Spring Landmark
Lot 168:
Description
Arthur Beecher Carles signed Gouache on Canvas Board Painting
Signed on Verso "Carles". Auction Label from Christies on Verso.
Frame: 30"H x 26"L Art: 20"H x 16"L
Known for his use of expressive and uninhibited color. Carles is represented in major public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York; the Newark Museum, New Jersey; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, all in Washington, D.C.; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Arthur Carles was a painter whose work went through phases of Realism, Impressionism, Fauvism and Abstract Expressionism, and of the latter style, he was one of the first American proponents.At the Pennsylvania Academy, he was early influenced by the bravura technique of William Merritt Chase as well as by early works of Edouard Manet. At the same time, he also painted in a precise realist manner. In 1907, he went to Paris to study and developed an interest in Post-Impressionism and Fauvism and fell under the influence of his friend, Henri Matisse. He also associated with Paul Gaughin, Hans Hofmann, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Alfred Maurer and the American, John Marin.
In New York, he participated in Alfred Stieglitz 1910 avant-garde show "Younger American Painters, " which made the distinction between the popular American Scene painters and those including Carles who were painting abstraction.
In 1913, his work was part of the New York Armory Show, another exhibition that included modernist painting and sculpture of Europeans and Americans and shocked many Americans. During World War I, Carles was among a group of artists who served as civilian ship camouflage artists for the U.S. Shipping Board in Philadelphia.
In the 1920s and 1930s, he did little exhibiting, but his work became increasingly abstract, and between 1937 and 1941, he created works whose heavily brushed surfaces and violent-appearing rhythms anticipated the Abstract Expressionism that became pervasive in America in the 1950s.
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