Arny Karl
Encyclopedia
Arny Karl (July 31, 1940 - February 15, 2000) was one of the key artists in the early stages of the California Plein-Air Revival
, which started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Along with Tim Solliday (b.1952) and Peter Seitz Adams (b.1950), Karl helped revitalize the use of pastels to paint outdoors or en plein air
, as the French described regarding the practice of working directly from nature. Karl was a student of Theodore Lukits
(1897–1992), who was a prominent California Impressionist and the best known Early California painter to have worked in pastel
. His work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions, is represented in a number of prominent public and private collections and has been the subject of a number of curatorial essays.
, Italy
to an Austrian father, Anton Karl (1899–1984) and an Italian mother, Rosa Maria Adami (1911–1966). His father was a minister and a writer, but it was his mother who encouraged Karl's artistic development through her own interest in design and the arts. The Karl family moved frequently, first to Milan
, then to Rome
and finally to Florence
, where Karl grew up and, as a student, was fascinated and awed by the art of the Renaissance
. Karl enjoyed the Italian countryside and was always drawn to nature as a subject. In 1961, he emigrated to the United States
and settled in San Gabriel Valley
, just east of Los Angeles
, where his sister was living after her immigration
into the United States. Initially, like many new immigrants, Karl worked at a variety of different jobs but because of his artistic talent, Karl enrolled at Pasadena City College
to study commercial sign and scenic painting
, which he felt would enable him to pursue a practical career that would still involve art.
, with its tremendous urban sprawl
, had a large billboard
industry and large, colorful billboards towered over the streets and freeways. In that era most of the boards were still hand painted and were essentially large mural
s that were painted in vast studios, or on site, by artists on scaffolds. Initially, Karl was hired as a 'helper' or apprentice at Foster & Kleiser, a large Los Angeles outdoor advertising firm that is now part of Clear Channel Outdoor
. He mixed paints and assisted the more experienced artists, while he learned the technique of completing vast paintings under a strict deadline. Karl quickly climbed up the union ladder and was soon painting his own large billboards for Foster & Kleiser and then for Pacific Outdoor Advertising. Like many commercial artists, he found the lack of creativity in commercial art
frustrating and wanted a career as a fine artist, but realized he would need further training. Fortuitously, Bernardo "Barney" Sepulveda, a senior co-worker at Foster & Kleiser, introduced Karl to the iconoclastic figurative painter and Early California pastelist Theodore Lukits. Known as a staunch traditionalist, Lukits' own work and teaching career helped preserve the ideals and methods of the late-19th-century French ateliers and academies. Karl immediately recognized and respected Lukits' knowledge and mastery of pastel and oil landscapes, formal portraits, still lifes, and anatomical drawing and knew he had found a teacher and mentor.
, beneath the San Bernardino
Mountains that Karl often painted. The Karls had no children and were divorced April 15, 1982. Later, Karl had a long relationship with a woman that he referred to as his wife, Katherine "Kay" Karl, who survived him, but there does not seem to be a record of a formal marriage and there were no children from their relationship. He had a strong, masculine appearance and he was eccentric and colorful in appearance and actions. Karl usually wore paint-splattered clothing and has been described as "looking like he just emerged from the studio", which most often was the case. He could be secretive about his art work, seldom sharing his paintings with anyone except his closest artist friends, who he felt would understand them. In his later years, he was wary of outsiders and reclusive enough that few visitors ever were allowed access to his home. In spite of a generally retiring nature, he developed close friendships with a number of his co-workers in the billboard industry and several of his fellow art students. In his later years, Karl worked in a drafty studio with a complement of cats that was adjacent to his ramshackle home. He was reluctant to see doctors and this quirk contributed to his health issues. He died in a hospital in Ontario, in San Bernardino County, California, after a lengthy illness.
