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Visual
Arts
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Self
Portrait, 1928, a watercolor in
the collection of Southern Ohio Museum: A sketch of Carter's
wife Mary, whom he met on the ship returning from Europe,
appears at the artist's shoulder because, Carter said, he
wanted to paint her into his life.
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Clarence
Carter
Painter
1904–2000
Poor Man's Pullman,
1930, an oil painting in the collection of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, was purchased with the Edith H. Bell
Fund in 1979. From the beginning, Carter was fascinated
by silence. (That's Mary, sitting with her back
to the viewer, and an art student friend of the
Carters, en route to Portsmouth on the Norfolk and
Western day coach.) |
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Clarence
Holbrook Carter, the winner of the 1972 Cleveland Arts
Prize for the Visual Arts, may have been the most successful
artist ever to come out of Cleveland. A 1927 graduate
of the Cleveland School of Art, he was barely 30 when
he became the first resident Clevelander, indeed the
first resident of Ohio, ever to have a painting bought
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Creepers,
1936). By 1948, Carter's oils and watercolors had been
collected by 27 important American museums, including
the Harvard's Fogg Museum and the Museum of Modern Art,
and he had become one of a handful of living American
artists to have two paintings owned by the Met.
The
hard, clean lines and intense focus of Carter's paintings,
along with his uncanny ability to recreate the textures
of different surfaces-from weathered boards to metal
oil storage tanks glistening in the sun-astonished both
critics and the public. His 1930 canvas, Poor Man's
Pullman, painted only three years out of art school,
gave birth to the term superrealist. The light
radiating from Carter's Richard Davenport, which
pictured an old man sitting alone by a lamp, was so
realistic, it prompted gallery-goers to look around
for the spotlight they assumed was shining on the canvas,
Carter's friend and composer Richard Hundley remembered.
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The
subject of Richard Davenport was typical of Carter's
pre-1960s work: a simple, unpretentious scene, usually
of people caught in some habitual activity: a man with
a horse and wagon hauling several bushels of potatoes
down a deserted country road. . .a farmer's family bowing
their heads in grace before their supper. . . two women
in long skirts and bonnets, their backs to the viewer,
walking down a railroad track, picking up bits of coal.
These scenes are never mawkish or sentimental; they
are cool and detached, crisply rendered, yet something
about them tugs at us powerfully, as it seems to have
drawn Carter.
In
Poor Man's Pullman, we see only the back of a
woman's head as she gazes out the window of a train,
while the man sitting across from her, a basket of flowers
and fruit on the seat beside him, looks in our direction.
Carter was fascinated by silence. The silence of his
people-less landscapes is intensified by the presence
of buildings or other human structures, as in the bleak
watercolor Subzero, Cleveland, a view from the
backyards of Cedar Avenue, in which icicles hang
from gutters and a wisp of smoke curls above a chimney,
all in wordless anticipation of something.
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Ohio
River Pilot, 1932,
an oil painting in the collection of Southern
Ohio Museum: At the Cleveland School of Art,
Carter's teacher Paul Travis, who had also
grown up in the Ohio River Valley, encouraged
his fascination with “the Ohio landscape,
its people, trains, cars, the circus.” |
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War Bride,
1940, an oil painting in the collection of the Carnegie
Museum of Art in Pittsburgh: Surrealist elements
began to appear in Carter's work in the late 1930s
and 1940s. |
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in 1904 in the southern Ohio river town of Portsmouth,
Carter was seized early by the stark grandeur of
landscapes where snows or the rising Ohio River
in spring competed with human presences trudging
purposefully, as often deep in thought, one imagines,
as in conversation. It may well have been the memory
of the river's overwhelming its banks in1913, when
he was six, that inspired his first important work,
painted non-stop in one day and one night while
he was still in art school. Carter had come up to
Cleveland in 1923 to study with painters Henry Keller
and Paul Travis, making ends meet by waiting tables
in the tearoom of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The
Flood, his first prize-winning entry in the
museum's annual juried showcase of regional artists,
The May Show, put $25 in the young student's pocket;
Cleveland industrialist Ralph Coe purchased it for
$100 from the show. Years later, Carter bought it
back. The painting had a special place in his heart,
he said, because it was the work that had brought
him to the attention of the museum's director William
Milliken. |
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Milliken,
an ardent champion of local artists, helped launch Carter's
career, arranging for his young protégé to study
with Hans Hoffman in Capri, Italy. The museum director promoted
the work Carter sent back for sale from Europe, enabling him
to spend a second year abroad in France, Switzerland, Belgium,
England, Sicily and northern Africa. When Carter returned
to Cleveland, Milliken arranged for him to teach studio classes
at the museum. However, Carter primarily supported himself
by selling his work during the 11 years between his graduation
and 1938, when he took a faculty position at Pittsburgh's
Carnegie Technical Institute (now Carnegie-Mellon University).
