Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

The artist

Private collection, Portsmouth, Ohio, 1962-present

Exhibited:

Clarence Carter, the Portsmouth Collection, The Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center, Portsmouth, 1984, pp. 59, no. 77

A Flower is to the Summer Sweet, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York, 1998

In his long and productive career, Clarence Holbrook Carter followed an independent course. He incorporated an unlikely mixture of stylistic influences, drawing from such disparate sources as regionalism and surrealism without strictly cohering to any one school. An experimentalist in the truest sense, Carter produced a body of work that defies categorization. He attempted nearly every variety of subject and style, ranging from genre to still-life, landscape to portraiture, and abstract to magic realist. In this sense, his career reflects the changing currents of twentieth-century modernity, in which artists struggled to find an appropriate means of self-expression. The sheer diversity of Carter’s oeuvre has made it difficult for critics to neatly situate his work in an art-historical context. The artist himself summed it up best:

My credo is simple and changeable. I may not change radically but if I wish to I have no preconceived theories to hold me back. I feel that theories tend to make an artist academic no matter how advanced and radical these theories appear to be at the present time. My paintings at various times have been termed cubist, surrealist, neo-romanticist, realist, and even oriental, but at no time did I ever follow any school. I have painted my world as I have seen it and felt it.[1]

Born in Portsmouth, Ohio, Carter showed an early talent for the arts, taking watercolor classes at the age of nine, followed by cartooning classes at thirteen. In 1923, he enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ohio, from which he graduated four years later. Carter then set out for Europe, where he spent a year traveling to Italy, Sicily, Tunisia, Switzerland, France, England, and Belgium, and then a summer studying at the Hans Hoffman Summer School in Capri. In 1929, he returned to Cleveland, where the following year he began teaching at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1938, Carter was made Assistant Professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he taught until 1944.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, Carter painted prolifically and enjoyed considerable success. His work was frequently exhibited, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His early style is widely considered Regionalist, since he often portrayed scenes of ordinary American life. Farmers, fruit stands, street scenes, and factories all served as subject matter in works of this period. By virtue of the artist’s straightforward depictions, these real-life scenes and places were laid bare for viewers to contemplate their inner beauty and deeper meanings.

Emblematic of the artist’s thematic and stylistic trends during these years, White Cineraria is a captivating image expertly rendered in a precisionist style. Planted in an ordinary earthenware pot, the Cineraria boasts a charming spread of delicate white flowers with yellow centers and large, verdant leaves. Carter’s meticulous paint application, a hallmark of his style, is best seen in the skillful gradations of hue that add depth and shadow to the plant’s leaves. Demonstrating the artist’s painterly virtuosity, the high sheen of the glossy black surface on which the plant sits displays exquisitely-executed reflections, which add another dimension of complexity to the composition. The heightened sense of realism developed by the perfection of the painting’s details actually endows the work with a quality of surreality. This element of mystery is furthered by the luscious burgundy curtain that serves as the backdrop of the still-life. An intriguing and beautiful work, White Cineraria is a powerful illustration of Carter’s ability to suffuse otherwise ordinary scenes with new sensibilities.