atelier
of Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), the Lukits Academy, in 1968. At that time painters like R.H. Ives Gammel (1893–1981) in Boston and Lukits in Los Angeles were two of the few fine arts teachers whose instruction was based on the ideals and techniques of the 19th Century French Ecole des Beaux-Arts
. This type of instruction is now known as the "Atelier Method
." The Beaux-Arts method had evolved over hundreds of years from the Renaissance through the 19th century and was brought to perhaps its highest level of refinement by Parisian masters like William-Adolphe Bouguereau
(1825–1905), Jean-Leon Gerome
(1824–1904) and Leon Bonnat
(1833–1922). Lukits, who had been teaching since 1924, was a respected California portrait, landscape and still life painter whose work was popular with the film community. He was an award-winning graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago
where he had studied with a host of Parisian- and European-trained painters including Alphonse Mucha(1860–1939), Edmund Henry Wuerpel (1866–1947), Edwin Blashfield
(1848–1936), Karl Albert Buehr
(1866–1952), Wellington J. Reynolds (1865–1949), Richard E. Miller (1875–1943), Charles Webster Hawthorne
(1872–1930) and Robert Henri (1865–1929). Lukits passed on the accumulated knowledge he learned in his years at the Washington University School of Fine Arts, Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago to his students, who began by "drawing from the antique" which meant doing charcoal or graphite portraits of marbles and plaster casts of ancient Roman and Greek statuary. These studies taught the students to understand "values" which are the tonal gradations of light and shadow, applicable to working under artificial lighting conditions in the studio or out of doors under the natural light of the sun or moon. Advancement in a traditional atelier is based on mastery rather than an artificial quarter or semester system, so Karl moved from working from plaster casts to simple still life set-ups only after his instructor was satisfied with his work. Eventually he began to work in color, painting still life set-ups under the colored lights that Lukits used to simulate conditions an artist would find out of doors. As the years passed under Lukits' guidance, Karl also began attending Lukits' anatomy and life drawing classes. Karl studied with Lukits for an entire decade while he supported himself in the field of commercial art and he concluded his studies in 1978.
(b. 1952), two younger painters who were interested in working out of doors, had entered the Lukits atelier. Karl, who had already been working out of doors for a number of years, served as their early mentor, helping them learn the techniques of working directly from nature. Together the three painters worked painting the stands of Eucalyptus along the Southern California Coast, working in places like St. Malo Beach, where the Adams family had their beach house, the wetland
s at Batiquitos Lagoon
and Laguna Beach. Karl, Solliday and Adams also made longer sketching trips to the High Sierras, Utah
, Yellowstone National Park
and the Canadian Rockies
. These three painters worked almost exclusively in pastel and dedicated themselves to championing that medium as a method ideally suited to capturing the rapidly changing natural conditions that an artist encountered out of doors. Karl also painted in Europe the entire year of 1971, working in the Alps
, Germany
, Italy
and Greece
. He usually worked in small sizes when he painted from nature, from 6" x 8" to 12" x 16" and then worked up larger paintings in pastel or oil in his studio. Karl held his Plein-Air pastel works closely, seldom exhibiting them or showing them to anyone except his fellow artists, a practice he learned from his teacher and mentor, Theodore Lukits. He saw the pastel work as his reference material for larger, more ambitious works and they served as a form of visual memory, so he seldom wanted to let go of them. In large part because of Karl's influence, by the late 1970s, a number of painters were working out of doors in the Plein-Air Pastel tradition that artists like Theodore Lukits and William Louis Otte (1871–1957) had established in the 1920s.
, Arizona
, a large western gallery, in the mid-1980s, but because of his infrequent visits to Arizona, they were never able to sell his work steadily. It was not until the early 1990s, when he began working with Jeffrey Morseburg, Howard Morseburg's son, that his work began to be exhibited and sold steadily. While he seldom sold his pastel studies early in his professional career, by the mid-1990s, his dealer convinced him that his most personally revealing works were the ones done from nature and that the revival of interest in California Impressionism meant that there was a much greater appreciation for Plein-Air paintings. Morseburg began to market and advertise the works of a number of "Contemporary Plein-Air Painters" with Karl's works advertised and shown along with those of Peter Seitz Adams, Tim Solliday and the aging landscape painter Richard Rackus (b. 1922). Morseburg Galleries also hosted a number of large pastel exhibitions with Karl's work featured prominently. It was from these pastel exhibitions that the collector Sean Sullivan began his collection of pastels of the western American landscape that would later form the core collection for the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art. Phoebe Faulkner, one of the premier collectors of the works of contemporary California Impressionists, also purchased many works from Morseburg's exhibitions. In the 1990s, Karl also began to paint medium-sized and large works based on his pastel studies and these works were sold by Morseburg Galleries and exhibited at Jones & Terwilliger Galleries in Carmel
, California. Patricia Terwilliger of Jones & Terwilliger, was responsible for the sale of Karl's largest work, a 36" x 45" painting of the Carmel Coast to a Pacific Grove collector. With Morseburg's help, Karl began to exhibit his work with the revived and strengthened California Art Club and his Plein-Air pastels were included in the annual Gold Medal Exhibition as well as the museum shows Treasures of the Sierra Madre and the ecologically-themed exhibition California Wetlands both originating at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
.
and Gil Dellinger. Three of Karl's works were exhibited in SAMA's 1999 exhibition titled Contemporary Romanticism: Landscapes in Pastel and again in the 2008 Exhibition titled From Charles Burchfield to Peter Adams in 2008. Additional gifts to the Southern Alleghenies Museum's pastel collection are planned. One of Karl's largest works "Windswept Sierras," has been promised to the California Art Club for its permanent collection.
