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Arthur Carles: Colors in Concert
Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Miriam Seidel
The 1920s brought great strides forward in his work, along with personal upheaval (including dismissal from his teaching job at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1925, temporary blindness from alcohol poisoning, the end of his first marriage in 1926, and a second marriage). His semi-abstract Nude (1921) typifies his predilection toward a cool, electric-bright palette, with the strikingly angled nude, a la Modigliani, rendered in white against an airy blue backdrop and violet divan. The 1924 Pheasant with Green Apple revisits the dark backgrounds and bright highlights of a Chase still life, abstracting and agitating the motif with a strongly torqued wave of purple cloth and gold-rust feathers; the Cezannesque apple is the only immediately recognizable object. A small still life inscribed to his daughter in 1928 (Abstract Still Life with Flowers) also nears abstraction, with the triangular rise of flower's melting into the background, anchored in an improbably dainty pink vase.
This counterpoint of slippery, propulsive abstraction and more conservative rendering, often in separate works, characterizes Carles's output through much of his career. It's almost as if he obeyed two impulses, Dionysian and Apollonian. In the first, he showed a courageous willingness to follow the color and motion implied in the work-in-progress, up to and beyond the point of chaos and failure. The second (evident in many works in the exhibition) evinces a kind of morning-after sobriety, a need to touch base with received forms.
Gay Madness (Gay Abstraction), ca. 1933, for example, explodes with Dionysian abandon, its flowers (if that's what they are) nearly pure color, with great swabs and scumbles radiating out from them. By contrast, the ca. 1932 Floral Arrangement (hung next to Gay Madness in the Woodmere exhibition) is a decorous arrangement of bright flowers, its abstracted background a bit washed out. This stylistic zigzagging, for which Carles has been faulted, doesn't generally represent a qualitative unevenness, though it can be unnerving. It is integral to his working method, and should perhaps also be seen in the context of the general contempt for modern art that was part of his milieu. His own shows of 1912 and 1922 received reactions ranging from appreciative to baffled, and scathing reviews followed a major show of modern art he helped organize from the collection of Albert C. Barnes in Philadelphia in 1923.
In some works, everything came together. Abstract Still Life (ca. 1930) fairly lifts off to the upper right, the oval table-form also reading as a tilting head, goaded upward by repeated hatchings and swaths of color. Blue Nude (1937) is a masterful summation, the female figure a clockwork of small vortices of shape and color, orbiting the white-and-green focal point of her breast; its abstraction and figuration are perfectly meshed. The later '30s saw Carles experimenting with more geometrical, complex, large-scale abstractions. These would be his last productive years, as a probable stroke and fall in 1941 left him incapacitated until his death in 1952.
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