Carl Holty: Search for the Grail
Preface
Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, the artist Carl Holty investigated the evolving language of 20th-century modernist movements, progressively moving from realism to cubism and finally into abstraction. His teachers and friends, among the masters of this era, included Hans Hofmann, Piet Mondrian, Stuart Davis and Mark Rothko (to name but a few). Romare Bearden, who co-authored a book with Holty, delivered the eulogy at his funeral in 1973. One of his oldest friends was Howard Thomas, whose recommendation to Lamar Dodd brought Holty to the University of Georgia as an artist-in-residence from 1948 to 1950.
This biography by Virginia Rembert Liles accompanies an exhibition of select paintings and drawings at the Georgia Museum of Art organized by Marilyn Laufer, and reflects Holty’s personal pursuit of modern art theory, much of which was focused on color as one of his essential building blocks in the creation of art. As Laufer noted in her wall text for the exhibition, through the years, “the artist proposed color as a structural matrix and later as pure atmospheric ground. His personal writings and recurring visual themes of bathers, horse and rider, and nature reveal an artist driven by a romantic ideal, an attitude perhaps reflective of an earlier time. Still, at its core, Holty’s art is truly evocative of 20th-century American modernism.”
Before she died, Virginia entrusted this biography of Carl Holty to my care. She knew that, because of his association with the University of Georgia and his friendship with Howard Thomas, the Georgia Museum of Art intended both an exhibition and a catalogue, but the latter became shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the inability to locate the photographs Professor Liles had gathered for her monograph many years ago. We are grateful to her as well as to Marilyn Laufer for reminding us of Holty’s achievements as well as his significance in the history of color theory and abstraction. Virginia’s work was not a gift to me or to our museum but to all who want to learn from the thoughts, the accomplishments and the teachings of Carl Holty.
William Underwood Eiland
Director
Georgia Museum of Art
University of Georgia
Carl Holty: Search for the Grail
by Virginia Pitts Rembert
“My Germanic side, the one that searches for the Grail and will not settle for less, has me in its clutches.”
Carl Holty
To my parents, Umsted and Hazel Pitts, who gave me a start in life and education, and believed in me all the way
and
To Carl and Elizabeth Holty, who gave me so much of this book, one in the telling and the other in the sharing
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Portrait of the Artist as Himself
Chapter 2: Childhood and Early Schooling
Chapter 3: The Emerging Artist
Chapter 7: Early Work Through World War II
Appendix A: Dates for Journals