Art: ARTHUR CARLES: A Success of Failure

MANY a favorite of yesteryear drops quietly from sight. More exciting are the rare instances of painters whom time mellows and improves. Such a one was Philadelphia Painter Arthur Carles, whose reputation for a while seemed to gutter and go out. Now, with a chance to review his lifetime’s production at an exhibition of paintings at Manhattan’s Graham galleries, critics have been shocked into recognizing Carles as one of the unsung ancestors of today’s abstract painting.

Although no amount of post-mortem analysis can altogether remove the aura of a grand failure from Carles’s work, it now appears, in retrospect, that Carles stood so alone because he was so far ahead. As a young man he had gone to Paris, fallen under the spell first of Edouard Manet and then the postimpressionists, sipped coffee with Matisse and Brancusi. Back home in Philadelphia, where he taught from 1917 to 1925 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Carles slowly digested his European lessons, then moved on to a symphonic orchestration of colors all his own.

To outsiders, hard-drinking Artist Carles was a long-haired, full-bearded bohemian who slugged hostile critics and hurled eggs against the wall on impulse. He alternated between exhausting stretches of work and months-long alcoholic bouts. But as an artist he believed in being both cool and controlled, recommended billiards as a fine training for any beginner. “On that green surface and within that frame.” Carles said, “he will find the equilibrium, symmetry, triangulation, direction, motion and restraint of all art.”

Nude with Bouquet (see color) is not only Carles’s tribute to Manet but a memorial to what he had learned from Matisse and left behind. Matisse’s arabesque line is there—but subordinated to Carles’s attempt to create volume with color alone. His Table Arrangement, quick and sketchy by comparison, records Carles’s later flight into an unknown world where images existed only as reference points.

Like most painters. Carles hoped for public confirmation that his new abstract direction was valid. In the socially conscious U.S. art world of the 1930s, such confirmation was not forthcoming. (In 1936 Leger visited him in Philadelphia, was amazed to find “anything like this going on in America.”) Carles began painting and repainting the same canvases until they were too heavy to lift. The World War II migration of Paris painters —Chagall, Mondrian et al.—to Manhattan finally produced the understanding audience Carles longed for, but it was too late. In 1941 Carles suffered a stroke, and though he lingered on until his death at 70 in 1952, he never painted again. Said his daughter, Painter Mercedes Matter, “His entire work was characterized by this impetuous moving on toward what he perceived further ahead. From one point of view he could be considered a failure, since there were few places in which he stopped sufficiently to consolidate his position and produce successfully.”