Arthur Beecher Carles 1882 - 1952

Graham Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Lust, by 1983
Coleman Bancroft, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2007

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Center (on loan)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art; New York, National Academy of Design, Arthur B. Carles: “Painting with Color,” September 1983-November 1984, no. 93, p. 174, illustrated in color p. 136

Arthur B. Carles began his career as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He traveled abroad for the first time in 1907 and spent the next three years in France, where he extensively studied the work of the modern French painters. Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse affected Carles in particular, and their ideas on the treatment of space and color had a lasting impact on his aesthetic. Although Carles almost always took representation—a still life or a nude—as his point of departure, the canvases he began to produce subsequently display a unique synthesis of the non-associative color explored by the Fauves with a cubist handling of space. Carles returned to the United States in 1910, and became a teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1917. As he worked and taught in Philadelphia, he made periodic trips back to Europe where he continued to absorb the emerging trends in modern art. Carles’ ongoing engagement with international art movements such as Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism continued to reflect in his canvases, as demonstrated in his painting Composition.

Carles executed Composition in 1935-37 during the last productive phase of his career, the period considered his most important and innovative today. Although long interested in breaking down representational forms into planes of color, Carles now pushed his aesthetic to the limits of abstraction. Composition is almost entirely abstracted, composed of biomorphic shapes and fragmented areas of color that seem to float, pushing and pulling against one another on the picture plane. While the influence of such artists as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró is strongly felt in its imagery, Carles’ bold, gestural brushwork imbues the work with an undeniable sense of energy, making it distinctively his.

As Barbara A. Wolanin writes, “Like music, [Carles’] compositions keep the eye moving, creating a momentum not unlike the flow of music in time. His canvases are never static; each viewing offers new surprises. In the manner of a composer who amplifies the notes of the scale by combining them, playing them on different instruments, and changing rhythm and volume, Carles manipulated his painterly elements. He devised color mixtures and juxtapositions, varied the texture of the pigment from thin washes to lush impasto, emphasized the gesture of his brushstrokes, stressed the rhythm of strong curves, and played with the tension between surface and depth, to produce a visual equivalent of music (The Orchestration of Color: The Paintings of Arthur B. Carles, New York, 2000, p. 28). Indeed, the palpable emotional intensity felt in Carles’ work, along with his unique emphasis on the process of painting itself, aligns him with Abstract Expressionist painters such as Hans Hofmann, with whom Carles lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts during the summer of 1934.