Mathias Kauten was born on June 13, 1911 in St. Louis, Missouri. His father was also named Mathias Kauten and his mother was Anna Kauten. His parents were both German speaking Hungarians, who immigrated the U.S. in 1902 to escape poverty. His father had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1907 and received a disability discharge one year later as a Private. His parents married in 1911, the same year that he was born. They lived at 5339 West Avenue. They owned their own house, which was valued at $2,000. His father was a locksmith and a machinist at a clay company at 4600 South Kings Highway. In 1920 his younger sister, Antoinette, was born.
By 1929 he had presumably finished schooling. It is not know if or where he may have studied art after high school.
In the Fall and Summer of 1932 he visited Germany, and on his return trip he sailed on the SS Deutschland from Hamburg.
In 1934 he married his wife Marie Kauten, who was his same age. They lived at 20 Jane Street in Manhattan's Greenwich Village.
By 1941 he began to sell illustrations to pulp magazines. The U.S. Draft began in 1941 and as the top-level illustrators began to be mobilized for war, the pulp industry began to accept many new entry-level illustrators, who were exempt from militrary service, such as Ernest Chiriacka, Sam Cherry and Gloria Stoll.
He was soon selling freelance pulp covers to All Football Stories, Best Western, Blue Ribbon Western, Complete Western Book, Detective Short Stories, Short Stories, Sports Leaders, Western Novel & Short Stories, and Western Short Stories.
During WWII he failed to report for induction into the Army and was arrested for violation of the draft law. He claimed to be a conscientious objector, but he was also an outspoken atheist, so he could not object to serving on religious graounds. Instead he opposed military service on the grounds that he was a Secular Humanist. His trail reached the Supreme Court and his lawyer was a counsel from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). The court eventually agreed with him upon appeal, and he was the first U.S. citizen to be granted Conscientious Objector status on secular philosophical grounds. For decades after his trail, future claimants to this same special status had to pass the "Kauten Test."
After the war he continued to spend much of his time as a pacifist and an anti-war activist in groups such as The Peacemakers, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, and The War Resisters League. He was arrested again in 1948 and 1949 at anti-war demonstrations.
In 1949 he married his wife Marie.
He did illustrations for Liberty Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. He also illustrated several magazine articles in Esquire Magazine as a photographer.
In 1949 he filed a patent for a book design with stereoptical illustrations.
He studied for one year with Frank Llyod Wright, and wrote an article about him for The Progressive Architect Magazine. In the 1960s he worked as an architect for open-minded clients who were interested in his ultra modern home designs, such as a geodesic globe supported on a steel tripod. He designed another modern house in Sag Harbor on Long Island, NY, for a friend, Mrs. Natalie Emma Rossin Davies.
In 1964 he and his wife moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania, a quaint artistic town on the Delaware River, famous for its many antique shops.
Mathias Kauten died at age 65 in May of 1977.
© David Saunders 2009 |
