Landscape 1921

Arthur Beecher Carles made this unnamed landscape painting with oil on canvas sometime in the first half of the 20th century. It is an abstract arrangement of colors with minimal suggestion of land, trees, and sky. Carles worked most of his life in Philadelphia, where he gained exposure to European modernism through his travels and the art scene promoted by Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Early in the 20th century, Philadelphia was the center of a particular strain of artistic conservatism in the United States. His championing of abstraction, influenced by artists like Cezanne and Matisse, flew in the face of the traditional artistic values of institutions like the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught. We see this painting as a product of those tensions. To understand this work fully, we need to consider the place of art academies and independent galleries in the development of modern art, and how artists negotiated their place within them.