(1774-1840) and J. M. W. Turner
(1775-1841). His Blue Moment and Pink Moments, plein-air pastels of the Sierra Mountains, convey the sublime and awe inspiring aspects of nature." While Karl's artistic oeuvre was small, because of his influence on a number of younger painters, strident advocacy of plein-air painting and the pastel medium and presence in several important public and private collections his influence is still being felt.
California Plein-Air Revival
The California Plein-Air Revival is an art movement that began in the 1980s and its artists were inspired by the revival of interest in the works of the California Plein-Air School of 1900-1940...
, which started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Along with Tim Solliday (b.1952) and Peter Seitz Adams (b.1950), Karl helped revitalize the use of pastels to paint outdoors or en plein air
En plein air
En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors.Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism...
, as the French described regarding the practice of working directly from nature. Karl was a student of Theodore Lukits
Theodore Lukits
Theodore Nikolai Lukits was a California portrait and landscape painter. His initial fame came from his portraits of some of the most glamorous actresses of the Silent Film era, but since his death, his Asian-inspired works, figures drawn from Hispanic California and his pastel landscapes have all...
(1897–1992), who was a prominent California Impressionist and the best known Early California painter to have worked in pastel
Pastel
Pastel is an art medium in the form of a stick, consisting of pure powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are the same as those used to produce all colored art media, including oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation....
. His work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions, is represented in a number of prominent public and private collections and has been the subject of a number of curatorial essays.
Early life
Karl was born in South TyrolSouth Tyrol
South Tyrol , also known by its Italian name Alto Adige, is an autonomous province in northern Italy. It is one of the two autonomous provinces that make up the autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. The province has an area of and a total population of more than 500,000 inhabitants...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
to an Austrian father, Anton Karl (1899–1984) and an Italian mother, Rosa Maria Adami (1911–1966). His father was a minister and a writer, but it was his mother who encouraged Karl's artistic development through her own interest in design and the arts. The Karl family moved frequently, first to Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, then to Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
and finally to Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
, where Karl grew up and, as a student, was fascinated and awed by the art of the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
. Karl enjoyed the Italian countryside and was always drawn to nature as a subject. In 1961, he emigrated to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and settled in San Gabriel Valley
San Gabriel Valley
The San Gabriel Valley is one of the principal valleys of Southern California, United States. It lies to the east of Los Angeles, to the north of the Puente Hills, to the south of the San Gabriel Mountains, and west of the Inland Empire. It derives its name from the San Gabriel River that flows...
, just east of Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, where his sister was living after her immigration
Immigration
Immigration is the act of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence...
into the United States. Initially, like many new immigrants, Karl worked at a variety of different jobs but because of his artistic talent, Karl enrolled at Pasadena City College
Pasadena City College
Pasadena City College is a community college in Pasadena, California, USA, located on Colorado Boulevard. PCC is the third largest community college campus in the United States. PCC was founded in 1924 as Pasadena Junior College. In 1954, Pasadena Junior College merged with another junior...
to study commercial sign and scenic painting
Scenic painting
Theatrical scenic painting includes wide-ranging disciplines, encompassing virtually the entire scope of painting and craft techniques. An experienced scenic painter will have skills in landscape painting, figurative painting, trompe l'oeil, and faux finishing, be versatile in different media such...
, which he felt would enable him to pursue a practical career that would still involve art.
Commercial art career
To earn a living, Karl found employment in the outdoor advertising industry. In the 1960s, Los AngelesLos Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, with its tremendous urban sprawl
Urban sprawl
Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a multifaceted concept, which includes the spreading outwards of a city and its suburbs to its outskirts to low-density and auto-dependent development on rural land, high segregation of uses Urban sprawl, also known as suburban sprawl, is a...
