Born: Portsmouth, Ohio in 1904
Died: Easton, Pa. 2000

Studied: Cleveland School of Art, Europe, 1927
The Hans Hofmann School, Capri, 1927

Unlike most American artists Clarence Carter experienced success at an early age. His first patron was William Milliken, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art and one of the most powerful museum directors of the twentieth century. Milliken provided the young artist with an extensive stay in the art capitols of Europe. Carter came home more rooted than ever in the simple and sobering facts of his American heritage. Ultimately Edward Alden Jewell, critic for The New York Times, branded him a “Superrealist.” By then he had been exhibited with the Magic Realists, with Dada and the Surrealists, and with artists labeled as op and geometric. A professor of art at various American universities, Carter began by painting ordinary Ohio people and landscapes using his own brand of Realism –- precise, luminous, detailed, yet often mysterious.. In the Icon series of the late fifties, his halo-like images, which evoke atomic structures, are emblematic of violence, power and progress. With the “Above and Beyond” Series of the 1960s supersize images of the animal kingdom peer at us from high and low and the elements of danger and hysteria are always implied . Later subjects include Euclidian mandalas: images of eggs and ovoids superimposed on architectural backgrounds. The balance, resolution and symmetry in these relate them to Fra Angelico but also to the enigmatic silence of Georges De Chirico. Ultimately Carter’s work provides us with respect for the shared conditions of mankind and elicits a sense of spirituality in the face of the infinite. Carter has received some seventy solo exhibitions. Selected Collections: Baukunst, Cologne, Germany; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland; The Brooklyn Museum; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Joseph H. Hirshhorn Collection; The Metropolitan Musem of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Toledo Museum of Art; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Whitney Museum of American Art DOROTHY KEANE-WHITE

 

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