Charles Goeller (1901 – 1955)

Unfinished Problem, by 1953, oil on canvas, signed lower right, signed and inscribed verso on stretcher “Charles Goeller/1272 Clinton Place, Elizabeth, NJ/Unfinished Problem”, 20 ¼ x 40 1/8 inches, exhibited: 1) 11th Annual Exhibition, Audubon Artists, National Academies Galleries, New York, 1953, 2) 90 Paintings by Living Artists of New Jersey, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey, January 26 to March 7, 1954, no. 32 (see The Art Digest, Vol. 28, Issue 11, March 1, 1954 – “Approximately two-thirds of the paintings shown are representational in treatment and include landscape . . . Outstanding among them is Unfinished Problem by Charles Goeller”), 3) New Jersey Artists Listed in Who’s Who In American Art, Plainfield Art Association, Plainfield, New Jersey, December, 1954, 4) Memorial Exhibition, Charles L. Goeller, Gus Eager, Bror J. O. Nordfeldt, Hunterdon County Art Center, Clinton, New Jersey, September 9 – 30, 1956, 5) Emotion Expressed Through Precision: The Art of Charles Goeller, Franklin Riehlman Fine Art and Megan Moynihan Fine Art, New York, 2003, and 6) Charles Goeller: The Art of the Unfinished Problem, Menconi & Schoelkopf, New York, April 4 - 29, 2022, literature: Stavitsky, Gail, Emotion Expressed Through Precision: The Art of Charles Goeller, Franklin Riehlman Fine Art and Megan Moynihan Fine Art, New York, 2003, unpaginated (illustrated)

$40,000

In the early 1950s, Charles Goeller returned to the desktop still life motif which he first developed in 1941 with Dream of Fair Women. That work, together with Unfinished Problem and Despair Among Glasses formed a trio of deeply personal autobiographical paintings. In her essay for the Goeller exhibition at New York’s Riehlman Fine Art in 2003, noted scholar Gail Stavitsky explained the context for these paintings:

"Goeller had already worked at his father’s steel firm during a strike in 1938. In his later years Goeller recalled 'I’ve relapsed into the family trade long enough to design a factory.' The artist’s conflicted involvement with the family business is suggested by the still life elements of the paintings Unsolved Problem and Despair Among Glasses. In the latter work, the harsh glare of a desk lamp illuminates various kinds of glasses, including an empty liqueur glass, a blueprint, a mysterious equation possibly associated with probability or symbolic logic, strewn cigarette butts, and the weary artist/amateur mathematician’s forearm. The frustration of family work is similarly suggested in Unsolved Problem in which half rolled blueprints are juxtaposed with the artist’s glasses, a half-eaten orange, and a stack of cigarette butts. The welcome distraction of the world at large is evoked by the open window to the left. These paintings suggest possible motivations for the never-married Goeller’s habits of drinking and smoking to excess."

These three works are the best examples of Goeller’s Magic Realist paintings. Lincoln Kirstein, in his introduction to the catalog for the Museum of Modern Art’s ground-breaking 1943 exhibition, American Realists and Magic Realists, described the artists included in that show as follows:

"The painters represented here have chosen and developed a technique in drawing and handling paint, the aim of which is to create images capable of instantaneous identification. By a combination of crisp hard edges, tightly indicated forms and the counterfeiting of material surfaces such as paper, grain of wood, flesh or leaf, our eyes are deceived into believing in the reality of what is rendered, whether factual or imaginary. Magic realism is an application of this technique to the fantastic subject. Magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed."

Later in his essay, Kirstein connects the American Magic Realist painters to German New Objectivity, a movement which profoundly influenced Charles Goeller since his time in Paris. As Kirstein explained, “There is a new departure, a new objectivity in fact, which strongly recalls the Neue Sachlichkeit of the nineteen-twenties, that attitude ferociously express in Germany by Otto Dix . . . This New Objectivity was human and concrete though often cruel, exact though frequently fantastic, almost always meticulous.” Returning to American Magic Realism, Kirstein concluded that “It is a frank, cool art. . . .”

Although Goeller was not included in American Realists and Magic Realists, this trilogy of paintings fits squarely within the aesthetic, stylistic, and emotional characteristics of the Magic Realists, who did not, themselves, have a manifesto, association or even a common understanding of who was, or was not, part of the group. From early in his career, Goeller was heralded as a master of replicating surfaces, very much in the trompe-l’oeil tradition. His drafting was precise and crisp, regardless of whether he is painting wood, glass, or the flesh of his own arm, as in Despair Among Glasses. His arrangements of objects were unexpected – each was clearly defined, even if their intended meanings were not.

Dream of Fair Women was squarely placed in the Magic Realist canon when it was exhibited in 1952 at the Montclair Art Museum’s exhibition, The Illusion of Reality. Of the forty-seven paintings exhibited, many were by acknowledged Magic Realists, including John Atherton, Eugene Berman, Peter Blume, Lux Feininger, Thomas Fransioli, Charles Rain, Priscilla Roberts, and George Tooker. The historic artists included in that exhibition included Harnett and Peto. There was a significant overlap between this group and the artists included in American Realists and Magic Realists, almost as if the Montclair show were a version 2.0 which was launched nearly ten years after the original. Many years later, Gail Stavitsky also placed these works into the Magic Realist rubric when she noted, “The affinities of mood and technique between Goeller’s paintings and the work of Criss, Blume, Hirsch, and particularly George Ault, reflect the differing directions Precisionism took from the 1930s onwards, particularly towards Surrealism and Magic Realism.”

For more information about Charles Goeller, please see our exhibition Charles Goeller: A Wistful Loneliness