, had a large billboard
Billboard
Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...
industry and large, colorful billboards towered over the streets and freeways. In that era most of the boards were still hand painted and were essentially large mural
Mural
A mural is any piece of artwork painted or applied directly on a wall, ceiling or other large permanent surface. A particularly distinguishing characteristic of mural painting is that the architectural elements of the given space are harmoniously incorporated into the picture.-History:Murals of...
s that were painted in vast studios, or on site, by artists on scaffolds. Initially, Karl was hired as a 'helper' or apprentice at Foster & Kleiser, a large Los Angeles outdoor advertising firm that is now part of Clear Channel Outdoor
Clear Channel Outdoor
Clear Channel Outdoor , is a company controlled by Clear Channel Communications and is one of the world's largest outdoor advertising corporations. The company is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona and has operations in six of the seven continents....
. He mixed paints and assisted the more experienced artists, while he learned the technique of completing vast paintings under a strict deadline. Karl quickly climbed up the union ladder and was soon painting his own large billboards for Foster & Kleiser and then for Pacific Outdoor Advertising. Like many commercial artists, he found the lack of creativity in commercial art
Commercial art
Commercial art is historically a subsector of creative services, referring to art created for commercial purposes, primarily advertising. The term has become increasingly anachronistic in favor of more contemporary terms such as graphic design and advertising art.Commercial art traditionally...
frustrating and wanted a career as a fine artist, but realized he would need further training. Fortuitously, Bernardo "Barney" Sepulveda, a senior co-worker at Foster & Kleiser, introduced Karl to the iconoclastic figurative painter and Early California pastelist Theodore Lukits. Known as a staunch traditionalist, Lukits' own work and teaching career helped preserve the ideals and methods of the late-19th-century French ateliers and academies. Karl immediately recognized and respected Lukits' knowledge and mastery of pastel and oil landscapes, formal portraits, still lifes, and anatomical drawing and knew he had found a teacher and mentor.
Personal life
Arny Karl was married to the teacher Lee Kietz on June 7, 1969. The couple lived in Rancho CucamongaRancho Cucamonga
Rancho Cucamonga was a Mexican land grant in present day San Bernardino County, California given in 1839 to dedicated soldier, smuggler and politician, Tiburcio Tapia by Mexican governor Juan Bautista Alvarado. The grant encompassed present day Rancho Cucamonga...
, beneath the San Bernardino
San Bernardino
San Bernardino, California is a large city in the Inland Empire Metropolitan Area of Southern California.San Bernardino may also refer to:-Landforms:*San Bernardino , a torrent that flows through the Italian province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola...
Mountains that Karl often painted. The Karls had no children and were divorced April 15, 1982. Later, Karl had a long relationship with a woman that he referred to as his wife, Katherine "Kay" Karl, who survived him, but there does not seem to be a record of a formal marriage and there were no children from their relationship. He had a strong, masculine appearance and he was eccentric and colorful in appearance and actions. Karl usually wore paint-splattered clothing and has been described as "looking like he just emerged from the studio", which most often was the case. He could be secretive about his art work, seldom sharing his paintings with anyone except his closest artist friends, who he felt would understand them. In his later years, he was wary of outsiders and reclusive enough that few visitors ever were allowed access to his home. In spite of a generally retiring nature, he developed close friendships with a number of his co-workers in the billboard industry and several of his fellow art students. In his later years, Karl worked in a drafty studio with a complement of cats that was adjacent to his ramshackle home. He was reluctant to see doctors and this quirk contributed to his health issues. He died in a hospital in Ontario, in San Bernardino County, California, after a lengthy illness.
Artistic education
After an introduction from the billboard painter Bernardo "Barney" Sepulveda, Arny Karl entered the Hancock ParkHancock Park
Hancock Park is a park in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, area, which is the location of the La Brea Tar Pits, the George C. Page Museum of La Brea Discoveries, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . The park does not, however, lie within the Hancock Park neighborhood which is...
atelier
Studio
A studio is an artist's or worker's workroom, or the catchall term for an artist and his or her employees who work within that studio. This can be for the purpose of architecture, painting, pottery , sculpture, scrapbooking, photography, graphic design, filmmaking, animation, radio or television...
of Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), the Lukits Academy, in 1968. At that time painters like R.H. Ives Gammel (1893–1981) in Boston and Lukits in Los Angeles were two of the few fine arts teachers whose instruction was based on the ideals and techniques of the 19th Century French Ecole des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts
École des Beaux-Arts refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The most famous is the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, now located on the left bank in Paris, across the Seine from the Louvre, in the 6th arrondissement. The school has a history spanning more than 350 years,...
. This type of instruction is now known as the "Atelier Method
Atelier Method
Atelier is the French word for "workshop", and in English is used principally for the workshop of an artist in the fine or decorative arts, where a principal master and a number of assistants, students and apprentices worked together producing pieces that went out in the master's name...
