Leaving the Bank (Primary Title)
Kenneth Hayes Miller, American, 1876 - 1952 (Artist)
Kenneth Hayes Miller’s Leaving the Bank is a signature work of the Fourteenth Street School artists who, from about 1920 to 1950, found realist subject matter in the hordes of individuals populating the parks, buses, banks, trains, restaurants, and other public sites around Union Square and Fourteenth Street in lower Manhattan. Their paintings pay special attention, as Leaving the Bank demonstrates, to the “new woman,” the quintessential shopper-worker-provocateur of 1920s through 1940s America. Wearing loose-fitting, factory-made clothing, the figure does not adhere to the idealized boyish and waifish female silhouettes of mid-1920s advertising and illustration. The painting gives visual form to the newly empowered urban female shopper who articulated her agency and autonomy through gainful employment, commercial exchange, and a street-savvy sensibility that finds voice in assertive (if still sympathetic) gazes and gestures.
Rothschild, Lincoln, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. 1974. To keep art alive; the effort of Kenneth Hayes Miller, American painter (1876-1952). Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press. B & W Fig. 37, as Leaving the Bank
Todd, Ellen W. 1993. The "new woman" revised: painting and gender politics on fourteenth street. Berkeley u.a: Univ. of California Press. 140-141, fig. 4.6, illus, as Leaving the Bank
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