BERNARD KARFIOL (1886-1952)
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Biography • Bernard Karfiol (1886-1952)
Bernard Karfiol was born in Budapest, Hungary where his parents, residents of Boston, were then travelling. He grew up in Brooklyn. Before the age of fifteen he attended the Pratt Institute and was awarded a scholarship to study at the National Academy of Design.
In 1902, he left for Paris where he attended Jean-Paul Laurens classes at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts while discovering the artistic trends of the time. André Derain is a notable example, while Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso’s early manner also contributed to his artistic formation. In 1904, he participated in the Paris Salon d’Automne. He then traveled through England and the rest of Europe; upon his return to Paris he met Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau at Gertrude and Leo Stein’s.
In 1906, he was back in New York City, working as a teacher in the studio provided by his friend, sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. He also joined the Ridgefield Artists Colony. By exhibition in the 1913 Armory Show, Karfiol’s work was noticed by Hamilton Easter Field, prominent painter, collector, and arts organizer. Field bought some of his paintings and invited him to teach the following summer at the school he had recently opened in Ogunquit, Maine. The progressive Perkins Cove Art Colony was founded in 1911 when Hamilton Easter Field purchased a group of modest homes in the village of Perkins Cove, just south of Ogunquit, for his Summer School of Graphic Arts. Many progressive American artists made Perkins Cove their summer home, including Robert Laurent, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Katherine Schmidt, Lloyd Goodrich, Marsden Hartley, Walt Kuhn, Stefan Hirsch, and Bernard Karfiol.
Hamilton Easter Field organized Karfiol’s first major exhibition in 1917. Karfiol went on to have three solo exhibitions at the Brummer Gallery in New York in the Twenties. He was then represented by Edith Gregor Halpert’s Downtown Gallery and participated in several exhibitions organized by the Museum of Modern Art, soon after its 1929 founding.
Karfiol exhibited Seated Figure in 1925–26 at The First Pan-American Exhibition of Oil Paintings in Los Angeles in 1926 and The 26th International Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1927. His entries in both exhibitions received honorable mention. In 1928, he won the gold medal at the Corcoran Biennial in Washington, DC.
Karfiol is a figurative painter influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and known for his tenderness towards his subjects, sensual forms and a soft palette of roses, oranges and dusty blues. His later travels to Cuba, Jamaica and Mexico in the 1930s inspired new subjects with stronger and more intense colors.
He participated in many exhibitions in the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in New York, including Paintings by 19 Living Americans in 1929-1930. Works from that exhibition were lent by his dealer Edith Halpert of The Downtown Gallery, as well as the Phillips Collection.
Karfiol died in Irvington, New York. In addition to MoMA, his works can be found in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art or the Brooklyn Museum.