." The Beaux-Arts method had evolved over hundreds of years from the Renaissance through the 19th century and was brought to perhaps its highest level of refinement by Parisian masters like William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.-Life and career :William-Adolphe...
(1825–1905), Jean-Leon Gerome
Jean-Léon Gérôme
Jean-Léon Gérôme was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.-Life:Jean-Léon Gérôme was born...
(1824–1904) and Leon Bonnat
Léon Bonnat
Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat was a French painter.He was born in Bayonne, but from 1846 to 1853 he lived in Madrid, where his father owned a bookshop. While tending his father's shop, he copied engravings of works by the Old Masters, developing a passion for drawing...
(1833–1922). Lukits, who had been teaching since 1924, was a respected California portrait, landscape and still life painter whose work was popular with the film community. He was an award-winning graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
where he had studied with a host of Parisian- and European-trained painters including Alphonse Mucha(1860–1939), Edmund Henry Wuerpel (1866–1947), Edwin Blashfield
Edwin Blashfield
Edwin Howland Blashfield , an American artist, was born in New York City.He was a pupil of Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat in Paris beginning in 1867, and became a member of the National Academy of Design in New York...
(1848–1936), Karl Albert Buehr
Karl Albert Buehr
Karl Albert Buehr was a painter born in Germany.Buehr was born in Feuerbach - near Stuttgart. He was the son of Frederick Buehr and Henrietta Doh . He moved to Chicago with his parents and siblings in the 1880s. In Chicago, young Karl worked at various jobs until he was employed by a...
(1866–1952), Wellington J. Reynolds (1865–1949), Richard E. Miller (1875–1943), Charles Webster Hawthorne
Charles Webster Hawthorne
Charles Webster Hawthorne was an American portrait and genre painter and a noted teacher who founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899....
(1872–1930) and Robert Henri (1865–1929). Lukits passed on the accumulated knowledge he learned in his years at the Washington University School of Fine Arts, Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago to his students, who began by "drawing from the antique" which meant doing charcoal or graphite portraits of marbles and plaster casts of ancient Roman and Greek statuary. These studies taught the students to understand "values" which are the tonal gradations of light and shadow, applicable to working under artificial lighting conditions in the studio or out of doors under the natural light of the sun or moon. Advancement in a traditional atelier is based on mastery rather than an artificial quarter or semester system, so Karl moved from working from plaster casts to simple still life set-ups only after his instructor was satisfied with his work. Eventually he began to work in color, painting still life set-ups under the colored lights that Lukits used to simulate conditions an artist would find out of doors. As the years passed under Lukits' guidance, Karl also began attending Lukits' anatomy and life drawing classes. Karl studied with Lukits for an entire decade while he supported himself in the field of commercial art and he concluded his studies in 1978.
Plein-Air painting career
From the time he was young, Arny Karl had always loved the outdoors and when he entered the atelier of Theodore Lukits, it was the elderly painter's large collection of Plein-Air Pastels that made the deepest impression on him. While Lukits was no longer working out of doors, he explained the techniques he used in his works of the 1920s to Karl and simulated conditions of natural light in his studio for his students. By the late 1960s, Karl was working out of doors, painted in the foothills of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains. He brought his works back to the Lukits atelier for the older artist to critique and his steadily work advanced and improved. By the mid 1970s, Peter Seitz Adams (b. 1950) and Tim SollidayTim Solliday
Tim Solliday is a contemporary California Plein-Air Painter and Western Artist who is known for his San Gabriel Valley landscapes and his paintings of American Indians and other western subjects. He studied with the California Impressionist portrait and landscape painter Theodore Lukits in the...
(b. 1952), two younger painters who were interested in working out of doors, had entered the Lukits atelier. Karl, who had already been working out of doors for a number of years, served as their early mentor, helping them learn the techniques of working directly from nature. Together the three painters worked painting the stands of Eucalyptus along the Southern California Coast, working in places like St. Malo Beach, where the Adams family had their beach house, the wetland
Wetland
A wetland is an area of land whose soil is saturated with water either permanently or seasonally. Wetlands are categorised by their characteristic vegetation, which is adapted to these unique soil conditions....
s at Batiquitos Lagoon
Batiquitos Lagoon
The Batiquitos Lagoon is a coastal wetland in southern Carlsbad, California. It is run by the California Department of Fish and Game as a nature reserve....
and Laguna Beach. Karl, Solliday and Adams also made longer sketching trips to the High Sierras, Utah
Utah
Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...
, Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone National Park
Yellowstone National Park, established by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872, is a national park located primarily in the U.S. state of Wyoming, although it also extends into Montana and Idaho...
and the Canadian Rockies
Canadian Rockies
The Canadian Rockies comprise the Canadian segment of the North American Rocky Mountains range. They are the eastern part of the Canadian Cordillera, extending from the Interior Plains of Alberta to the Rocky Mountain Trench of British Columbia. The southern end borders Idaho and Montana of the USA...
. These three painters worked almost exclusively in pastel and dedicated themselves to championing that medium as a method ideally suited to capturing the rapidly changing natural conditions that an artist encountered out of doors. Karl also painted in Europe the entire year of 1971, working in the Alps
Alps
The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
and Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
. He usually worked in small sizes when he painted from nature, from 6" x 8" to 12" x 16" and then worked up larger paintings in pastel or oil in his studio. Karl held his Plein-Air pastel works closely, seldom exhibiting them or showing them to anyone except his fellow artists, a practice he learned from his teacher and mentor, Theodore Lukits. He saw the pastel work as his reference material for larger, more ambitious works and they served as a form of visual memory, so he seldom wanted to let go of them. In large part because of Karl's influence, by the late 1970s, a number of painters were working out of doors in the Plein-Air Pastel tradition that artists like Theodore Lukits and William Louis Otte (1871–1957) had established in the 1920s.
Professional career
About the time Karl finished his academic studies with Theodore Lukits he began to exhibit his work professionally. He sold his first works to the veteran Los Angeles dealer Howard Morseburg (b. 1924), a relationship that began because of the dealer's long friendship with Thedore Lukits. These early. less mature works were done in oil, "worked up" from his pastel studies. They were brightly colored paintings depicting vivid sunrises and sunsets, broadly painted with little detail. According to Morseburg, because of the intense colors, the paintings did not sell well and after working with Karl for a number of months, the business relationship faded. Karl also began to work with Doug Jones, another veteran dealer who had the Jones Gallery in La Jolla, California. Jones encouraged Karl and purchased and sold a number of his paintings including both figurative and landscape works in oil and pastel. Both Morseburg and Jones have cited Karl's eccentricity and unreliability as an impediment to the development of his artistic career in the 1980s. Karl began working with Trailside Galeries in ScottsdaleScottsdale
Scottsdale is the name of several places:* Scottsdale, Arizona, United States* Scottsdale, Tasmania, Australia* Scottsdale Reserve, New South Wales, Australia...
, Arizona
Arizona
Arizona ; is a state located in the southwestern region of the United States. It is also part of the western United States and the mountain west. The capital and largest city is Phoenix...
, a large western gallery, in the mid-1980s, but because of his infrequent visits to Arizona, they were never able to sell his work steadily. It was not until the early 1990s, when he began working with Jeffrey Morseburg, Howard Morseburg's son, that his work began to be exhibited and sold steadily. While he seldom sold his pastel studies early in his professional career, by the mid-1990s, his dealer convinced him that his most personally revealing works were the ones done from nature and that the revival of interest in California Impressionism meant that there was a much greater appreciation for Plein-Air paintings. Morseburg began to market and advertise the works of a number of "Contemporary Plein-Air Painters" with Karl's works advertised and shown along with those of Peter Seitz Adams, Tim Solliday and the aging landscape painter Richard Rackus (b. 1922). Morseburg Galleries also hosted a number of large pastel exhibitions with Karl's work featured prominently. It was from these pastel exhibitions that the collector Sean Sullivan began his collection of pastels of the western American landscape that would later form the core collection for the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art. Phoebe Faulkner, one of the premier collectors of the works of contemporary California Impressionists, also purchased many works from Morseburg's exhibitions. In the 1990s, Karl also began to paint medium-sized and large works based on his pastel studies and these works were sold by Morseburg Galleries and exhibited at Jones & Terwilliger Galleries in Carmel
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California
Carmel-by-the-Sea, often called simply Carmel, is a small city in Monterey County, California, United States, founded in 1902 and incorporated in 1916. Situated on the Monterey Peninsula, the town is known for its natural scenery and rich artistic history...
, California. Patricia Terwilliger of Jones & Terwilliger, was responsible for the sale of Karl's largest work, a 36" x 45" painting of the Carmel Coast to a Pacific Grove collector. With Morseburg's help, Karl began to exhibit his work with the revived and strengthened California Art Club and his Plein-Air pastels were included in the annual Gold Medal Exhibition as well as the museum shows Treasures of the Sierra Madre and the ecologically-themed exhibition California Wetlands both originating at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California, USA in 1913 as the Museum of History, Science, and Art. The moving force behind it was a museum association founded in 1910. Its distinctive main building, with fitted marble walls and domed and...
