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BIOGRAPHY
In 1934,
at the age of 31, Karl Zerbe came to America fleeing Nazi persecution.
Recognized as one of Germany's major new artists, Zerbe's first
exhibitions in Munich and Berlin attracted immediate attention and
he was represented in some of the finest museums in the country.
In 1934, while Zerbe's paintings were being removed
and destroyed as Kulturbolschewismus ("degenerate art")
from these same museums, the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University
gave him his first one-man show in America.
Karl Zerbe became the Head of the painting department
at the Boston Museum School in 1935. Faced with the necessity of
explaining and demonstrating what makes a picture, he began to search
for a medium that would permit him to build-up his paintings in
superimposed layers without the waiting periods demanded by slow
drying oil paint.
By 1939, Zerbe found the medium he was looking
for in the ancient and nearly forgotten technique of painting in
wax: encaustic. The wax-and-pigment mixture, applied to canvas or
board while hot, solidified almost instantly, and could be reworked
by reheating. Encaustic lent itself to a vast variety of effects,
from the most transparent glaze to the heaviest impasto, from surfaces
as smooth and shiny as enamel to rich granular textures.
Zerbe's work favored the conceptual over the
perceptual. Although his images dealt with recognizable themes from
the "real" world, they were not produced directly from
models, but rather from sketches or, sometimes, his imagination.
A technical expert, Zerbe was a student of materials and methods
of painting and excelled in the use of paint as an expressive medium
in itself. |
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