Karl Benjamin, a painter of geometric abstractions beam that has established a national reputation in 1959 as one of four in Los Angeles, abstract classical and create a recognized body of work that celebrates the glories of color in all its variants, has died. He was 86 years.
Benjamin died Thursday of congestive heart failure at home in Claremont, said his daughter, Beth Marie Benjamin.
His work was exhibited last year in "Benjamin Karl and the evolution of abstraction, 1950-1980" at Galerie Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood, as part
Benjamin was a former resident of Claremont and a vital part of the university city of the arts community. After retiring from 20 years of teaching career in elementary and secondary public schools, he was professor and artist in residence at Pomona College 1979-1994 and has taught at Claremont Graduate University. For most of these years, he also pursued a lifelong interest in the orchestration of complex arrangements of color on the canvas.
Working with a full palette and vocabulary of stripes, squares, triangles, circles, rings and irregular shapes are created well balanced compositions that seem to glow, vibrate or explode in space.
His work became fashionable in the 1970 and '80, but made a comeback in recent years his pictures, when suddenly seemed fresh young artists and intelligent critics and curators.
"I can not think of any other artist's paintings radiate the joy and pleasure of being an artist with more intensity than Karl Benjamin, or any other artist's long teaching career is not out of any failure of cynicism in their practice," critical Dave Hickey wrote in the catalog of a 2007 survey of paintings by Benjamin Louis Stern Fine Arts. "It was always the kid in a candy store, the man with the rock in his pocket to draw, showing and exclaimed: 'Hey, check it out." "
Times art critic Christopher Knight, has praised the Claremont Museum of Art for "the right choice for its inaugural exhibition" in its review of a study of 42 years of work by the artist, the 2007. "Benjamin emerges as a colorist of great intelligence and ingenuity," he wrote.
Born December 29, 1925, in Chicago, Benjamin began his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in 1943, but left that year to enlist in theU.S. Navy.
At the end of his military service in 1946, moved to California and resumed his studies in what is now the University of Redlands.
Three years later, he graduated, he married Beverly Jean Paschke and taught at an elementary school in San Bernardino County city of Bloomington. After two years he moved to a place of teaching Chinese in public schools. He and his young family moved to Claremont in 1952.
Benjamin's career began in 1951 when he was asked to add a component of the curriculum of his art students. Initially working with cakes, was fascinated with the color options and understand the effect of putting one color next to one. Color, in itself, soon became their object.
At home, he began experimenting with oils and eventually took classes at the Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University), obtaining a master's degree in 1960. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983 and 1989.
In a 1986 essay, Benjamin writes: "I am an intuitive painter, everything looks clean and my paintings, and are fascinated by the infinite range of expression inherent in the relationships of color." Although often create a structure based on levels of numerical progressions, sequences or modular buildings at random, came up with surprising results.
He has shown his work in 1954 at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1958 and the Long Beach Museum of Art, but shot to fame in 1959-60 with the "Four abstract classicists." The reference sample, even with the work values ??Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin - giving fresh LA artists, hard-edge abstractions as an alternative to abstract emotional relationship of the east coast. After appearing in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the show in London and Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Benjamin then showed his work and has been widely displayed in museums as important as "geometric abstractions in the United States" in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1962, issues 30 and 35 of the "Biennial of Painting American "in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, in 1967 and 1977, and" Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era "at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington, DC in 1976.
Cal State Northridge has organized an exhibition of his work in 1989, and Pomona College, presents a retrospective in 1994, when he became professor emeritus. Benjamin has played a leading role in "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture in the middle of the century," a traveling exhibition organized by the 2007-09 National Art Museum of Orange County
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