Arts and Letters

I believe it was Willa Cather who once wrote that man is not only shaped by his environment, he even tends to look like it; and although it might be pointless to belabor the point too strenuously (is it, after all, merely another case, metaphorical this time, of protective coloration?) it is certainly neatly and notably applicable in the case of Karl Knaths, the contemporary American abstractionist who died at the age of eighty some months ago, for although his background was mixed, his physical appearance—blunt-faced, craggy-featured—was as "Scandinavian" as any of the settlers who were his neighbors on the windy Midwestern plains around his birthplace at Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

But then, in his own quiet way, Knaths himself was a man of many contrasts. Big in build, he was notably mild in manner, and though his work was forthright enough he could be refreshingly modest about it. Again, for all his background on the plains his life-movement was consistently eastward, both physically and intellectually, for after a couple of years at the Milwaukee Art Institute he moved on to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied intermittently for the next five years. He moved on again from there to Provincetown, where apparently he found the precise mixture of artistic stimulation and opportunity for quiet contemplation that his nature required, for he settled there quite contentedly to stay for the rest of his life. It is typical of the man's unpretentiousness that although in his later years he achieved a generous amount of success (the Phillips Gallery alone, in Washington, owns some forty-five of his canvases, and his works are to be found in a dozen or more other national collections), his way of life throughout remained essentially the same; and although as time went on he enlarged, modernized and "spruced up" generally his living and working quarters, they had at their core the same original structures—which, indeed, Knaths had largely put together himself. He had in his younger years supported himself as a competent part-time carpenter.

Indeed, even to say that Knaths was an abstractionist requires a certain amount of qualification—to the point at least of specifying that he was one in the classic, "old-fashioned" sense; far from being non-objective, that is, his work always had its basis in, and indeed drew most of its strength from, its usually oblique but fairly recognizable references to natural elements.

Finally, I think I should in honesty state that I knew Knaths the man only slightly; it was principally in my function as a critic that I was familiar with him, and then only with his work, and as a result I have had to round out my knowledge with what references I could find. In the course of this slightly scattered research I came upon an excerpt in his obituary from an interview with John Canaday in The New York Times that somehow delighted me. Mr. Canaday, it seems, had asked him if the form of a clock-face that had become one of the recurrent figurative references in his paintings of the period had any particular symbolic or metaphoric significance, and Knaths paused only a moment to reply.

"Not that I know of," he said, and I think one would have to look long indeed to find a better example of the way of speaking of the true Plains States westerner, who almost alone among men can manage to be both straightforward and cagey at the same time.