Carl Holty

Twelfth Night Blue, Contemporary Color Field painting

1962

Born in Freiburg, Germany, Carl Holty moved with his parents to a Germain community in Milwaukee when he was an infant. He began studying art at the Milwaukee Normal School under instructors who had trained in Europe and later continued his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1919, following a summer at an artists' colony in Saugatuck, Michigan, Holty enrolled at Parsons School of Design and the National Academy of Design, both in New York. He briefly considering entering medical school, his father’s profession, though with the help of his grandfather, returned to Germany to continue his art education. It was at Hans Hofman’s school that Holty would be introduced to the principles of modernist composition and ideas in painting and drawing, an influence he would consider his main focus throughout his career. Hofmann "first opened my eyes to the plastic nature of drawing." Holty once recalled. Displaying no interest in the predominant style of expressionism, popular in Germany at the time, Holty focused on the tenants of Cubism, Fauvism, and Futurism which lead him, in 1928, to relocate to Paris. Holty quickly became part of the active artistic community in the nation’s capital associating with many of the major figures of international avant-garde art including Miro, Mondrian, Arp, and Delaunay, the latter of which sponsored Holty to become one of only two American members of the Abstraction-Creation group founded by Theo Van Doesburg. Holty returned to America in 1936 becoming a significant figure in the development of abstract art. He reconnected with his old mentor Hans Hofmann and developed friendships with many of the City’s rising artist’s including Vaclav Vytlacil whom he had known in Paris. It was this group that formed the American Abstract Artists association, where Holty would serve as chairman in 1938 and with whom he’d exhibit with through 1944. It was during this period Holty abandoned Cubism for Biomorphism, leaving behind edges to explore shapes and forms that ultimately lead to his color field paintings of the mid 1950s and through the remainder of his career.