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Arthur B. Carles
Hilda Carline
Arthur N. Christie
Arthur N. Christie was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and studied at Pratt Institute, the American Artists’ School, with Stefan Hirsch, and later with Hans Hoffman in New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Christie began doing abstract painting about 1931. From 1937 to 1941, he exhibited with the American Abstract Artists. During the late 1920s and 1930s Christie worked as a designer of bank notes and currency. Among his accomplishments were designs for the national currency of Panama, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Turkey. He later worked for the New York office of civil defense.
Christie’s paintings and drawings indicate his thorough acquaintance with Hans Hoffman’s theories of space and balance within the picture plane. Both Regatta and Kilimanjaro draw from the natural world for their motifs, but the highly abstracted, rhythmic line with which they are executed indicates Christie’s thorough conversation to modernist aesthetics and reflects ideas expressed in one of his few extant statements: “In presenting a work in the abstract we are manipulating hard/edge form. The evolving idea is couched in the landscape of form. And is transmitted by a plastic motility. Inherent in a calligraphy of form and/ or line/ the subliminal is indicated.”
In his later work, Christie explored Abstract Expressionism. In several highly detailed sketches for sculpture, he explored the juxtaposition of open and solid form using wire and wood. Christie did a large number of sketches from life and was fascinated with the human form in motion. He thought of himself as an artistic researcher and for a series of drawings designed a situation to test the validity of artistic transcription. He invited a dancer to improvise before two artists who made abstract sketches of the dancer’s movements. A second dancer was the asked to use the drawings as a basis for duplicating the improvisation. The artist could then asses the effectiveness with which they had captured the postures, movements, and rhythmic changes of their subject.
A resident of New York in midcareer, Christie subsequently moved to Philadelphia where his paintings were occasionally featured in group exhibitions.
1. Apart from a few gallery announcements and an undated exhibition in the Arthur N. Christie Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., little published material exists from which to reconstruct Christie’s life and career. Even Christie’s papers offer little substantive evidence. Among them are his handwritten quotes by other artists, critics, and literary figures, and a large number of drawings, most of which are undated.
2. From Hand written notes entitled “These are researches of A.N. Christie,” which appear to be a draft for a catalogue statement; see Christie Papers, Archives of American Art.
From: American Abstraction 1930-45
The Patricia and Philip Frost Collection
National Museum of Art 1989
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Dwinell Grant
WHEN HE WAS TWELVE, DWINELL GRANT BEGAN STUDYING LANDSCAPE PAINTING with his grandfather. Seeking further traditional training, in 1931 Grant enrolled at the Dayton Art Institute, which he soon discovered, had modernist leanings. After a year, he left Dayton to go to New York where he entered the National Academy of Design in 1933. By the time he arrived in New York, he had seen the Bliss collection and had begun thinking along modern lines. Although at the time, he said, his painting had not yet progressed "beyond the pointillist stage." After five months, he left the National Academy and in 1935 became an instructor in art and director of dramatics at Wittenberg College in Ohio. By this time, Grant's paintings were nonobjective, and he had come to believe that nonobjectivism "is a part of the earth itself. . . . In creating it we do not say something about something else, but rather we produce a rhythm which is a part of nature's rhythm and just as deep and fundamental as a heartbeat, a thunderstorm, the sequence of day and night or the growth of a girl into womanhood. . . . Nature is not something to be commented on, it is something to be."[1]
At Wittenberg, Grant had little time to paint. His work with student dramatics provided an outlet for his innovative ideas. As the stage set for an experimental, symphonic drama, Grant designed and built a large, nonobjective construction, painted it gray, then lit it with colored lights controlled by dimmer switches. By varying the intensity of the lights, he found he could change the color, and therefore the mood, of the dramatic presentation.[2] Although Grant's avant-garde ideas soon brought him criticism at Wittenberg, his friends at the Dayton Art Institute encouraged his work, and suggested he write to Hilla Rebay at the Guggenheim Foundation for support.
Rebay quickly became enthusiastic about Grant's ideas, and began sending him a fifteen dollar monthly stipend to help with the cost of materials. She arranged for Solomon Guggenheim to buy two of his drawings, and used several of his paintings in a group exhibition at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in the summer of 1940.
