CARL HOLTY (1900-1973)
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Biography • Carl Holty (1900-1973)
Carl Robert Holty was born in Freiburg, Germany in 1900. While Holty was still an infant, his American-born parents moved to the United States, settling in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Holty's art career began at a young age when he started taking art classes in high-school and drawing cartoons for a local newspaper. In 1919, intending to pursue a career in graphic arts, Holty enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1920 he went to New York City, where he studied at the Parsons School of Design and at the National Academy of Design with H. Bolton Jones until 1921. Holty returned to Milwaukee in 1923 to set up studio as a portrait painter.
In 1926 Holty traveled to Munich to study at the Royal Academy. He was, however, persuaded by friend and fellow artist Vaclav Vytlacil to enroll instead at the Hans Hofmann School. It was here that Holty's interest in abstraction blossomed as he embraced Hofmann's conceptual teachings and began to use shape, color and space as a means of personal expression. He found a voice for this expression in the fragmented forms of Cubism. Holty's abstract style continued to develop when he and his ailing wife moved to Switzerland in 1927. Around this time he began to look to Neoplasticim and Surrealism for inspiration for his art. With the death of his wife in 1930, Holty moved to Paris. Under the sponsorship of Robert Delauney, he attained membership in the Abstract-Création group in 1932 and had his work published in the group's magazine the following year. In Europe Holty was a frequent exhibitor and was rewarded with many positive reviews.
In 1935 Holty returned to New York where he renewed his associations with friends from abroad, including Hofmann, Vytlacil and Stuart Davis. In 1936 he helped found the American Abstract Artists, becoming its chairman in 1938 and exhibiting regularly with the group until his resignation in 1944. Throughout his life as an artist, Holty was constantly developing his vision of abstraction. In the thirties, Holty's art uses Cubist principles to break up the planes of the picture in blocks of color onto which he places readable abstracted forms. By the end of the 1930s Holty's canvases were fully abstracted. Their subject was color with geometric and biomorphic shapes that reference nature using titles to point to the subject or mood he wished to create. By the mid-forties, Holty's paintings were about large and small forms in broken arrangements aiming at a rhythmic movement of color and shapes in different densities. By the 1960s and until his death in 1973, the contours of his forms had disappeared into thinly washed areas of color swimming within a subtly toned space. In his late work, Carl Holty selected a palette keyed on one color with variations on that color arrangement as the theme. These late works by Holty seem like bright rainbows of color within which forms float freely.
In 1931 the Greenes moved to Paris. Here Gertrude Greene was exposed to the progressive art of the Cubists, Surrealists and Constructivists. She was particularly interested in the simple geometry of Constructivism, an art movement that merged politics and art, theorizing that pure, abstract art had the power to reorder and elevate society. Inspired by the Russian Constructivists Antoine Pevsner, Naum Gabo and Vladimir Tatlin, Greene began creating her own non-representational Constructivist drawings.
Upon the Greenes' return to New York City, Gertrude became involved in the Unemployed Artists Group, which lobbied for federal support for out-of-work artists and paved the way for the formation of the Works Progress Administration in 1935. In 1937 Greene helped to organize the American Abstract Artists and became its first paid employee, tending the reception desk during their early exhibitions.
By 1935 Gertrude Greene had begun creating wood constructions, making a name for herself in the history of art as one of the first abstract artists to work in sculpture. Her early constructions reflected her dual interests in biomorphism and geometric abstraction by implementing elements of both styles in her compositions. After 1940, however, Greene's work was much more akin to Constructivism, with its cleaner forms and simpler geometry. In 1942 the Greenes were splitting their time between New York City and Pittsburgh. Working out of two studios meant that Gertrude didn't always have access to all of her tools, which accelerated the increasing simplicity of her constructions. Because of these trips between residences, Greene began making studies for her constructions in the form of small paper collages, a portable medium that allowed her to quickly and easily work out the ideas that she would later transform into wood.
By the early 1950s Gertrude Greene began to work almost exclusively with paint. Her style at this time was moving away from Constructivism and becoming increasingly expressionistic. In 1951 and 1952 Greene had her first two solo exhibitions at Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York City and in 1955, she had another solo exhibition at Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York. Gertrude Greene died in 1956.