With regional museums closed and waiting to reopen, we are continuing to remind readers of their important collections by highlighting visual art works you can visit as soon as social distancing practices change and museum doors open.
This week’s pick is Clarence Holbrook Carter’s 1929 painting “Portrait of Jane Kyle,” part of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
A longtime Milford, New Jersey, resident, Carter was originally from Ohio and graduated from the Cleveland School of the Arts in 1927 before studying at the Hans Hoffman Summer School in Capri, Italy.
Having decided to pursue a visual art career early in life, Carter had exhibited in several international watercolor exhibitions before he was 26 years old.
After an extensive stay in Europe, he returned to the United States and created a notable series of paintings that captured Depression-era rural America.
The portrait at right was created the same year the Depression began.
In the 1940s he began incorporating emerging and conflicting art theories into his works, arriving at a unique synthesis of contemporary styles.
In addition to his painting, Carter served as general superintendent of the Federal Art Project of Northeastern Ohio, was an instructor at the Cleveland School of the Arts and in the Department of Painting and Design at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and a director of Madison Avenue commercial art company.
His work is included in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Hirshhorn Museum, James A. Michener Art Museum, New Jersey State Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and many others.
He died in 2000 at the age of 96.
