About the artist:

Kaitz was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 6, 1913, to Polish immigrant parents. His father was a businessman who ran a nightclub on Coney Island, and his mother was a homemaker. They encouraged his interest in art, and he channeled his love for French artists of the Art Deco movement into his paintings. “He continued painting in that way. He didn’t really have an evolution in painting,” Kinch said. “He preserved that painting style into his later works, which is why we call him one of the last to continue painting in that style.” Kaitz took a 23-year hiatus from painting while he ran an antique store in Brooklyn with his wife, Mildred. They collected 19th-century art and oil paintings — expanding to three stores before relocating their collection to Monticello in upstate New York. There they had a summer home, where they entertained artists, writers and poets. Longtime friend and Pulitzer Prize nominee, the Yiddish poet Menke Katz, once wrote that Kaitz “is always walking the mountaintops, but he knows what’s going on in the streets.” Kaitz’s first era of painting focused on mythical, goddess-like figures, while his later work involved celestial landscapes that could have been inhabited by the creatures in his earlier paintings. One futurist-inspired painting is “Voyager,” made in 1975. The abstract landscape appears to show a jagged spear of ice pointing toward a fractured moon, while orange ribbons of smoke curl around it, as if from a spaceship. Perhaps his best-known work is “The Gatsby Girl,” painted in the 1930s and reflective of the Jazz Age as depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel “The Great Gatsby,” which focused on millionaire Jay Gatsby and his obsession with the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. The subject of the painting wears a flapper hat and gazes at the viewer, with her head tilted and one hand covering her breast. Kaitz continued his interest in strange and alluring women later in life, as in “Terra,” painted in the 1980s. The woman wears space-age jewelry and is holding a crescent-shaped, multicolored object. “Her divinity encompasses all of existence. In her hand she holds the spiritual realm of eternity,” Kaitz once said of the painting.