One of the most important artists to emerge from Cleveland, Ohio during the twentieth century, Clarence Holbrook Carter’s paintings range from powerful depictions of the American scene to evocative abstractions. In the words of the author James Michener, his “vision is exceptionally pure, his technique is unsurpassed; such a union produces works of great visual impact and tactile delight.” 1
Born in Portsmouth, Ohio in 1904, Carter became interested in drawing as a child. He received private watercolor lessons as a boy and later took a home correspondence course in cartooning, going on to win prizes in art competitions at county and state fairs as a teenager.
In 1923, Carter began a four-year period of study at the Cleveland School of Art, where he was taught by William Eastman, Henry Keller and Paul Travis. During this period, he found himself drawn to the rich coloring and enigmatic compositions of fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish painters, stylistic traits which he began incorporating into his work. His paintings attracted the attention of William Milliken, then curator of paintings and later director at the Cleveland Museum of Art, who, in 1927, orchestrated the sale of several of Carter’s oils, thereby providing him with the funds to go to Europe. He spent the summer of that year studying with Hans Hofmann on the island of Capri, after which time he traveled throughout the Continent and Africa, painting landscapes and cityscapes in the clear, precise style for which he became known.
Returning to Cleveland in 1929, Holbrook had his first one-man exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art. He went on to teach studio classes there from 1930 to 1937. During the 1930s and 1940s, Carter painted landscapes, genre scenes and industrial subjects that depicted life in the Ohio River Valley. His tendency to imbue his images with a sense of mystery--exemplified in works such as War Bride (1940; Carnegie Institute Museum of Art)--set him apart from mainstream American realism and allied him instead with visionary painters such as Edward Hopper, Ivan Albright and Peter Blume.
In 1934, under the auspices of the government’s Public Works of Art Project, Carter painted two murals for the Cleveland Public Auditorium. Through his involvement with the Works Progress Administration, a later Depression Era program, he served as district supervisor for painting projects in northeast Ohio and painted murals for post offices in Ravenna, Ohio and his native Portsmouth.
In 1938, Carter moved to Pittsburgh, spending the next eight years teaching at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University). Since that time, he has taught in the art departments of a number of institutions, including Lehigh University, Ohio University, and the Atlanta Art Institute. He was guest artist at the University of Iowa in 1970, artist-in-residence at Lafayette College from 1961 to 1969 and guest artist at Kent State University in 1975.
During the 1950s, Carter’s work took on a greater degree of abstraction. Throughout the sixties and seventies, he turned to reductive motifs, such as ovoids and mandalas, as a means of symbolizing his inner state of mind. Many of his later paintings revolve around themes of death and resurrection, and what he described as “the mysterious and magical elements in life…things suggested but only partly seen.” 2
Carter has had many solo exhibitions throughout the United States. His paintings have also been included in numerous group shows devoted to regional realism, magic realism, surrealism, symbolism and abstraction. A resident of Milford, New Jersey, at the time of his death, Carter’s work is represented in major public and private collections throughout America and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; Citibank, New York; Pfizer Company, New York; Southwestern Bell, Houston; the Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Baukunst, Cologne, Germany, among many others.
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1. James A. Michener, “Foreword,” in Frank Anderson Trapp, Douglas Dreishpoon and Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Clarence Holbrook Carter (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), p. 7.
2. Quoted in Gordon Brown, “Two Worlds of Clarence Carter,” Arts 41 (November 1966): 41.
