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Artist or Maker: Arthur Beecher Carles (1882-1952)
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Provenance: The artist.
Caroline Mantovi, daughter of the artist.
Washburn Gallery, New York.
Acquired by the present owner from the above.
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Exhibited: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Art Alliance, 1944.
New York, Nierendorf Gallery, 1944.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Memorial Exhibition, 1953.
New York, Graham Gallery, Retrospective, 1959.
New York, Hollis Taggart Galleries, The Orchestration of Color: The Painting of Arthur B. Carles, February 10-March 18, 2000.
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Notes: Property of a Trust
One of the most important modern painters and teachers of the first half of the twentieth century, Arthur Beecher Carles shifted from abstract to representational styles throughout his career. Born in Philadelphia, Carles attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he studied with William Merritt Chase, Thomas Anshutz and Cecilia Beaux. After several trips to Europe, his style changed dramatically, "By 1912 Carles had fully adopted a modernist aesthetic; he subscribed to the tenet that paint lies flat and that paintings are patterns in color, not illusions in light and shadow." (D. Strazdes, American Paintings and Sculpture to 1945 in The Carnegie Museum of Art, New York, 1992, p. 125)
The late 1920s were difficult for Carles. In 1925 he was dismissed from his teaching post at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a position that he had held for eight years, and his problems from drinking worsened. Despite this distress, he produced some of his best work during this period, as he went against the mainstream and began to experiment with Cubism. "His embrace of this painting style was especially daring at a time when many American artists were turning to realism and native subject matter." (American Paintings and Sculpture to 1945 in The Carnegie Museum of Art p. 125) This stylistic shift was further reinforced by a two year stay in Paris from 1929 to 1931.
Flowers were a perennially popular subject for Carles, and in works such as Flower Arrangement he explores the topic from a Cubist perspective. Meredith Ward discusses similar paintings from this period in Carles's career, "He had developed a new interest in cubism by 1928, and he began to experiment with cubist principals in his painting. The stylistic change is aptly demonstrated in Fruit and Flowers, 1928-35, in which a traditional life subject is transformed into intersecting planes that penetrate the pictorial space. In Sunflower Abstraction, 1936-41, Carles has fractured the recognizable forms, distributing them over the canvas surface in a wildly joyful array of color. Shapes float and collide with each other, all stability is gone except for the remnant of a table in the lower portion of the composition." (Arthur Beecher Carles: 1882-1952, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1997, p. 5)