The Constructivist stage set had transformed Grant's ambitions, and he yearned to make an experimental, nonobjective film. He wrote to Rebay, "I am no prophet. I am simply an artist who sees a neglected beauty that is bursting to be possessed. In the midst of the confusion of nationalistic isms here will be an art that is clean, naked and straightforward. It will be barbaric because it will have none of the sickening stupid veneer that civilization has laid on the arts for hundreds of years, but it will not be crude. And it will drive in to the emotions a new depth because of the primitiveness, the directness, and the fundamentalness of its expression."[3]
With Rebay's assistance, Grant moved to New York and began working at the Guggenheim. His own art flourished, and between 1938 and 1941, he made several experimental films, including Contrathemis, an eight-minute, animated production, for which he did some four thousand drawings. In 1942, Grant went to work for a commercial film company and during World War II made Navy training films. Soon thereafter, he began doing scientific illustration and making teaching films for the medical profession. Although he continued to paint and draw independently, his career in medical films took precedence, and until the mid 1970s, he exhibited his creative work only on rare occasions.
In New York in the early 1940s, Grant was friendly with John Sennhauser, Jean Xceron, Irene Rice Pereira, and others associated with the Guggenheim Foundation. However, he did not become actively involved with either the American Abstract Artists, or other organizations, that provided an artistic or political forum for practicing artists. His own vision had developed independently, and although his paintings bear some resemblance to those of Kandinsky, his interest in balance and rhythm grew intuitively rather than as the result of a theoretical searching for new forms of expression.
1. Dwinell Grant letter to Hilla Rebay, 24 July 1940, Dwinell Grant Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
2. For Grant's own description of the stage set and a newspaper clipping about the performance, see Grant's letter to Hilla Rebay, 5 May 1940, in Grant papers, Archives of American Art. I am grateful to Marina Pacini and Judy Throm of the Archives staff for their assistance.
3. Dwinell Grant letter to Hilla Rebay, 5 June 1940, Grant Papers, Archives of American Art.
Source:Virginia M. Mecklenburg. "The Patricia and Phillip Frost Collection: American Abstraction, 1930-1945" (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art and Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), pp. 80-84. Copyright 1989 Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved
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David Hare
Charles Houghton Howard
Charles Howard was born in New Jersey in 1889. Raised in Berkeley, California, he was a member of a family of celebrated architects, painters, and sculptors. Howard graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a BA in journalism in 1922, and did graduate work in English at Harvard and Columbia Universities. Howard was not formally trained as an artist,but embarked on an artistic career after an epiphany that occurred during a trip to Italy in 1924.
In the town of Castelfranco, north of Venice, Howard was mesmerized by the beauty of a Giorgione altarpiece. After leaving the chapel, he became violently ill, and immediately returned to Paris to begin painting. In 1926 he returned to the United States where he lived in New York City's Greenwich Village and worked painting murals for a decorating firm. This experience comprised his only formal art education. Howard had his first one-man exhibition of drawings in 1926 at the Whitney Studio Club, the precursor to the Whitney Museum, and later was represented by the influential New York dealer Julien Levy. He married the English painter Madge Knight and they moved to London in 1934, where his social circle included avant-garde artists like Henry Moore and where he was exposed to European Surrealism and abstraction. The advent of World War II and the onslaught of the blitzkriegs forced the couple to return to the United States.
From 1940 to 1946 Howard and Knight lived in San Francisco, a refuge for the international avant garde. There they became close friends with Douglas and Jermayne MacAgy. Douglas MacAgy, a curator at the San Fransciso Museum of Art and then the influential director of the California School of Fine Arts, championed Howard's work. His wife, Jermayne MacAgy, organized Howard's 1946 retrospective at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, where she served as the acting director. Among Howard's many colleagues were Bay Area modernists including his brother Richard Howard, Clyfford Still, and Clay Spohn. Howard made a significant artistic contribution to this community by introducing European approaches to art to students and artists alike. Howard and Knight returned to London after the war where he continued to teach and paint until his death in 1978.
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Aristodimos Kaldis
Aristodimos Kaldis would be more widely recognized as one of the most original painters of his day, had he been less of a Bohemian and less of a public personality. Instead, he tends to be pigeonholed as a naive painter. However, naive he was certainly not. The true naive is obsessed by the need for finish, to make things look real. If he paints a wall, he will describe each brick. Kaldis, on the other hand, had an unfailing knack for knowing where and when to stop. Like Bonnard, like Kandinsky, he stops painting as soon as he sees what the action of the painting has taught him. He was as much an action painter as the New York abstract expressionists, Gorky, Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning, who were his friends and colleagues.
- Lawrence Campbell
One of the things that you have to have to understand Kaldis' paintings is you have to be interested in painting. You can't expect to respond to Kaldis' paintings unless you have both an understanding of, and a real appetite for painting. He was a virtuoso at addressing that appetite. He had it. he could transmit it. It was in his fingertips and it's one of the qualities that gives his work it's distinction, I think.
- Hilton Kramer
Everything Mr. Kaldis paints is invested with the passion and extravagance of his personality, which is given to uncontained outbursts of feeling and a whimsical ebullience.
Obituary 1979 May 3 - The New York Times by C. Gerald Fraser
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