Geranium in Night Window

Karl Knaths was one of the earliest American artists to paint in a distinctively cubist style. He was first introduced to the paintings of European abstract artists when he worked as a gallery guard for the Chicago venue of the 1913 Armory Show. By his own admission, he was confused by the exhibition’s radical art, especially the work of Henri Matisse, but was immediately awed by Paul Cézanne. However, he began to gain greater familiarity with European avant-garde art after he moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, around 1920, and his work took on many elements of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Matisse. He also gained a greater understanding of his American contemporaries, including Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Stuart Davis.

Geranium in Night Window, painted in 1922 shortly after Knaths’s move to Provincetown, shows his style as he absorbed the influences of European modernism, but was not yet working in his mature cubist style. It is a vigorous work in its own right, and Knaths’s personal vision is apparent, as seen by the expressive use of color to elucidate the mystical qualities of nature. In the painting, Knaths explores color and space. Evocative qualities, like the floating dots and the window’s muntins, which form a cross floating against the deep-purple sky, generate an aura of mystery reminiscent of Marc Chagall’s dreamlike nocturnal images.

Duncan Phillips most admired the lyrical qualities of Knaths’s paintings. About Geranium in Night Window he wrote: “This exceptionally promising canvas reveals a delightful sense of color relations and a developed knowledge of what happens to colors under a flickering play of light.” Geranium in Night Window was the first painting by Knaths to enter a museum collection.