Arthur B. Carles

Of unusually monumental scale for the artist, Painting is among the most important canvases of Arthur B. Carles’ career and is regarded as one of two final works he produced. Carles was a leading American modernist who worked in various innovative styles during the course of a 45-year mature career. He traveled to Paris in 1907 and was among the first generation of American artists to be directly influenced by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse in the years prior to World War I. Carles embraced assorted media and myriad styles, never settling on one approach as he bristled against established norms.

Carles completed Painting during a defining period beginning in 1935 that gave rise to his most consequential work as he developed a style characterized by geometric and biomorphic abstract forms, thick black lines, a bold color palette, and large-scale canvases. The present work is one of approximately six from the period remaining in private hands, and it is the largest scale example of this period both in private and public collections.

Scholar Barbara Wolanin writes of this period: “Carles’s last paintings look ahead to future developments in American painting through his commitment to modernist principles and his willingness to explore new ways of creating form with color in the early 1930s. It is tempting to speculate that he would have been at the forefront of the Abstract Expressionist movement had he not been paralyzed in 1941, for at the time of his death in 1952 he was called ‘one of the founders of the Abstract Expressionist movement.’” [1]

The importance of this work as a critical episode in Carles’ artistic development has been recognized by distinguished collectors who previously owned the work, including arts patron S. Beryl Lush, who founded the Suburban Opera Company which would later become the Opera Philadelphia, and prominent New York art dealer Margit Chanin, known for introducing many European artists to American audiences.