Sea and Rocky Coast

Karl Schrag

Deer Isle, Maine has been a gathering place for artists for decades and since 1950, has been the home of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Schrag spent 50 summers on the coast of Maine, thirty-six of them on Deer Isle, the inspiration for this composition.

In 1945, Karl Schrag joined Stanley William Hayter and others at Atelier 17 in New York. He worked with artists such as Miró and Chagall, and in 1947 he had his first solo show in New York at the Kraushaar Gallery. Five years later, Hayter returned to Paris, and at Hayter's request Schrag took over the directorship of Atelier 17 in New York until his own painting and other teaching commitments made it necessary to leave.

Schrag taught at Brooklyn College from 1953 to 1954 and at Cooper Union from 1954 to 1968. He had his first retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 1960, the most recent at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine in 1992. His work is represented in museums across the United States and Europe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Academy Museum, the British Museum London and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

When Hayter closed Atelier 17, Schrag took over his large etching press, putting it in his own graphic workshop on the ground floor of his home on the Upper East Side of New York.