Calla Lilies

Arts of the Americas

1922–25

Arthur B. Carles
American, 1882–1952

In 1922, Arthur B. Carles began a series of calla lily paintings, using the flowers’ stark shapes as the basis for formal experiments into color and surface. Calla lilies were of particular interest to Carles’s fellow modernists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley because of their sexual connotations, which these artists frequently exaggerated or exploited. Carles’s Calla Lilies does not appear to carry any erotic overtones but instead is restrained in color and almost classically composed. Carles played with the effects of light and shadow on the curving shapes of the blossoms, contrasting the firmly modeled white flowers with the more loosely painted background. These juxtapositions expressed his fascination with the play of space in his compositions, and he likened the deliberate intervals between the flowers to the rhythmic qualities of music.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Arts of the Americas

Artist: Arthur B. Carles
Title: Calla Lilies
Place: United States (Object made in)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: c. 1922–1925
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 76.2 × 61 cm (30 × 24 in.)
Credit Line: Quinn E. Delaney and Vance American Art funds; through prior gift of the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection Fund; Mr. and Mrs. Frederick G. Wacker Jr. Endowment Fund; purchased with funds provided by Julie and Brian Simmons
Reference Number: 2008.183

Annual Report (Art Institute of Chicago, 2007–2008) p. 19, ill. p. 23.
Barbara Ann Boese Wolanin, “Arthur B. Carles, 1882–1952: Philadelphia Modernist” (PhD. diss. University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1981) p. 462.
Judith A. Barter, et al., American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2009), cat. 77. 36.

The artist; to Alfred W. Fleisher (1878–1928), Wyncote, Pa., by 1927; by descent to his wife, Mrs. Alfred (Selma Gerstley) Fleisher, later Mrs. Leon Sunstein, in 1928; to her daughter-in-law, Janet Fleisher, from about 1950 until 2008; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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