Roger Edward Kuntz

Art Brokerage: Roger Edward Kuntz American Artist: b. 1926-1975. Roger Edward Kuntz (January 4, 1926 – August 22, 1975) was a highly accomplished Southern California landscape painter and a member of the Claremont Group of painters - professors and graduates of Pomona College, Scripps College, and the Claremont Graduate School. A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects, including tennis players, domestic interiors, freeways, road signs, bathtubs and the Goodyear Blimp. A retrospective exhibition of his work, at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA in 2009, was aptly titled "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction". In the exhibition catalogue, curator Susan M. Anderson wrote: "Kuntz's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s quintessentially embodied the experimentation, fragmentation, and paradox in American culture of the time." In 1954, upon the recommendation of Sheets, Kuntz joined the faculty at Scripps College in Claremont as a visiting professor of art. Two years later, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant for painting. The $3,000 award allowed him to take a leave of absence from teaching and work on his art full-time. Travels in California and Mexico inspired many of his paintings during that period. As his reputation grew, Kuntz joined the stable of artists represented by Felix Landau, a leading Los Angeles art dealer who maintained a prestigious gallery on La Cienega Boulevard. The relationship continued from 1957 to 1968. As Kuntz matured, his paintings evolved from relatively traditional landscapes, still lifes and figure studies to much more reductive and dramatic views of freeway overpasses and underpasses, cropped highway signs, and signs carved in deep shadow and light; they embodied Kuntz's search for the union of formal abstraction and mundane reality. Produced from 1960 to 1962 in a palette generally limited to black, white, grays and greens, these paintings compose his most highly acclaimed body of work. Listings Wanted.