Art: A Day in June

Bernard Karfiol, a nut-brown little walnut of a man, is one of the country’s most reserved and most respected artists. In almost half a century of painting he has had less than a dozen one-man shows, but they have earned him a place in a dozen topnotch museums. His latest exhibition, which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week, showed why Karfiol is famous in spite of himself.

Entering the gallery was like going outdoors on a balmy June day. Karfiol’s nudes, flowers and landscapes all had the same warmth and freshness of tone, the same softness of outline and the same idyllic mood. The dreamy passivity of Karnol’s paintings made a startling contrast to the hard energy of John Marin’s (see below).

Karnol’s strictly limited palette contained only one dull “earth” color, burnt sienna. The others, which he blended at will into a rainbow of subtle hues, were lead white, cadmium red and yellow, emerald green, ultramarine blue “and, very very seldom, a little black.” He applied his colors to canvas with a feather-soft touch that was also precise enough to require hardly any preliminary drawing. Though some of the canvases had been in his studio for years, and had been worked over again & again, they all looked ripe and bright as peaches with the bloom intact. “I’m finished with a picture when I feel I can’t do any more with it,” Karfiol says. “It’s not a matter of smoothing everything out, it’s the feeling.”

Remember Gertrude. At 63, Karfiol can look back on a career that has run like a single thread through the crazy-quilt pattern of modern art. The son of a Brooklyn manufacturer, he was one of the first U.S. painters to go to Paris. “They were just tearing down the exposition buildings of 1900,” he says. “There were no automobiles then and you could buy a Chateaubriand for 30 centimes. I remember Leo and Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Alfy Maurer, Weber, Pascin, and John Marin, too. I used to think Marin was an Italian model: he never said a word, never fitted in with our crowd at the Cafe de Dome . . .

“I studied at the Julian Academy for a year and showed some portraits at the salons. When someone compared me to Sargent I got discouraged and started to work on my own. That was a period in art when everyone was using lots of black. Then from 1901 to 1906 we became more color-conscious. Instead of just copying what we saw we began to get pleasure out of the different colors and to point them out to the onlooker. The same with form . . .

“That’s the artist’s job—to feel a thing and then point it out in his work so the other fellow immediately feels it too. The esthetic quality is the ‘you’ in the art, not the thing you paint. Your style is part of your personality, like your signature. You can’t really change it.”

Back to the Cafe. Karfiol’s style has grown steadily softer and warmer, but it has not changed. Nowadays he paints in Manhattan, spends his weekends with his wife, son and two grandchildren in Irvington, N.Y., and his summers in Ogunquit, Maine. “I’m saving my pennies to go back to Paris again,” he says. “I want to go back to the Cafe de Dome.”

When he gets there he will find young painters still discussing the problems that the grand old men of French art first raised at the turn of the century. There will be nothing new to shake his simple, and productive, philosophy.