KARL
KASTEN
Painter, Printmaker,
Teacher, 1916-2010
In much of his work of the late 1950s and 1960s, Kasten
sets up dynamic movement ("das shifting" as Hoffman called it)
with passages of contrasting brushwork - a rich array of scrapes, smears,
splatters, incisions, impasto, and nearly bare canvas, - all held in place
by a contrapposto composition of opposing thrusts and counterthrusts.
- Susan Landauer, 'The San Francisco and the Second Wave',' Crocker Art
Museum
Biography
Karl
Albert Kasten was born in San Francisco’s Richmond District in the
spring of 1916. As a child, he spent so much time drawing that one teacher
sent a note home: “Dear Mr. Kasten, Do something about your son.
All he wants to do is draw.” His father, an electrical engineer,
sent back a note to the teacher: “Let him draw.”
Kasten
attended College of Marin, and later transferred to UC Berkeley where
he was a teaching assistant for Worth Ryder, and also an illustrator at
the Daily Californian newspaper. He received his B.A. and M.A. from UC
Berkeley, and taught briefly at the California School of Fine Arts before
being drafted for WWII. After the war, Kasten studied printmaking in Iowa,
and taught two years at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor under
the direction of Professor Paul Slusser. He also instructed at San Francisco
State before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1950. “That was
Nirvana” he said. “My greatest satisfaction is that I was a
pretty good teacher.”
In 1951, Kasten studied with Hans Hoffman in Provincetown Massachussetts,
which signaled a more pronounced foray into Abstract Expressionism painting.
Hoffman maintained many ties with the UC Berkeley Art Department having
first taught there in 1930 and 1931. Several UC faculty members also studied
with Hoffmann in Europe and America beginning with Glenn Wessels and John
Haley in the 1920s.
Susan
Landauer, the biographer of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism,
considered Kasten to be the artist who most closely represented the tenets
of Hans Hoffman. Of that time, Kasten said, “It was a great period
to work in. Just letting things flow and seeing what happens … I
think I got more color into painting during that time than most guys.”
In addition to his impressive record of painting exhibitions, Karl Kasten
is widely known as a master printer and inventor. In 1950, he established
the printmaking workshop at UC Berkeley, and embraced the credo that printmaking
could equal traditional painting through creative exploration. After viewing
his colorful etchings of the 1950s, art critic Alfred Frankenstein observed
that Kasten had “discovered a new softness, liquidity, and fluency
of effect in the bitten plate and with this a new way of expressing the
modern artist’s preoccupation with space and movement.”
According to Susan Landauer, in her monograph Breaking Type: The Art of Karl Kasten, ‘there were few examples of serious printmaking among Abstract Expressionists in New York.’ As well, there was a little known link between the two schools through printmaking. After meeting Willem de Kooning in 1960, Kasten invited him to the Berkeley campus where he pulled his first prints.
In
the 1970s, Kasten designed a lightweight press in conjunction with the
Berglin Corporation (The KB Press) that can now be found in schools and
studios around the world. He was recognized for his printing accomplishments
when he received the 1997 Distinguished Artist award of the California
Society of Etchers. He previously received a Humanities Research Fellowship
and Tamarind Lithography Fellowship.
Kasten
exhibited in the Sao Paulo Bicentennial and World Print III Traveling
Show, as well as the M.H. de Young Museum and California Palace of the
Legion of Honor, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum
of American Art, among others.
1961, Collection of Musee des Beaux Arts, Rennes, France
Don Quixote, 32" x 40", Oil on Canvas, 1961
His works are in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art; the Oakland Art Museum; New York Public Library; Museum of Modern
Art, New York City; M.H. de Young Museum; Achenbach Collection; Musee
des Beaux Arts, Rennes; Musee des Beaux Arts, Brittany, France; Auckland
City Museum, New Zealand; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Kasten retired from teaching in 1983, but continues to live and work in
Berkeley.
Sources:
San Francisco Chronicle (11/22/02); The Crocker Art Museum, San Francisco
and the Second Wave: The Blair Collection of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism,
2004, and Karl Kasten; Breaking Type: The Art of Karl Kasten, Susan Landauer.