Word: karfiol
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...Bernard Karfiol, a nut-brown little walnut of a man, is one of the country's most reserved and most respected artists. In almost half a century of painting he has had less than a dozen one-man shows, but they have earned him a place in a dozen topnotch museums. His latest exhibition, which opened in a Manhattan gallery last week, showed why Karfiol is famous in spite of himself...
...some of the canvases had been in his studio for years, and had been worked over again & again, they all looked ripe and bright as peaches with the bloom intact. "I'm finished with a picture when I feel I can't do any more with it," Karfiol says. "It's not a matter of smoothing everything out, it's the feeling...
Entering the gallery was like going outdoors on a balmy June day. Karfiol's nudes, flowers and landscapes all had the same warmth and freshness of tone, the same softness of outline and the same idyllic mood. The dreamy passivity of Karnol's paintings made a startling contrast to the hard energy of John Marin's (see below...
Remember Gertrude. At 63, Karfiol can look back on a career that has run like a single thread through the crazy-quilt pattern of modern art. The son of a Brooklyn manufacturer, he was one of the first U.S. painters to go to Paris. "They were just tearing down the exposition buildings of 1900," he says. "There were no automobiles then and you could buy a Chateaubriand for 30 centimes. I remember Leo and Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Matisse, Alfy Maurer, Weber, Pascin, and John Marin, too. I used to think Marin was an Italian model: he never said a word...
Back to the Cafe. Karfiol's style has grown steadily softer and warmer, but it has not changed. Nowadays he paints in Manhattan, spends his weekends with his wife, son and two grandchildren in Irvington, N.Y., and his summers in Ogunquit, Maine. "I'm saving my pennies to go back to Paris again," he says. "I want to go back to the Cafe de Dome...