.
Late career and posthumous recognition
By the late 1990s, Karl began to experience health problems and was diagnosed with an advanced case of diabetes. He had problems with his eyesight, including severe cataracts that interfered with his ability to paint and his artistic production ceased for months at a time. After learning how to treat his diabetes and having eye surgery, Karl rallied for a time and was able to paint once again. However, by 1999, Karl's health began to decline once again and he died in February 2000 from complications from congestive heart failure. Since his passing, Karl's work was the subject of one solo posthumous exhibition titled The Color of Mood, the Pastels of Arny Karl at the Morseburg Galleries in 2005. Karl's works have also been included in a number of exhibitions in public venues. A number of Arny Karl's pastels have been donated to the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art which is located on the grounds of St. Francis University through the auspices of the Sean and Margaret Sullivan fund, the latest of which was donated in 2008. Sean Sullivan was one of the founders of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art (SAMA) and a passionate collector of Plein-Air pastels by Californian and Western American painters, both historic painters like Theodore Lukits and contemporary artists such as Peter Seitz AdamsPeter Seitz Adams
Peter Seitz Adams is one of California’s most recognized landscape and figurative painters and an important figure in contemporary Southern California art. He is the longest serving President of the California Art Club and a member of the Board of Directors of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena...
and Gil Dellinger. Three of Karl's works were exhibited in SAMA's 1999 exhibition titled Contemporary Romanticism: Landscapes in Pastel and again in the 2008 Exhibition titled From Charles Burchfield to Peter Adams in 2008. Additional gifts to the Southern Alleghenies Museum's pastel collection are planned. One of Karl's largest works "Windswept Sierras," has been promised to the California Art Club for its permanent collection.
Assessment and oeuvre
Arny Karl's professional career was relatively short, no more than twenty years. In that time Jeffrey Morseburg, his dealer and fellow student of Theodore Lukits, estimates that he painted about 400-500 plein-air Pastels and about 100-150 oil paintings, so his artistic oeuvre was very limited. He was famously eccentric and difficult, so relationships with dealers were seldom steady. According to Morseburg's essays, Karl's earliest pastel works from the late 1960s and early 1970s were "blocky" with bold strokes of color. As his pastel works matured, the strokes of pastels became almost imperceptible, as he began to "paint" with his fingers. Karl's pastel works of the mid-1990s consisted primarily of foothill scenes, often of California Oaks or Eucalyptus. Some of his later pastel works could be quite detailed, in spite of the artist's eye problems. Sierra Autumn, Big Sur Overlook and Mono Lake, all of which were shown in public exhibitions, are all examples of these detailed pastels. Karl's early works in oil were thinly painted, with little impasto and boldly colored, evidently too boldly for many collector's tastes. His later oils could be more thinly painted or thickly brushed examples of California Impressionism. Most of these works relied on imprecise brushwork and were painted in a cool palette. Scenes of the Central California Coast and the High Sierras predominated in the works of Karl's last decade. Art authorities such as Michael Tomor, former Chief Curator of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art or art curator Jeffrey Morseburg, describe Karl as a "romantic" or "lyrical" painter because of his "moody" subjects and curvilinear compositions. In his 1999 exhibition catalog Tomor stated that "Jeffrey Morseburg, Lukits' biographer, believes Karl to be inspired by Lukits' pastels as well as the works of Caspar David FriedrichCaspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning...
(1774-1840) and J. M. W. Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...
(1775-1841). His Blue Moment and Pink Moments, plein-air pastels of the Sierra Mountains, convey the sublime and awe inspiring aspects of nature." While Karl's artistic oeuvre was small, because of his influence on a number of younger painters, strident advocacy of plein-air painting and the pastel medium and presence in several important public and private collections his influence is still being felt.
See also
- California Art ClubCalifornia Art ClubThe California Art Club , founded in 1909, is one of the oldest and most active arts organizations in California. It celebrated its centennial in the spring of 2010. The California Art Club originally evolved from the Painters Club of Los Angeles...
- California Plein-Air PaintingCalifornia Plein-Air PaintingThe term California Plein-Air Painting describes the large movement of 20th century California artists who worked out of doors, directly from nature in California, United States. Their work became popular in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California in the first three decades after the...
