This untitled lithograph was also used by Knaths as a Christmas greeting. The colors are hand applied and vary from impression to impression.
Karl Knaths was first exposed to Modernism, as many Americans were, at the famous 1913 Armory Show which featured the works of leading European Modernists, and which caused a great deal of controversy in the American art scene. In Knaths’ case, he happened to be employed as a guard at the show’s Chicago stop on its three-city tour; his knowledge of the arts up until that time came from his limited, three years’-worth of schooling at Dudley Craft Watson and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he took painting courses and worked as janitor to support himself. The show both shocked and intrigued him, and though he was wary of the new, avant-garde genres such as Cubism and Futurism, he was greatly inspired by Cezanne -- and, later, by those very artists whose works challenged him.
In this lithograph, the vestiges of Knaths’ first artistic fascination - Fauvism - are still present in the established Provincetown painter and printmaker’s work. The naturalistic approach he became known for is evident in his use of bold, black lines that dance across the sheet, illuminated by hand-applied color. Inspired as much by music as he was by the painters who visited the famous artists’ colony, Kanths’ untitled abstraction is exemplary of his willingness to continue to bend and grow with the changing tide. The star of Abstract Expressionism was rising and reshaping the horizon of the American art scene; so, too, did the works of Karl Knaths.