Clarence Holbrook Carter
Yellow Calla Lily
1931

About the Item

In his long and productive career, Clarence Holbrook Carter followed an independent course. He incorporated an unlikely mixture of stylistic influences, drawing from such disparate sources as regionalism and surrealism without strictly cohering to any one school. An experimentalist in the truest sense, Carter produced an oeuvre that defies categorization. He attempted nearly every variety of subject, from genre to still life, landscape to portrait, abstract to magic realist. In this sense, his career reflects the changing currents of twentieth century modernity, in which artists struggled to find an appropriate means of self-expression. Carter was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1904. He showed an early talent for the arts, taking watercolor classes at the age of nine, followed by cartooning classes at thirteen. In 1923, he enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio, from which he graduated four years later. Carter then set for Europe, where he spent a year traveling to Italy, Sicily, Tunisia, Switzerland, France, England, and Belgium, and spent a summer studying at the Hans Hoffman Summer School in Capri. In 1929, he returned to Cleveland, where the following year he began teaching at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1938, Carter was made Assistant Professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught until 1944. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Carter painted prolifically and enjoyed considerable success, exhibiting frequently, including several shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from 1940-42. His style was widely interpreted as Regionalist, since his paintings often represented scenes of ordinary American life. Farmers, fruit stands, street scenes, and factories all appear in works of this period. Paintings such as Trapeze Artists, formerly at Hirschl & Adler (1933; see Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York, 1989, Clarence H. Carter: Early Works, no. 2 illus. in color), display an interest in the playful innocence of the rural Ohio lifestyle. However, the real-life scenes and places depicted in his paintings from this period, by their straightforward representation, are often laid bare for the viewer to contemplate their inner mysteries. Beginning in the early 1950s, Carter began painting in a surrealist mode, in which he pursued ideas about time, death, and spirituality in a series of works, called the Projectives. These canvases are constructions of images, reminiscent of collage, in which a variety of disjunctive elements appear together to form elusive, mysterious narratives. By the 1960s, Carter had begun his most well-known paintings, characterized by the incorporation of ovoid shapes, including the Transections, Eschatos, and Mandala series. To Carter, the ovoid symbolizes a transection, or a bridge between life and death. “The shape of the egg affirms life, but biological life in time passes away, becoming spirit. The ovoid becomes simply a void. In death shape remains only in silence — eternal, all encompassing silence” (Clarence Carter, as quoted in Linda Weintraub, “The Egg Symbol in the Work of Clarence Carter,” in Center of the Arts, Muhlenberg College, Allentown Pennsylvania, 1978, Clarence H. Carter, n.p.). Carter remained occupied with these ideas until the end of his life. Because of the wide range of Carter’s career, critics have had a difficult time placing his work in an art-historical context. Carter perhaps summed it best himself: My credo is simple and changeable. I may not change radically but if I wish to I have no preconceived theories to hold me back. I feel that theories tend to make an artist academic no matter how advanced and radical these theories appear to be at the present time. My paintings at various times have been termed cubist, surrealist, neo-romanticist, realist, and even oriental, but at no time did I ever follow any school. I have painted my world as I have seen it and felt it (Carter, as quoted in Monroe A. Denton, Jr., “Some notes on Clarence Carter,” in Center for the Arts, Muhlenberg College, op. cit., n.p.).

Creator:
Clarence Holbrook Carter (1904-2000, American)
Creation Year:
1931
Dimensions:
Height: 24.4 in (61.98 cm)Width: 18 in (45.72 cm)Depth: 1.5 in (3.81 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style:
American Realist
Period:
Early 20th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
Seller: APG 80481stDibs: LU236197202
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Clarence Holbrook Carter

Clarence Holbrook Carter achieved a level of national artistic success that was nearly unprecedented among Cleveland School artists of his day, with representation by major New York dealers, scores of awards and solo exhibits, and streams of praise flowing from pens of the top art critics. Over the course of his 60+ year career Carter evolved from an exceptionally fine American Scene painter capable of evoking deep reservoirs of mood, into an abstractionist with a strongly surrealist bent. While his two bodies of work seem at first to be worlds apart, owing to their different formal vocabularies, they, in fact, explore virtually the same subject: the nexus between life and death and the transition from earth to spirit. The early work finds its expressive power through specific people, events, and landscapes—most of which are drawn from his experiences growing up in the river town of Portsmouth, Ohio—while the later work from the 1960s on evokes potent states of being through pure flat shape, color and form that read as universals. As his primary form he adopted the ovoid or egg shape, endowing it with varying degrees of transparency. Alone or in multiples, the egg moves through Carter’s landscapes and architectural settings like a sentient spirit on a restless quest. Born and raised in southern Ohio along the banks of the mercurial Ohio River and its treacherous floods, Carter developed a love of drawing as a child, and was encouraged by both his parents. He was self-directed, found inspiration all around him, and was strongly encouraged by the fact that his teenage work consistently captured art prizes in county and state fairs. Carter studied at the Cleveland School of Art from 1923-27, where he trained under painters Henry Keller, Frank Wilcox and Paul Travis. Returning to Cleveland in 1929, Carter had his first solo show, and through Milliken taught studio classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art from 1930-37. In 1938, he moved to Pittsburgh to teach at the Carnegie Institute of Technology until 1944. Carter’s American Scene paintings of the ’30s and ’40s, which launched his artistic star, are the works for which the artist remains best known. During and immediately after World War II, Clarence Carter realized his attraction to bold pattern, dramatic perspective and eye-catching hard-edged design was a poor fit with the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism. Fortunately, these same hallmarks of his style were prized within the realm of commercial art. Around 1964 Carter acknowledged a need to break from the confines of representational painting. Once Carter had found a potent symbol in the egg, he used it to create an astounding body of imagery for the rest of his life. Among the most ambitious of all his later paintings were his Transections, a theological term meaning to cross, specifically between life and death.