. Otherwise he would have totally been forgotten. It's strange.
At some point he felt like he was being taken advantage of and he asked for more money for The Three Investigators?
They didn't want to pay him any more money. He put in so much work into those books. He felt he should get more money and they refused, so he quit. He was never one to back down. He would go all the way with it. That's it. If he asked for more money and they didn't give it, he was out. If he said he was going to quit, he quit.
I noticed that as the series went along he got less and less detailed in his drawings and that was probably because he felt he wasn't getting paid enough, so he didn't put as much effort into them as it went along.
I think he was also getting bored with doing this kind of work. He started doing other things. He had been doing this how many years? He was getting tired of it and wanted
to do something else.
We did find a letter from Random house, there was a letter from the publisher saying,
ya know, congratulating him and thanking him for doing such a good job, but then they wouldn't give him any more money (laughs).
You have kids of your own. Did you let your kids read The Three Investigators?
I brought home the whole set that my dad had. I brought it home and gave it to my son and I guess he loved them. And then my daughter found one in the Malibu library and said, "Oh! Grandpa drew the drawings in this." It was funny. "Isnt this Grandpa?" She was in elementary school. She was very excited about it.
What other things interested your dad?
In his later years he studied filmmaking. He wrote a few scriptsand made several short
16mm films. He also studied set design, but never was able to work professionally at it. He did quite a bit of storyboard work. When advertising jobs were limited he moved on to that.
Your dad got into filmmaking?
That had sort of precipitated the break up. My parents split up in 1969. I came back for Christmas and he was gone. They had moved my brother home at that time.
My mother went back to school and got her teaching credential and masters degree. She was a school librarian in Great Neck. She had the health insurance and she was making some
money and he was making less and less. That's what started the arguments and then he started doing his film stuff and then he wanted to take money to make films, so they started arguing more and more. He made a couple short 8-10 minute films. I think they were in black and white.
He had me act in one. I was in high school or maybe college. In the 60's there was all this push for cultural diversity and everything, so they wanted him to do... it was on African dance and masks. He had met in the class, Ed Lowe, at the New School for Social Research in the late 60's. He was taking these classes and he hooked up with Ed Lowe, because Ed Lowe could afford to rent the equipment. He was always complaining because he didnt think this guy knew what he was doing. It was something that he and my mom hatched up that he might be able to sell this as an education tool, so part of it was the African dances and the music and then they talked about masks and he had me demonstrate how to make a paper-mache mask and the Metropolitan Museum of Art bought it. It was the only one he ever sold. The other one was on Coney Island. There was a scene where people are playing cards, you know how people are at Coney Island. It was like a study of the people on the beach. I think the shot was a close up of the card game and then it pans out to the beach area. That was like his take on Coney Island.
Then when your parents divorced, he moved out and got the studio on 52nd Street in New York?
That studio was where he lived too. It was a nice studio. It was really small but it had beautiful light and a big north facing window. He had a pullout sofa and a really tiny kitchen. He had a drawing table, taboret and flat files. It was rent controlled and not expensive. When he got sick they were anxious to get him out because hed been there a long time and was paying low rent. They could get a lot more rent. We had to go clean the place out. They were bugging my mother about it. He was 75 when he died.
Do you remember your dad's first paying job?
It was probably those western drawings, that's what it looked like. If that wasnt THE first, it was close to it.
Do you know what he got paid for any of these jobs?
No, that wasn't something he talked about with us. I think he did well when we were young, but it always seemed to me that we never had enough money. My mother said so much of it got funneled to my brother for doctors, medications and special schools. It seemed that things became difficult in the 60's when photography became popular and design was in vogue. I think I always had a feeling that being an artist was really tough.
It always seemed like my dad was struggling.
What was it like growing up with a father who was an artist?
Because of my brother, our situation was unique. I got so little time with my dad. He was always proud of my doing art and if I asked for art supplies he always bought me the best that was age appropriate from the art stores where he bought his own stuff. We also got all those sable brushes with the points worn down.
My Dad spent much of his free time with my brother, and my sister and I often just tagged along. We would go off on our own, as my brother wanted to talk about all his problems. But my father did take an interest in what I did and encouraged me. If I asked him how to draw something he would usually demonstrate by drawing on paper napkins and explaining a lot. You always got more than you asked for from him.
What was your house like?
We lived in one of those row houses that were built in New York after the war.
He came back from the army and my mom got pregnant with me right away and we had nowhere to live. We lived with my grandmother. My grandmother didn't
get along with my dad. My grandmother was strong willed too. My uncle Harry
and my dad Harry never got along very well either. My uncle Harry was a
socialist and my dad was a communist, so they would argue (laughter).
