Arthur Beecher Carles
Arthur Beecher Carles
1882 - 1952
American painter and teacher. As a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, between 1900 and 1907, Carles won numerous prizes, including fellowships to travel abroad. Modern French art was Carles’s primary source of inspiration; he lived in France between 1907 and 1910 and returned there in 1912, 1921 and 1929. Cézanne and Matisse inspired his use of colour for both structure and expression, as in The Church (1908–10; New York, Met.). Close to EDWARD J. STEICHEN and JOHN MARIN, Carles associated with ALFRED STIEGLITZ’s circle, and in 1912 he had the first of four solo exhibitions in New York at the 291 gallery. He showed at the Armory Show in 1913 and at annuals in Philadelphia and across the country. As an influential teacher he inspired students at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1917 to 1925 and then in private classes, opening their eyes to colour and to modern art.
Carles was one of the finest colourists among the early American modernists. His favourite subjects were the female nude, flower still lifes and French landscapes, treated in a variety of styles but with painterly colour always dominant. In the late 1920s he began to break up forms with Cubist planes of colour, as in Arrangement (1925–7; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.). Abstraction (Last Painting) (1936–41; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn), on which he was working when he was incapacitated by a fall and stroke in 1941, was prophetic of Abstract Expressionism. [Barbara Ann Boese Wolanin. "Carles, Arthur B.." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T014093.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
