Bernard Karfiol

Bernard Karfiol (May 6, 1886 – August 16, 1952) was an American painter and watercolorist. His work was indebted to French modernism and wished to synthesize Hellenic classical painting and modernist abstract concerns.

In 1902, he left for Paris where he attended Jean-Paul Laurens classes at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts while discovering the artistic trends of the time. André Derain is a notable example, while Renoir, Cézanne and Picasso’s early manner also contributed to his artistic formation. In 1904, he participated in the Paris Salon d’Automne.

He then traveled through England and the rest of Europe; upon his return to Paris he met Henri Matisse and Henri Rousseau at Gertrude and Leo Stein’s.

In 1906, he was back in New York City, working as a teacher in the studio provided by his friend, sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Connoisseur and art collector Hamilton Easter Field noticed his work at the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Field bought some of his paintings and invited him to teach at the school he had just opened in the coastal village of Ogunquit, Maine. Field organized his first major exhibition in 1917, it was followed by three solo exhibitions of his work at the Brummer Gallery (New York); he was later represented by Edith Gregor Halpert’s Downtown Gallery

When Seated Figure was exhibited in 1925–26 at the First Pan-American Exhibition of Oil Paintings in Los Angeles, it was awarded an honorable mention. In 1928, he won the gold medal at the Corcoran. Karfiol died in Irvington, New York, he leaves portraits of children, nudes, landscapes and marines.

In addition to the MoMa, his works can be found in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art or the Brooklyn Museum.