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Clarence Holbrook CarterSurrealist Still Life with Apples, Mid 20th Century Cleveland School Artist1940
1940
About the Item
Clarence Holbrook Carter (American, 1904-2000)
Still Life with Apples, 1940
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated upper right
18 x 24 inches
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. Although money was tight after his father (who was a postal worker) died suddenly of a stroke, Carter’s mother supported his desire to study at the Cleveland School of Art from 1923-27, where he trained under painters Henry Keller, Frank Wilcox and Paul Travis.
In the summer of 1927, Carter studied in Capri with the modernist Hans Hofmann, where he carried out compositional exercises in charcoal and paint, recording the lucid spatial order of stairs, walls, roofs, arches and other elements of the island’s compressed architecture. 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 1934, he worked under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project and won a commission to paint two murals in Cleveland’s Public Auditorium. In 1936, he painted a post office mural in Ravenna, Ohio, as well as one for the post office in his hometown of Portsmouth, where his father had worked. He then headed the Northeast Ohio division of the painting projects arm of the Works Progress Administration, a subsequent government art program. 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. Thus, from 1944-1959, Carter became a veritable “Mad Man [Madison Avenue Man],” designing ambitious series of advertisements for major corporations such as Alcoa and The National City Bank of New York (Citibank) which appeared on the back covers of Fortune magazine, and on inside pages of Time, Newsweek, Business Week, and US News & World Report. Carter described this period of his life as one of incredible inventiveness and imagination. It freed him up to be far more experimental in his approach to image-making.
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.
- Creator:Clarence Holbrook Carter (1904-2000, American)
- Creation Year:1940
- Dimensions:Height: 18 in (45.72 cm)Width: 24 in (60.96 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Beachwood, OH
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1768214071912
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