“Carl Schmitt was an important twentieth-century American painter who not only deserves your attention but will reward it.
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Carl Schmitt: The Artist
Gallery
Carl Schmitt’s work as a artist encompassed painting, etching, and print making, as well as as work in pastel and charcoal. He was especially noted for his still lifes, portraits, and religious paintings. Throughout his career spanning eight decades, he exhibited at such important venues as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the Carnegie International, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Società Delle Belle Arti in Florence, and numerous galleries in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. His paintings now grace many private collections around the world.
Carl Schmitt: The Man
biography
Friends characterize Carl Schmitt as a man truly respectful of the individual person. Despite the poverty and troubles that sometimes seemed to overwhelm him, he treated people amiably and with humor. Schmitt’s intensely strong beliefs, great wit, and profound ideas never closed him off from his contemporaries whose ideas many times differed greatly from his own. He was genuinely a man in pursuit of the truth of art and life.
Carl Schmitt: The Thinker
Writings
Schmitt wrote constantly throughout his life, producing a library of diverse writings filling some thirty-three notebooks. His topics ranged from the fine arts, history, science, economics, and metaphysics, to the roles of family, society, and the human person. The titles of a few of his essays illustrate the variety of his interests: “The Instinct for Contemplation in Art,” “Grounds for Optimism in Politics,” “On Mythology,” Upon First Reading Aristotle,” and ““Religion and Rationalism.”
“The aim of art, its primary aim, is Beauty”
“Goodness and beauty, contrary to modern thought, are not luxuries.”
Black Bottles, Oil on Canvas, 1931
The Carl Schmitt Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation, was established in 1996 to perpetuate the legacy of the American artist Carl Schmitt (1889-1989), and to make his achievement as an outstanding man, artist, and thinker better known and appreciated. Using the example of Schmitt's life, the Foundation seeks to educate the public and artists on the role of Beauty in everyday life and the artistic vocation through exhibits, articles, concerts, conferences and more.
The CSF aims to reinvigorate artists and the public by sharing the artwork, life and legacy of Carl Schmitt, and in doing so to spark a new dedication to Beauty through the Fine Arts.
Nothing is so simple, so explainable, so logical and un-mysterious as a thing dead. The moment you deal with a thing alive you deal with mystery. True unity is a trinity and defies analysis when analysis alone is brought to bear upon it.
Great art, major art, is dependent upon wind. Granted authentic lyricism in two men in any art, the major poet differs from the minor in wind only. Call it endurance, perseverance, sustainment or what you will; I prefer wind.
The artist is particularly unfit for life— too sensitive. Life’s lack of unity is heartbreaking to the artist. The artist is prone to yield to temptation to attempt to reform life instead of fleeing as he should to the imaginative life (art). As a reformer he is denying his gift of the gods and lowering himself.
I shall attempt to write some brief suggestions of my main beliefs in art. If they seem vague, I can plead that the artist is filled with the desire to express through vision alone.
The artist has always been prophetic. The more naturalistic outlook of Masaccio, Cimabue, and Giotto presaged the humanism to come in the West: the painters had abandoned the rigidities of Byzantium long before the mass of mankind had accepted the comparative freedom of the Renaissance.
The breakdown here in America is not due to a negative evil like sin, but to avoidance alike of all negative and positive things like the virtues and vices in the hope that by postponing both heaven and hell long enough a Utopia of science may be discovered
Have you ever noticed how many essays begin with a beautiful ritual? I mean with a nice rhythm and choice of words—but with no content. I do not criticize this. I applaud it as something quite fitting.
The Vision of Beauty: Artwork and Reflections
by Carl Schmitt
$29.99
