Karl Zerbe (1903 - 1972)

Closed Doors, 1957, polymer tempera on Masonite, signed lower right, 20 x 40 inches, inscribed verso “Zerbe Closed Doors June 1957,” label verso reads: “Artist Karl Zerbe / No. T / Title Closed Doors / Date 1957 / Medium Polymer Tempera / Size 40 x 20 / The Downtown Gallery / 32 51st St., New York”; presented in original frame (with new linen lining)

$5,000

German-born, Karl Zerbe was a mainstay of the first-generation Boston Expressionists, together with Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine. Their work contrasted strongly with the traditional and academic paintings for which the city was best known. Zerbe was born in Berlin, but spent much of his childhood in Paris where his father worked as an engineer for a manufacturer of electric machinery. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Zerbe moved with his family to Frankfort and after the war, the young artist relocated to Munich, where he was exposed to the Blaue Reiter group and other forms of German Expressionism. Zerbe had his first solo exhibition in Berlin in 1922 and the following year, he won a traveling fellowship which took him to study art in Italy. In the mid to late 1920s, he fell under the spell of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and later combined these two major influences with Post-Impressionist aesthetics.

After Hitler came to power, Zerbe fled Germany, spending part of his time in Paris before eventually settling in Boston, where he served as Head of the Painting Department of the Museum School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1937 through 1954. Zerbe then served as an art instructor at Florida State University from the mid-1950s into the 1960s. Through his professorships, Zerbe exposed several generations of students to the principles of German Expressionism.

Although many of Zerbe’s early works were developed in oil and watercolor, during the early 1940s, he began to focus on wax encaustic and later after developing an allergy to this medium, polymer tempera, which afforded him the opportunity to innovate with its plastic qualities from transparent glazes to thick impasto and shiny enamel to granular, gritty surfaces. Closed Doors is typical of Zerbe’s use of polymer tempera during the mid-1950s.  As explained in the essay in the American Federation of Arts’ 1961 publication on Zerbe,

"All the mature works in polymer tempera tend to be close-knit webs of overlapping flat segments of forms, set off against each other by sharply defined edges as well as by contracts of color and texture. The motifs themselves are often taken from the repertory of slum architecture – fire escapes, boarded-up windows, crumbling masonry, shop signs, the massed magazine covers of newsstands – suggesting an intense though hidden life behind their collage-like surface. These are cityscapes in a new key, dense, crowded, pulsating with energy; the very antithesis of their gently nostalgic predecessors of a decade before."

From 1922 through his death, Zerbe had over ten solo exhibitions and was admitted to dozens of group shows, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and more than twenty other museums across the United States and Europe. He is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and all other standard references.