Karl Kasten

Art Brokerage: Karl Kasten American Artist: b. 1916-2010. Karl Albert Kasten (March 5, 1916 – May 3, 2010) was a painter-printmaker-educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kasten attended College of Marin, and later transferred to UC Berkeley. His early mentors came from the "Berkeley School" - John Haley, Erle Loran, Margaret Peterson and Worth Ryder. Following the mode of the "Berkeley School" Kasten painted landscapes with flat planes punctuated with color. His work from this period earned him recognition and prizes in annual painting competitions held at the San Francisco Museum Of Art (now MOMA). Kasten was also an editorial cartoonist and Arts Editor for The Daily Californian newspaper. His cartoons regularly featured reflections on the New Deal and the conflicts in Europe. In the early 1950s Kasten experimented with Cubism and non-objective painting but after studying at the Hans Hofmann School in Provincetown, Mass in '51 he turned to Abstract Expressionism. Hofmann's modern art philosophy stressed "pictorial structure, spatial illusion, and color relationships." Kasten's paintings are predominately acrylics on canvas, but he also works in watercolor and gouache. The graphics are primarily drawings in pencil, monoprints, drypoints and collagraphs. In the 1960s he began working in collography which is a variation of the etching process first practiced by Rudolph Nesch in the 1930s. Kasten's collographs are noteworthy for the sensitivity in texture and for the use of insertable parts such as coins and found objects to print a range of colors. In 1960 Kasten unexpectedly met Willem de Kooning at an art gathering. The meeting resulted in Kasten inviting de Kooning to the Berkeley campus where he pulled his first lithographs. Kasten has since lectured widely on the unique tools, technique and genius which de Kooning employed in the two lithographs. In the 1970s, he designed a lightweight press (The KB Press) in conjunction with the Berglin Corporation that can now be found in schools and studios around the world. Listings wanted.