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Carl Holty Art

American, 1900-1973
Born in Freiburg, Germany, Carl Holty moved with his parents to a Germain community in Milwaukee when he was an infant. He began studying art at the Milwaukee Normal School under instructors who had trained in Europe and later continued his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1919, following a summer at an artists' colony in Saugatuck, Michigan, Holty enrolled at Parsons School of Design and the National Academy of Design, both in New York. He briefly considering entering medical school, his father’s profession, though with the help of his grandfather, returned to Germany to continue his art education. It was at Hans Hofman’s school that Holty would be introduced to the principles of modernist composition and ideas in painting and drawing, an influence he would consider his main focus throughout his career. Hofmann "first opened my eyes to the plastic nature of drawing." Holty once recalled. Displaying no interest in the predominant style of expressionism, popular in Germany at the time, Holty focused on the tenants of Cubism, Fauvism, and Futurism which lead him, in 1928, to relocate to Paris. Holty quickly became part of the active artistic community in the nation’s capital associating with many of the major figures of international avant-garde art including Miro, Mondrian, Arp, and Delaunay, the latter of which sponsored Holty to become one of only two American members of the Abstraction-Creation group founded by Theo Van Doesburg. Holty returned to America in 1936 becoming a significant figure in the development of abstract art. He reconnected with his old mentor Hans Hofmann and developed friendships with many of the City’s rising artist’s including Vaclav Vytlacil whom he had known in Paris. It was this group that formed the American Abstract Artists association, where Holty would serve as chairman in 1938 and with whom he’d exhibit with through 1944. It was during this period Holty abandoned Cubism for Biomorphism, leaving behind edges to explore shapes and forms that ultimately lead to his color field paintings of the mid 1950s and through the remainder of his career.
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Artist: Carl Holty
Blue and Green Summer Abstract
By Carl Holty
Located in Greenwich, CT
A fresh and intriguing composition that keeps you looking at it. The composition is composed of summer greens, whites, blues and lavenders and also conveys figures and movement. Ho...
Category

1950s Abstract Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Mosaic II
By Carl Holty
Located in Greenwich, CT
Appropriately called the "Mosaic" period for important historical artist Carl Holty, this is a super example! His color use during this time frame was lively as he always used sky b...
Category

1940s Abstract Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Bold German American Abstract Expressionist Color Field Oil Painting Carl Holty
By Carl Holty
Located in Surfside, FL
Carl Robert Holty (American 1900-1973) Abstract Expressionism Oil on Masonite board. Abstract with greens blues and red, Dimensions 12 x 9-1/2 inches. Framed 17 X 14 inches Hand...
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20th Century Abstract Expressionist Carl Holty Art

Materials

Masonite, Oil

Blue with Green and Grey Spots
By Carl Holty
Located in Missouri, MO
Blue with Green and Grey Spots By Carl Holty (1900-1973) Signed Lower Right Unframed: 16" x 20" Framed: 17" x 21" Known for his floating, luminous, highly-colorful forms, Carl Holty...
Category

20th Century Abstract Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Twelfth Night Blue, Contemporary Color Field painting
By Carl Holty
Located in Greenwich, CT
Conceived of as one half of a diptych, together with Twelfth Night Red, the title of this painting suggest a reference to William Shakespeare’s play Twel...
Category

Late 20th Century Color-Field Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Red Gray #5
By Carl Holty
Located in Greenwich, CT
Holty did a series of works that explored the use of varying tones of Gray with other colors. This was done during his Colorfield foray as he pioneered this movement along with such...
Category

1960s Abstract Expressionist Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Abstracted pair of oil paintings by Carl Holty
By Carl Holty
Located in Hudson, NY
These artworks by Carl Holty are only sold as a pair. Each painting measures 9" x 11" and framed 18" x 20.25" x 2.5" The red and gold work is signed "Carl Holty" in the lower right. About this artists: Carl Holty was awakened to his interest in art as a child through visits to the Layton Art Gallery of Milwaukee, and began painting lessons with Friedrich Wilhelm Heine at a young age. Though born in Freiburg, Germany, in 1900, he was raised in Wisconsin and enrolled at Marquette University. Before long, Holty abandoned his pre-medical studies in order to pursue art. He spent a summer at the School of the Chicago Art Institute in Saugatuck, Michigan, and set off for New York in 1920. He then studied at the National Academy of Design under Francis Coates Jones...
Category

