Arthur Carles: Colors in Concert

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Miriam Seidel

Despite his early assimilation of modernist methods, Arthur B. Carles has long been underappreciated. A recent New York retrospective, part of a growing effort to bring his influence to light, traveled to the artist's hometown of Philadelphia, where it was joined by two related shows.

Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952) would seem to have had great timing, at least early on. As a young American artist in the first decades of the 20th century he traveled several times to France, absorbing its art revolutions directly, even participating in the Salon d'Automne in 1908 (along with Kandinsky and Matisse), and again in 1912. In 1913 he took part in New York's landmark Armory Show. And he knew the right people: he visited Gertrude Stein's salon in Paris; after returning to live and work in Philadelphia, he maintained long friendships with such modernist pioneers as John Marin, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz and, later, Hans Hofmann.

On top of this, the man could paint. Hollis Taggart Galleries' recent retrospective in New York, "The Orchestration of Color: The Paintings of Arthur B. Carles," which traveled to Philadelphia's Woodmere Art Museum where it was joined by a companion show of works by Carles from the collection of Perry and June Ottenberg, revealed a productive, questing artist, whose mastery of color, adventurous compositions and risk-taking on canvas led him to create, arguably, several masterpieces of American 20th-century art. His works show a mature assimilation of the seismic influences of Fauvism, Cubism and a variety of abstract modes, well ahead of most of his American contemporaries, and have been acknowledged as influences on Abstract Expressionism via artists such as de Kooning and Gorky.

Nevertheless, after his death in 1952 his work fell into decades of obscurity from which it is just emerging. Why doesn't Carles stand among the front ranks of American modernist artists? Several possible answers, ranging from the artist's alcoholism to his lack of a dealer to promote his work during his lifetime, seem to locate the causes of this lingering underappreciation in Carles himself. Charming, charismatic figure that he was, Carles did not husband his work--many paintings are undated--or his reputation. After his death his works were left in disarray, and many supporting materials were lost. It's been up to such champions as art historian Barbara Wolanin, organizer of a 1983 retrospective of his work at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a consultant to the Hollis Taggart show, to try to restore him to his proper place.

Born into a middle-class Philadelphia family (his father designed watch cases and painted in his later years), Carles made a shining start at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied from 1900 to 1907. A confident early painting, Still Life with Copper Kettle (1904), dark with dramatic highlights, reflects similar works by his teacher, William Merritt Chase. Among numerous prizes he won, traveling scholarships made possible his first two trips to Europe, in 1905 and 1907-10.

Carles enthusiastically absorbed modernist trends in France. Matisse saw and critiqued his paintings, and through Steichen, with whom he lived for a time, he met Rodin and Brancusi. But unlike his contemporary Alfred Maurer, who made a sudden break with traditional painting into a fractured modernism, Carles worked from this point on to gradually assimilate different ways of seeing in his painting. Among the small landscapes on view from these trips, paintings like Moonlight (ca. 1908) show a new looseness and luminosity, with echoes of Whistler in their atmosphere and compositional balance. By 1912, on a third visit to France, he would produce even bolder works. The mountain-view landscape Chamonix (ca. 1912) undulates with hatched purple, yellow and green areas, a juicy Post-Impressionist color-improvisation that anticipates his later color experiments.

By this time Carles had married Mercedes de Cordoba; their daughter Mercedes was born in 1913. (The younger Mercedes later co-founded the New York Studio School.) In a twist on Bohemian domestic arrangements, the couple hardly lived together except on their frequent trips to France; in the United States Carles moved back with his parents in Philadelphia, while his wife stayed in New York.

The year 1912 saw Carles's first and only exhibition at Stieglitz's 291 Gallery. Had Stieglitz promoted Carles with further shows as he did O'Keeffe, Dove and Hartley, the arc of Carles's career would certainly have been boosted earlier and higher. Instead, Carles ensconced himself in Philadelphia, taking a teaching job at his alma mater. He would have only two more shows in New York in the next 30 years. Perry Ottenberg speculates that Carles tended to look to family and wealthy patrons for support (like collector Carroll Tyson, who paid for his 1921 trip to France, and gave him a house in Philadelphia), rather than to the gallery system.(1) He was also disorganized and chronically unreliable, which would not have endeared him to dealers.(2)