Karl Stanley Benjamin (1925 – 2012)

Untitled (Highrise), 1954, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 20 x 20 inches, presented in its original frame

$18,000

Karl Benjamin was a California-based artist who is best known for his hard-edged abstractions. Born in Chicago, Benjamin began his undergraduate studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in 1943.  With the continuation of World War II, Benjamin left school and served in the US Navy. After the war, he resumed his studies at the University of Redlands in 1946. Benjamin graduated in 1949 with a BA degree in English literature, history and philosophy and began his career as a public school teacher. 

In 1952, he relocated to Claremont California and the trajectory of his life took a significant turn when he began "playing" with paint. Although Benjamin continued to teach in public schools and Pomona College, he pursued a career as a professional artist at a time the Los Angeles art scene was coming into its own on the back of a booming post-war economy and the development of a uniquely California form of "cool" art and design. By 1954, the year of the present work, Benjamin began to develop a hard-edge vocabulary as his paintings were accepted into prominent exhibitions. Benjamin's work was included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's ground-breaking 1959 exhibition Four Abstract Classicists: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley and John McLaughlin.  Benjamin's work was also included in the exhibit Purist Painting which traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and the Columbus Museum of Art.  The Whitney Museum used his work in Geometric Abstraction in America.  The Museum of Modern Art (NY) also featured the artist in their watershed exhibit The Responsive Eye.

Benjamin's paintings are in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, Israel, Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, Seattle Art Museum, WA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY among many others. He is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and all other standard references.