Demand was not hurt by the fact that he took 26 prizes at
The May Show during that time, including 13 firsts, or by
the fact that 10 of Carter's watercolors were accepted by
the Brooklyn Museum of Art for its 1928 International Watercolor
Exhibition. Though surrounded there by such successful artists
as Edward Hopper, William Zorach and John Singer Sargent,
critics pronounced the 22-year-old the hero of the show. (Carter's
Sommer Bros. Stoves and Hardware was promptly snapped
up by the Brooklyn for its permanent collection.)
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Southern
Ohio Museum's Let Us Give Thanks, 1943: It is impossible
to view this oil painting, done at a time when the war's
outcome “remained uncertain,” writes William
H. Robinson, “without considering the fateful circumstances
of the moment
. . . . The psychological effect of leaving a place vacant
in the foreground is to invite us into the picture so
we may participate in this moment of prayer and reflection.” |
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Over and Above #13,
1964: As a boy, Carter told his friend Richard Hundley,
he would hang around the circus when it came to town,
mesmerized by the spectacle of huge, quiet animals peering
over the fences at him. (This oil painting, in the artist's
estate, is nine feet high.) |
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In
May 1935, Carter was chosen from a statewide competition
to paint murals in the Ravenna, Ohio, post office by
a national panel that included Eleanor Roosevelt. This
was the first of a series of works to be commissioned
for Ohio public buildings as part of the WPA Federal
Art Project. Carter's work for the Works Progress Administration,
for which he also served briefly as regional superintendent
(1937-38), included four large murals for the new post
office in Portsmouth, Ohio. (Contrary to what is stated
in Federal Art in Cleveland 1933-1943, Richard
Hundley believes Carter did not paint the mural in John
Hay High School.)
From
1938 to 1944, Carter taught painting and design at Pittsburgh's
Carnegie Technical Institute; Carter would in time be
a professor, visiting lecturer or artist-in-residence
at seven universities. He then took a position with
the Alcoa Steamship Company and painted a series of
21 scenes from the Caribbean and South America that
set new standards for national magazine advertising.
He was to create other memorable series for the First
National City Bank of New York and American Locomotive
that appeared in Fortune and Life magazines.
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By
the early 1960s Carter's work had become more symbolic, almost
abstract, in character. A series of huge canvases the artist
referred to collectively as “Over and Above” featured
giant insects, birds and other animals peering over walls at
the viewer. These startling images gave way to what Hundley
characterized as “large luminous structural compositions
of tombs, caverns and ovals called 'Transections,' ” then
to surreal landscapes (though that element had been present
in his work since the early 1930s) featuring almost mystical
egg shapes, the symbol of life, that the artist called “Eschatos”
(The Final Things). The silence, which Carter equated with death,
is palpable.
William H. Robinson, curator of modern European art at the Cleveland
Museum of Art and author of the illuminating catalogue essay
for Clarence Carter: The Unknown Snapshot Studies, believes
it was the death of the artist's father and two younger sisters
while Carter was still in his teens that imbued his work with
a sense of “the precariousness of life.” “I draw
my inspiration from things close at hand,” Carter wrote
in 1943, “which are sometimes suffused with memories of
the past.” Years later, in a letter, he recalled as a youth
squatting in deep holes dug by his own hand to “contemplate
the mystery of this cubicle of earth shutting me off from the
world.” He had found it “satisfying to be enveloped
in the rich brown earth and look up at the rectangle of blue
sky and to try to relate the confinement of the earth with the
spaciousness of the universe outside the hole.” |
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Transection #15,
1972: Newsweek critic S. K.Oberbeck would describe
Carter as “a homegrown transcendentalist [who sees]
no distinction between real and surreal.” This acrylic
painting is in the artist's estate. |
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Southern
Ohio Museum's acrylic on paper, Eschatos #3, 1973:
In the eternal silence of death, an affirmation of life |
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Carter's
fascination with photography-a source of inspiration
that came to light only after his death, with the discovery
of an old chest full of snapshots corresponding to some
of his most famous paintings-may have had something
to do with the eerie way in which photographs can capture
a fleeting moment of time, yet seem, in their primal
stillness, to prefigure the cessation of movement and
change that awaits all life. As demonstrated in Clarence
Carter: The Unknown Snapshot Studies, the 2004 show
mounted by the Southern Ohio Museum and brought to the
Beck Center for the Arts in Lakewood, Ohio, by the Cleveland
Artists Foundation, some of Carter's best-known paintings
are clearly based on photographs. Yet, Frank Trapp,
author of the definitive book on Carter, claimed he
had personally watched the artist create three of these
very paintings on canvas from scratch, beginning with
faint pencil lines, then applying the paint, with virtually
no revising or retouching.
Recognition
of Carter's place in American art spiked in the 1970s,
when he was mentioned or discussed at some length in
11 books and peaked in the 1980s with his mention in18
books. By the centenary of his birth in 2004, citations
of his work totaled 61. Clarence Carter died in 2000
at the age of 96.
text by
Dennis
Dooley
Winner of the 1986 Cleveland Arts Prize for Literature
Summer
2004
For
more on Clarence Carter, visit
http://askart.com/artist/C/clarence_holbrook_carter.asp
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