The Philadelphia modernist Arthur B. Carles was a brilliant colorist and an extraordinarily innovative painter. Though Carles trained initially at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, soaking up the more conservative teaching of William Merritt Chase and Thomas Anshutz, he was deeply influenced by the avant-garde art scene in Paris during his first trip there in 1905. In 1907, Carles won the prestigious Cresson Traveling Scholarship, which enabled him to return to Paris for several more years. This experience had a profound impact on Carles as an artist; he was extremely affected by modern French painting, especially the work of Cezanne and Matisse, and by the time Carles returned home to Philadelphia in 1912, he was a confirmed modernist.

Of all the subjects which Carles explored throughout his career, still life painting provided him with the best outlet for his experimentations with pure color and form, and ultimately, it facilitated his leap into total abstraction during the 1930s. Carles had a deep affinity for still life, especially floral still lifes, and he helped to revive interest in this subject in Philadelphia and beyond, preceding other modernists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, who also began to concentrate on flower forms around this time. For Carles, this subject seemed to capture a sense of delight in the beauty and “livingness” of things, and it continued to be an on-going source of inspiration for him throughout his life.

In 1922, he started a series of paintings depicting calla lilies in a bowl. While these works remain fairly representational, Carles did experiment with different techniques of applying paint, building up the layers thickly on the canvas using a palette knife and a large brush. Perhaps a few years later, around 1925-27, he revisited this compositional idea once again with a painting of irises arranged in the same shallow blue dish and set against a colorful fragmented background. In some ways, Still Life with Irises is rather restrained for Carles: the forms of the flowers and vase are clearly delineated, and there is an overarching sense of order and balance to the composition. And yet, Carles’s color palette is extraordinarily vivid and dynamic, and the colors seem ready to explode off of the canvas. The painting emits a jewel-like glow, so that it almost appears as if the planes in the background were made of stained glass with light shining through them, illuminating the entire surface. Here, color creates light, form, and space, and it was the primary motivating force for Carles. As one of his students, Quita Brodhead, said in reference to his work, “Color was not just a filler, it became the forms that lived and breathed in space. Color to Carles was a spiritual experience.”