In commemoration of the artist’s 100th birthday, Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Karl Benjamin: A Centennial Exhibition. On view are a selection of rare and early works from the 1950s, the decade that launched Benjamin’s (1925—2012) 45-year artistic career. This diverse and exploratory output set the stage for the innovative expressions of color and form that followed, and predicted his 1959 star turn as a founding member of the Hard Edge painting movement. The 50s saw the birth of what Benjamin called his “love affair” with painting: an earnest and joyous creative quest located at the intersection of intellect, impulse, and intuition.
Benjamin’s bachelor’s degree from the University of Redlands was in English literature, history, and philosophy – everything, as he would later recall, but visual art. His inspiration to pursue a career in painting originated not in formal education, but in the sixth-grade public school classroom where he began teaching after graduating college in 1949. Required to provide his students with 45 minutes of art education per week, Benjamin banished the typical trucks, trees, and houses from his students’ efforts and suggested they “fill up the space with pretty colors” instead. He otherwise let them follow their own muses, demanding only that they concentrate on their work and always finish what they started. Benjamin was fascinated with the accomplishments of his young pupils, and held himself to the same standards of focus and productivity when he began painting in 1950.
Benjamin’s early investigations were largely self-taught, drawing inspiration from art magazines, visits to museums and galleries, and works by other artists he admired such as Piet Mondrian, Paul Cézanne, and Arshile Gorky. With the enthusiasm and inquisitive spirit of a new convert, Benjamin experimented with a variety of painting approaches in his journey to discover his own unique style. Energetic abstract expressionist color studies and playful, cubist-inflected landscapes and architectural forms eventually coalesced into the hard-edged geometric compositions that preoccupied Benjamin for the remainder of his career. “I was trying to paint a beautiful picture and make it feel right to me,” Benjamin explained in a 2008 interview. “You do this and all of a sudden, your own voice has emerged.”
Karl Benjamin earned his MFA from Claremont Graduate University in 1960, and after retiring from teaching public elementary and middle schools, served as a professor of art at CGU and Pomona College from 1979 – 1994. Benjamin’s work has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions and is included in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among many others.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the estate of Karl Benjamin.