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Arthur Beecher CarlesNude
$62,500
£46,461.64
€54,391.50
CA$87,404.44
A$97,596.47
CHF 50,908.97
MX$1,200,093.75
NOK 642,534.66
SEK 604,923.75
DKK 405,760.78
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About the Item
Provenance
The artist;
Collection of Walter Stuempfig, Philadelphia;
Private collection, Massachusetts until 2022
The Philadelphia modernist Arthur B. Carles was a brilliant colorist and an extraordinarily innovative painter. Though Carles trained initially at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, soaking up the more conservative teaching of William Merritt Chase and Thomas Anshutz, he was deeply influenced by the avant-garde art scene in Paris during his first trip there in 1905. In 1907, Carles won the prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which enabled him to return to Paris for several more years. This experience had a profound impact on Carles as an artist; he was extremely affected by modern French painting, especially the work of Cezanne and Matisse, and by the time Carles returned home to Philadelphia in 1912, he was a confirmed modernist.
Carles revisited the subject of the female figure numerous times throughout his life, often using this form as a vehicle for his experimentations with pure color and abstraction. However, painting the nude was far more than just a formal exercise for Carles; he was highly sensitive to female beauty and was both deeply attracted to and attractive to women. He once joked that “Women are my medium.” Carles was also aware of the hint of scandal which surrounded this subject for the American public, and he may have enjoyed the degree of controversy that some of his paintings elicited.
After returning home to Philadelphia from France at the end of 1912, Carles began to explore the subject of the female figure extensively until around 1919. Although some of these works might have appeared daring by Philadelphia’s standards, many of them remained fairly academic despite a certain freedom of brushwork and color. These paintings were generally quite well received, and indeed Carles won a silver medal for Repose at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. A critic for the Philadelphia Press remarked that the painting “aroused considerable comment, and showed an unusually fine color sense and a deliberate disregard for the conventional manner of painting.”
In the summer of 1921, Carles returned to France through the generosity of his friends and patrons, and during this period, he revisited the figure once again, executing a series of paintings through which he pushed further into abstraction. Carles noted that modern artists often worked in a series because it enabled them to move from a realistic depiction of their subject to a work that captured the spirit of the subject, and finally to an interpretation that encapsulated “the mood, abstract and entirely detached from the first painting.”
- Creator:Arthur Beecher Carles (1882-1952, American)
- Dimensions:Height: 30 in (76.2 cm)Width: 24 in (60.96 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Very good condition. There are few tiny, scattered dots of inpaint, visible under UV light, on the sitter's torso, and one pinpoint dot of inpaint on the left side of her face. There is an area of retouching on the nude's left shin and knee.
- Gallery Location:Bryn Mawr, PA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU2773216077552
Arthur Beecher Carles
Philadelphia Modernist Arthur Beecher Carles was born in Philadelphia and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he also taught and travelled to Paris on the prestigious Cresson Scholarship in 1907. Greatly influenced by French Fauvism and Post-Impressionism, Arthur B. Carles met and became friends with Matisse and others living in Paris. His work is in major museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Carles' main subjects were nudes and still lifes. His nudes, painted between 1920-30, were heavily influenced by his trips to Paris; his model and muse in many of these paintings was Angele, a red-headed French girl who was persuaded by Carles' daughter, Mercedes to model for her father. Whether painting a still life or figure, Carles used the surface to apply abstract forms of color, defining his new "Modern" approach.
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