Harry & His Daughters on Vacation
What do you remember about the holidays with your dad?
My mother was adamant that Christmas was not a religious holiday; her family was not very religious. My dad's sister when she'd come to visit she'd always come on the Jewish holidays and she had to go to temple and she had to have kosher and it was the whole thing. But my dad, none of it had rubbed off on him, so he didn't care. When my parents got married, they got married in a civil ceremony with a judge, but my grandfather made them have a Jewish wedding with a rabbi.
And your dad worked on a Christmas movie poster and...
Oh, he didn't care. We had a Christmas tree. My mother said up and down it was not
a religious holiday. She thought it was nice. When we were older we had a choice of Hanukkah and Christmas. For presents, sometimes we picked Hanukkah and
sometimes we'd pick Christmas. But our street was Menorahs up and down.
The thing is, my mother was the one with all the built up prejudices and things because
if you talked about Jesus, well, we didn't talk about him. Because she was teased as
a child, "You killed Jesus". There was a lot of anti-Semitism in those days.
My dad used to joke about bar mitzvahs. I guess he was bar mitzvah'd because his
father was very religious. My dad used to say, "Today, I am a fountain pen", because
that was the standard gift. Instead of saying, "Today, I am a man", my dad would say, "Today, I am a fountain pen" (laughter). That was my dad's humor. The other one was about the guy who was starving and the garbage man would come out to collect the garbage and they'd yell, "Garbage!", and the starving man would say "Send it up!"
That was one of his jokes. I remember it because he kept telling it over and over.
What was he working on that you think he might of said to himself, "Hey, I can make a career
out of this?"
He knew he had talent and always wanted to do art. Whatever he was asked to do he would do. He knew what good illustration could do for the text. He was very good at doing portraits. He captured expressions. I think he wanted to do fine art, but got so bogged down with making a living that he didn't get around to it.
He did this Santa Clause and he used to say "My Santa Clause is as good as the Nast Santa." You know the one that Coca-Cola always used? He was always like, "This guy got famous
and I didn't." He was just as good and that used to burn him up. Jokingly, he always referred
to his Schlitz beer illustration as of one of his great accomplishments. He called it his
George Bellows. (laughter)
My mom envisioned him being more like NC Wyeth and having children and being a great dad.
Towards the end of your dad's career, when he was getting up there in age, he wanted to sell his art; can you tell me about that?
He wouldn't reveal what was going on. He was very secretive. He simply wouldn't tell anyone anything. If I had known what he was doing I would have sent him some money. When we saw him in the nursing home, there he is, and he was like so drawn and it was so shocking when we first came. However as we were talking to him he was there and then he says, "You know those pieces I gave you? You sell them, and you give me half the money." (laughter)
He wanted more money. He had the feeling that he had no money. That he was destitute and he needed to sell this stuff. He got sick and we came in and went through all his stuff. We saw the bill of sale (for the art he sold). He didn't get much money. He didn't live much longer after that.
After your dad passed, you went to visit your brother and took him to the Whitney where your dad had taken you kids so many times before?
Yeah, I was there just a couple years ago with my brother and the guard was telling me that it was his last day and he said, "I know you, I know him. What happened to your old man? Your father? He was such a nice man." I told him that he had passed. He remembered my dad.
My brother and my dad always had a routine. With my brother everything had to be a routine. Like they would always go a certain place for tea after they went to the Whitney. In the springtime they would go to a park and listen to records. He had one of those early Panasonic portable record players that played on like eight D cell batteries. In the winter they would go to museums. They went like every week at the same time, so the guards knew them.
What do you want people to remember your dad for?
Ya know, I was thinking about that. He was a really good artist and worked hard at the craft of it. It's sad for me to think about how difficult his professional life was, and how little recognition he got for all the work and talent that went into what he did. When my mom met my dad, he was at the beginning of his career and had huge potential and a lot of talent and it didn't ever pan out into more than just making a living. That's the sadness of his life. I think there was some disappointment. He was feeling so down trodden and he felt like he was reduced to book illustrations and now this is what's kept him from obscurity (The Three Investigators). If people can know about my dad, ya know, even though he's gone and he'll never know, but at least that's like some fulfillment of that promise. That more people would see what he did. He had amazing talent, but not much luck. It is a great joy to see how much his work for The Three Investigators is appreciated. Maybe he will be remembered after all.
I think we were lucky to have your dad doing the illustrations for The Three Investigators.
He made us believe that we could all be the 4th investigator. Thanks for your time :)
Harry (center) Posing For
One of His Own Illustrations