1940s Abstract Expressionist Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Mountain Wall
By Carl Holty
Located in Missouri, MO
Carl Holty (1900-1973) "Mountain Wall" 1962 Unframed: 12" x 9" Framed: 19.5" x 16.5" Signed Lower Left Known for his floating, luminous, highly-colorful forms, Carl Holty belongs to...
Category

20th Century Abstract Carl Holty Art

Materials

Oil, Panel

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Out of the Blue, Miniature Red & Blue Abstract
Out of the Blue, Miniature Red & Blue Abstract
$440 Sale Price
20% Off
H 3.5 in W 7.5 in D 2 in
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Fredric Karoly (1898-1987). Etude III, 1950. Oil on masonite panel measures 18 x 24 inches. Unframed. Signed, titled, dated on reverse. Good condition with minor paint loss at edges. Biography: An abstract painter, Karoly was born in Hungary and studied painting in Paris, architectural eingineering in Berlin, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1926. He began a successful career as a fashion and fabric designer. In 1948 he was working as a fashion director for Simplicity Patters, when he had a solo exhibition of of his oil paintings, wire montages, dry-pen drawings and abstract photography. Solo Exhibitions: Hugo Gallery (Alexandre Iolas) New York 1948; Gallery Mai. Paris 1949; New Gallery (Eugene Thaw) New York 1950; Museu de Arte, Sao Paulo, Brazil 1951; Miami Museum of Modern Art, Miami, Florida 1959; Loft Gallery, New York City, 1966.Group Exhibitions: Hugo Gallery, New York 1947; Salon des Realities Nouvelles, Paris 1949-1953; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (Annual) 1951-1953, 1963; Biennale of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1951; International Independent Exhibition, Tokyo, 1951; Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1959; The Butler Institute of Art, Youngstown, Ohio, 1960; Stuttman Gallery, New York, 1960; The Art Institute of Chicago (Annual), 1960; International Watercolor Exhibition, Brookyln Museum, 1961; Westchester Art Museum, White Plains, NY, 1963; Whitney Museum, Annual, NY 1963; Cleveland Art Festival, Park Synagogue, Cleveland, 1963; Whitney Museum, Sculpture Annual, NY, 1964.Works in Institutional Collections: Museu de Arte, San Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; New York University, New York; Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri; Finch College, NY; Barnard College, NY; Metropolitan Museum, Whitney Museum and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL. Awards: National Council Arts Awards, 1968. Frederic Karoly died on December 15, 1987 at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Manhattan, where he had made his home for many years. Fredric Karoly was born in Budapest in 1893. According to Karoly’s own vitae, his exhibition history began in New York in 1947, when at the age of 54 he took part in a four-person group show at Hugo Gallery. His involvement with visual art however was apparently life long. In a brief introduction to his solo show at Galerie Mai in Paris in June of 1949, Jen Luc de Rudder, reports that Karoly began painting at the age of 12 in Budapest. After several years of studying, then working in London, Paris and Berlin, Karoly emigrated to the United States in 1925 or 1926 (he probably first came to the US on a work visa in 1925). In New York, Karoly worked in women’s fashion as a designer. In 1948 Karoly worked in a manner than was clearly influenced by the work of such European surrealists as Max Ernst, creating spiked automatic bi-chromatic paintings. His style progressed into a progressively more biomorphic vein, similar to explorations by Theodore Stamos, Daphnis, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko around the same period. He was supported with patronage during this period by Mrs. Mimi Baliff, who apparently supported the “Industrial Design Workshop” that she helped open to feature Karoly’s designs in 1948. By the early 1950’s (1951) Karoly started experimenting with the drip and splatter process as well. Drip paintings dominated his process until the late 50’s-early 60’s, when linear compositional elements began to reemerge. By the late 50’s multi-layered drip grid motifs asserted a masque of spatial organization over looser washed fields and splatters of paint that Karoly worked off of. This development was consistent with concurrent explorations into the grid by artist Agnes Martin and others. By the mid-50’s Karoly’s style began another transition into a more surface concerned “Color Field” style of painting. There are elements still reminding one of Abstract Expressionist concerns as such painters as Clifford Still. But the works that began to emerge from Karoly’s studio in 1958 presaged the Morris Lewis fan motifs and Friedl Dzubas’s epic and romantic color spewing expanses of canvas. In 1959 Karoly began experiments using washes of turpentine diluted oil paint directly onto raw linen, and all of these subsequently suffered the consequences of oil oxidation and acidity upon the surfaces. However, many of Karoly’s washes in color field happily occurred on lightly prepared primed canvas surfaces as well. By 1960 Karoly began reintroducing imagistic references to his visual content. There were also various references to Japanese and Zen influences. He experimented with a variety of processes that included mixed media and marbleized surfaces achieved by the intermixture of oil and water mediums. A calligraphic element also enter Karoly’s work in the early 60’s. Then in 1961 glued and assembled objects begin to show up in Karoly’s work in earnest. The influence of early POP artists, particularly Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, become apparent. From 1961-63, a series of the assemblage works transition from canvas to the sculptural to pieces obviously intended for full scale installation. Many of these pieces were among the most fragile of his works primarily due to their reliance upon the of gluing of objects such as plastic or paper cups on flexible surfaces of stretched linen or canvas. In the mid-60’s Karoly apparently produced a number of photo-silk screened series of Picasso, De Kooning and other significant artists of his generation. These were executed in a style somewhere between Rauschenberg’s and Roy Lichtenstein’s, primarily because of their reliance upon half tones and Ben-Day dot effects. Then Karoly began a series of paintings conflating his drip and grid styles with super imposed and painted over string. In the late 60’s Karoly embarked upon a series of multi-paneled stretched linen constructions often with slits and fiber optic back-lit elements that were prescient of the work of Dan Flavin and others. It was this body of work that was shown at Hofstra University’s Emily Lowe Gallery, and it was these works that suffered perhaps the most irreparable damage from a steam/water infiltration in a space where they were being stored. The late professional start that Karoly had into the art world was balanced by his long life span and early immersion into the design issues of modernism as it emerged in turn of the century Europe and later evolved in America. He was clearly an artist who subscribed to the ethos of the new in abstraction and was obviously impressionable and in some instances prescient with regard to various trends in abstraction. Several noteworthy and influential collectors and institutions during his 40 years of professional engagement acquired his work. The Whitney Museum of American Art had and may still own a large Karoly canvas from 1960, but this is doubtful as the artist failed to list it on the vitae he filed with MoMA in 1965. His work was recognized and honored by the Whitney with its inclusion in four of their annual survey shows (1951,1953, 1963 and 1964). The artist’s surrealist influenced paintings from 1948-1950 were the focus of a solo exhibition held of his work by the Museo de Art in Sao Paulo and eight years later a ten year survey of his work was the focus of a solo show at the Miami Museum of Modern art. The Sao Paulo Museum in Brazil, and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina each acquired Karoly paintings for their collections in the 1950’s. One of Karoly’s surrealist pieces was apparently purchased by Christian Zervos, Picasso’s designated chronicler, who apparently also wrote a piece on Karoly in Cahiers D’Art in 1949. A 60’s piece of Karoly art that is in the New York University’s permanent collection is included in the MoMA Library’s catalog...
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Previously Available Items
Federation, pastel colored abstraction
By Carl Holty
Located in Greenwich, CT
Very contemporary yet a period abstraction by an artist president of the American Abstract Artists Group. This clear, crisp, and pastel-colored abstraction by Carl Holty is a marvelo...
Category

