Stephen W. Kuzma, an East Toledo native and a New York City-based artist whose realist-style paintings won admirers, even when the art world trended abstract, died Jan. 6 in Otterbein Pemberville SeniorLife Community in Wood County. He was 89.

He had been in declining health, his niece, Cathy Jo Kuzma, said Thursday. He moved in May from New York to the Otterbein facility to be near family. 

His hometown recognitions included awards in 2000 and 2001 for his paintings in the Toledo Area Artists Exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art. He also was acknowledged by the historically Hungarian American neighborhood where he grew up as a 2000 inductee to the Birmingham Hall of Fame.

An artist dating back to the 1950s, he continued painting until about four years ago. 

“He was to his bones an artist,” said Jeffrey Guimond, a friend since 1994. “He was always sketching, drawing, painting, doing watercolors. It was what he did. He did it all the time.”

Mr. Kuzma depicted the buildings and people of Soho in Manhattan, where he was a pioneer among artists who moved to the district, and the views from his summer home on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia.

He experimented with modern painting styles and Japanese print techniques, but “his heart really was in the old-master style,” Mr. Guimond said.

Mr. Kuzma said in a 1990 interview that he didn’t like the word “realism.” He attempted another definition: “Still lives that are not so still,” he said then.

“I know my images are clear, but I’m into things that are deeper than those surface things,” Mr. Kuzma said. “I paint what I see, and it starts from that. It’s a visual impression, not something I think about and then paint.”

Yet some of his works could with study reveal complexity beyond form and composition.

“I just want to be a catalyst,” he said in the interview. “I want to throw a bone into the game and let people make the game themselves. I don’t want to tell them what it’s about. I like the idea of not telling too much.”

A scene of men in hoods over a glowing fire was his vision of a street repair crew. He called it one of his “psychological” paintings.

“They’re just working asphalt, but the mood is such that you can read all sorts of other things in it,” Mr. Kuzma said. 

He also painted a multi-panel folding screen showing the view from his front porch in Nova Scotia. He accompanied fishermen on their scallop boats.

“He really was a man of the people,” Mr. Guimond said. “He was an incredibly real and honest person. I always attributed that to his upbringing in Ohio and his family. He never lost the quality of being a local boy who did well in the big city.” 

His works were part of shows of realist paintings in Boston, at Yale University, and elsewhere on the East Coast.  

“Being a realist painter in that period was a pretty unusual thing,” Mr. Guimond said. “There were plenty of art galleries around him selling contemporary art. Since then, realist art has had a resurgence.”

Through the mid-1960s, Mr. Kuzma was represented in shows at well-known galleries. In that period, he took the Suydam bronze medal from the National Academy of Design and won the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation prize.

Later, though, the loft he had created in a former industrial building in Soho became home, studio, and, at least once a year, his gallery. He opened the space to 200 or more guests, hired a band, and hung his artwork.

“I’m not a self-promoter,” he said in 1990. “I don’t like jumping out there and pushing my art. I like to focus on my work.”

A collector of Mr. Kuzma’s work — and among his champions — was the late Edgar Munhall, curator of the Frick Collection in New York City. 

“He’s in the great tradition of American romantic realist artists of the 19th Century,” Mr. Munhall said in a 1990 news story. “People don’t want romantic, beautiful pictures. They want something to make them suffer. But, someday he’s going to be recognized.”

In Soho, he knew every shop owner.

“He’d walk down the street and say hi to everybody,” his brother, Richard Kuzma, said. “He had an upbeat personality.”

Stephen Kuzma liked to cook and to share Hungarian dishes with friends. And with family, “he liked to take us out to experience different food,” Ms. Kuzma said. “He was the first person I ever had dim sum with. The first person I ever had ramen with. He was not a stuffy foody. He liked to try everything.”

Mr. Kuzma enjoyed attending concerts in Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center or listening to recordings of classical music.

“He had an incredible ear,” said Mr. Guimond, a pianist. “He was always so much fun. Eating and listening to music was a fabulous evening with Steve.” 

Mr. Kuzma was born May 14, 1933, to Katherine and Stephen E. Kuzma, the oldest of what would be three children. He grew up on Moravan Street and then Burger Street in Birmingham and went to St. Stephen School. He was a graduate of Macomber Vocational High School, where he studied with art teacher Ernest Spring. He also studied with Frank Turner at the Toledo Museum of Art.

Scholarships followed at the American Academy of Art in Chicago and then the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design in New York. A stateside veteran of the Navy, he was a Seabee and painted a 30-foot mural for the library of the base in Danville, R.I.

Surviving are his brother, Richard Kuzma, and sister, Arlene Kazmierski.

Memorial services will be scheduled this spring in New York and in August at Whale Cove, N.S.

First Published February 3, 2023, 5:00 a.m.