- American ImpressionismAmerican ImpressionismImpressionism, a style of painting characterized by loose brushwork and vivid colors, was practiced widely among American artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.-An emerging artistic style from Paris:...
- California TonalismCalifornia TonalismCalifornia Tonalism was art movement that existed in California from circa 1890 to 1920. Tonalist are usually intimate works, painted with a limited palette. Tonalist paintings are softly expressive, suggestive rather than detailed, often depicting the landscape at twilight or evening, when...
- Tonal ImpressionismTonal ImpressionismTonal Impressionism is an art historical term that refers to works of art that are "mood" paintings with simplified compositions, done in a limited range of colors, as with Tonalist works, but using the brighter, more chromatic palette of Impressionism...
- Decorative ImpressionismDecorative ImpressionismDecorative Impressionism is an art historical term that is credited to the art writer Christian Brinton, who first used it in 1911. Brinton titled an article on the American expatriate painter Frederick Frieseke, one of the members of the famous Giverny Colony of American Impressionists, "The...
- Theodore LukitsTheodore LukitsTheodore Nikolai Lukits was a California portrait and landscape painter. His initial fame came from his portraits of some of the most glamorous actresses of the Silent Film era, but since his death, his Asian-inspired works, figures drawn from Hispanic California and his pastel landscapes have all...
- Peter Seitz AdamsPeter Seitz AdamsPeter Seitz Adams is one of California’s most recognized landscape and figurative painters and an important figure in contemporary Southern California art. He is the longest serving President of the California Art Club and a member of the Board of Directors of the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena...
- Tim SollidayTim SollidayTim Solliday is a contemporary California Plein-Air Painter and Western Artist who is known for his San Gabriel Valley landscapes and his paintings of American Indians and other western subjects. He studied with the California Impressionist portrait and landscape painter Theodore Lukits in the...
Museum exhibitions
- From Charles Burchfield to Peter Adams: Watercolors and Pastels from the Permanent Collection Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, Pennsylvania, March 21 - Sept 14, 2008; exhibited: Pink Moment, Blue Moment, San Gabriel Peaks
- Contemporary Romanticism: Landscapes in Pastel, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, Pennsylvania, April 4 - May 30, 1999; exhibited: Pink Moment, Blue Moment, San Gabriel Peaks
- Treasures of the Sierra Madre, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles CountyNatural History Museum of Los Angeles CountyThe Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California, USA in 1913 as the Museum of History, Science, and Art. The moving force behind it was a museum association founded in 1910. Its distinctive main building, with fitted marble walls and domed and...
, May 28 - August 30, 1998; Muckenthaller Cultural Center, Fullerton, California, September 12 - October 30, 1998 - California Wetlands: Paintings of California Endangered Species and Protected Wetlands, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, April 13 - September 1, 1996; exhibited: Mono Lake
- 86th Annual California Art Club Gold Medal Exhibition, Arcadia, California, Spring 1996; exhibited: Windswept Sierras
- 88th Annual California Art Club Gold Medal Exhibition, Arcadia, California, June 14–22, 1998; exhibited: Sierra Autumn and Big Sur Overlook
History of professional representation
- Estate Representation, Jeffrey Morseburg, 2000–present
- Morseburg Galleries, West Hollywood & Los Angeles, California, c. 1990 - 2000
- Jones and Terwilliger Galleries. Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, c. 1994
- Trailside Galleries, Scottsdale, Arizona, c. 1982 - 1985
- Jones Gallery, La Jolla, California, c. 1980 - 1990
- Howard Morseburg Galleries, Los Angeles, California, 1980–1985
External links
- Website of Arny Karl
- Arny Karl's Summary Page on Ask Art, Online Art Dictionary
- California Art Club, Roster of Historic Artists
- California Art Club, Gold Medal Exhibitions, 88th Annual Show, Arcadia, California
- Traditional Fine Arts Online: Contemporary Romanticism, Landscapes in Pastel, April 4- May 30, 1999, Preview of Exhibition at Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art
- Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Museum Press release, SAMA-Loretto to Display Works from the Permanent Collection, 2008
- Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, 2008 Annual Review
- California Art Club, Special Exhibitions, Treasures of the Sierra Nevada and California Wetlands, Exhibitions
- America's Distinguished Artist's, TFAOI.Org
- Website devoted to Theodore Lukits, Karl's Teacher and Mentor
- Morseburg Galleries (Karl's Longtime Dealer) website
- Los Angeles Times Article Listing Karl's Work on Exhibition at Morseburg Galleries
- Pastel Society of America Website