Skip Navigation

Deer and Cactus

Kai Gotzsche

American Art

The Danish-born modernist Kai Gotzsche painted this work in the American Southwest, where he spent time in the 1920s, often in the company of the writer D. H. Lawrence and a fellow Danish painter, Knud Merrild, at the Taos home of the art patron Mabel Dodge. Abstracted in a decorative manner, with simplified forms and echoes of a few key shapes, the composition is in keeping with the elegant Art Deco style that was internationally popular by the mid-1920s, particularly in architecture, decorative arts, and graphics.
MEDIUM Watercolor over graphite with some gold paint on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream, wove, hand-made Whatman paper
  • Place Made: United States
  • DATES ca. 1926
    DIMENSIONS 30 1/8 x 22 1/4 in. (76.5 x 56.5 cm) Frame: 36 1/8 x 28 1/16 x 1 3/4 in. (91.8 x 71.3 x 4.4 cm)  (show scale)
    MARKINGS Along left side, watermark "J WHATMAN 19[?]3 ENGLAND" and countermark "B"
    COLLECTIONS American Art
    ACCESSION NUMBER 29.1389
    CREDIT LINE Museum Collection Fund
    MUSEUM LOCATION This item is not on view
    CAPTION Kai Gotzsche (American, born Denmark, 1886). Deer and Cactus, ca. 1926. Watercolor over graphite with some gold paint on moderately thick, moderately textured, cream, wove, hand-made Whatman paper, 30 1/8 x 22 1/4 in. (76.5 x 56.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 29.1389. © artist or artist's estate (Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 29.1389_PS2.jpg)
    IMAGE overall, 29.1389_PS2.jpg. Brooklyn Museum photograph, 2005
    "CUR" at the beginning of an image file name means that the image was created by a curatorial staff member. These study images may be digital point-and-shoot photographs, when we don\'t yet have high-quality studio photography, or they may be scans of older negatives, slides, or photographic prints, providing historical documentation of the object.
    RIGHTS STATEMENT © artist or artist's estate
    Copyright for this work may be controlled by the artist, the artist's estate, or other rights holders. A more detailed analysis of its rights history may, however, place it in the public domain. The Museum does not warrant that the use of this work will not infringe on the rights of third parties. It is your responsibility to determine and satisfy copyright or other use restrictions before copying, transmitting, or making other use of protected items beyond that allowed by "fair use," as such term is understood under the United States Copyright Act. For further information about copyright, we recommend resources at the United States Library of Congress, Cornell University, Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums, and Copyright Watch. For more information about the Museum's rights project, including how rights types are assigned, please see our blog posts on copyright. If you have any information regarding this work and rights to it, please contact copyright@brooklynmuseum.org.
    RECORD COMPLETENESS
    Not every record you will find here is complete. More information is available for some works than for others, and some entries have been updated more recently. Records are frequently reviewed and revised, and we welcome any additional information you might have.