1940s Abstract Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Dark Blue Abstraction
By Carl Holty
Located in Greenwich, CT
Dark Blue is exceptional abstraction that has Cubist elements but is moving toward the exploration of Colorfield painting. The fragmented forms and use of a...
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Mid-20th Century Abstract Expressionist Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Canadian Return
By Carl Holty
Located in Greenwich, CT
During some periods of Holty’s abstract painting career, he would allow certain representational forms emerge in his works, as he does with the Moon and sense of clouds and atmospher...
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1960s Abstract Expressionist Carl Holty Art

Materials

Canvas, Oil

Carl Holty art for sale on 1stDibs.

Find a wide variety of authentic Carl Holty art available for sale on 1stDibs. If you’re browsing the collection of art to introduce a pop of color in a neutral corner of your living room or bedroom, you can find work that includes elements of blue and other colors. You can also browse by medium to find art by Carl Holty in oil paint, paint, canvas and more. Much of the original work by this artist or collective was created during the 20th century and is mostly associated with the abstract style. Not every interior allows for large Carl Holty art, so small editions measuring 7 inches across are available. Customers who are interested in this artist might also find the work of Paul Burlin, Robert Goodnough, and Fred Mitchell. Carl Holty art prices can differ depending upon medium, time period and other attributes. On 1stDibs, the price for these items starts at $3,500 and tops out at $55,000, while the average work can sell for $18,000.

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