Going To Market

  • Biography

    Carl Pappe (1900 - 1998)

    Born in Hungary in 1900, Carl Pappe showed an early interest and talent
    in drawing, taking up the only tools available, chalk and slate. 
    When Pappe was just five years old, his father immigrated to the United
    States in search for a new life for his family.  Six years later
    they were reunited in Lorain, Ohio.



    While in his early teens, he was apprenticed to a Hungarian muralist
    working in Cleveland.  From 1921 to 1925 he attended the Cleveland
    School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art).   Awarded a
    scholarship by the Hungarian Society, he enrolled at the school of his
    choice, the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.    He
    studied under Hugh Breckenridge and Daniel Garber from 1925 to
    1926.  The Academy awarded him a full scholarship, but he was
    unable to complete his third year of studies due to medical problems.



    In 1929 he worked in stage design for Paramount Studios in New York but
    was laid off due to the economic recession. "If I am going to die of
    hunger it won't be here", he said.  Amidst the Depression, Carl
    Pappe worked crafting repairs to the gold leaf of the ceilings of
    theaters while refinishing furniture and sail boat decks in
    Philadelphia and Boston.   He started a drawing school for children
    in Easton, Pennsylvania in a downstairs room of the Masonic Temple. 
    Tuition was 50 cents per week.  This was the first of many
    opportunities he took in instructing young people in the arts.



    Pappe visited Mexico City in 1934, and began to work as a cook and tour
    guide to earn money for rent on a studio where he could paint.  He
    met Bernice Goodspeed, his future wife, an anthropologist and tour
    guide specializing in sites of antiquity.  She became a designer
    of silver jewelry and authored books on Mexican folklore, illustrated
    by Pappe, then her husband.  They opened a gallery in the still
    quaint silver mining town of Taxco, southwest of Mexico City.



    Acquainted with many interesting and influential people during his four
    years in Mexico City, Pappe heard lectures on art given by Diego Rivera
    and shared the same Swedish doctor with his friend Frida Kahlo,
    Rivera's wife.  He was a great admirer and friend of the sculpture
    Isamu Noguchi.  He also worked to become an apprentice to muralist
    Jose Orozco, visiting his studio often.  As a personal tour guide
    to Amelia Earhart upon her arrival via solo flight, he took her to the
    studio of Diego Rivera as well as the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon
    outside of Mexico City.  Pappe' friendship with Carlos Merida,
    Juan O'Gorman and Ruffino Tamayo brought them to Taxco in an effort to
    escape the politics and distractions in the Capital.



    Carl Pappe  outlived all of his contemporaries, a reality he attributed
    to his avoidance of the tempting and often addicting evils of smoking,
    drinking and fast living.



    He left such distractions and settled in Taxco, Mexico's silver mining
    capital in the Sierra Madre Mountains.  There he was able to focus
    entirely on art and all that delighted him, inspired by the love and
    beauty that is Mexico.  He could not live anywhere else, he said
    of colonial Taxco. "That was the magnet that attracted me here, in the
    heart.  Painting and sculpting is my blood; that is what I was
    trained for.  Now with all my years what am I going to do? 
    There is nothing else but to continue until the end".



    According to Abraham Davidson's essay, CARL PAPPE: The Late Works (1995), "Pappe had not seen an ARTnews
    since about 1945, had never watched television and heard radio for the
    last time when listening to an Amos 'n Andy program."  Davidson
    further explains the abstract works as having "a controlled delicacy
    and sureness of draftsmanship, which compel our close attention and
    admiration.  His pieces do not comprise a composition of diverse
    parts or contain a focus."  Another series inspired by Paul Klee's
    Magic Squares of 1922-1930 are like going up or down scales of
    music and according to Pappe they are put together so they "work as a
    whole on all sides, forget the individual squares and feel what the
    whole thing says to you".



    Pappe's use of the vignette can be seen in works dating from 1980
    through 1990.  The strong lines outlining the works usually
    contain washes used to illuminate the line drawing such that without
    using perspective Pappe has caused dimensionality.  Abstract works
    crossover from early cubist toward Nahuatl glyphs.  Much
    reflection is seen in the contemporary Mexicana design; however, more
    mysterious are the 'Anthropos' which seem to have come directly from
    ancient shamanistic dreaming. Inherent in the human species, the animal
    concepts are depicted in an anthropomorphic style.  Pappe has
    visited these images in a somewhat three dimensional outline of
    prehistoric design which resemble artifacts of animals, living beings
    or entities.  His abstract line drawings resemble western
    continental petroglyphs; webbing and connections could serve as spirit
    catchers or preform the use of virtual universe.



    Carl Pappe was a fellow of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
    where his work has been shown.  Several of his woodcut prints of
    Taxco street scenes are among the collections at the Library of
    Congress.  An exhibit of his abstract pastels was held in 1994 by
    the Government of Guerrero as a commemorative to his fifty five years
    as an artist in Taxco.  In 1995 over eighty of his abstracts were
    shown at the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia.



    His sculptures, drawings and paintings hang on the walls of European,
    Middle Eastern, American, South American as well as many Mexican
    collectors who had visited him in Taxco through the years.



    His creativity as an artist continuously evolved in art that ranged
    from pencil and ink drawings, etchings, woodcuts, abstract sculptures
    in solid silver, bronze busts, watercolors, oil paintings to his more
    recent series of abstract pastels. Truly a modern scholar of numerous
    genres of art and a generous instructor of his crafts, Carl Pappe's
    creative spirit lives on in his century of art.





    Submitted November 2005 by Peter Bissell, Cooperstown, New York. 
    The source is the website of a gallery in Santa Cruz, California










    Carl Peppe (1900-1998) was born in Hungary and came to the U.S. at the age of 11, where his family settled in Ohio. As a young man, Peppe studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. During the early years of the Great Depression, he struggled as a theater scene designer and furniture maker in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia before moving to Mexico City in 1932.

    With his wife, author and sometime silversmith Bernice Goodspeed, he eventually established a studio and opened a gallery in Taxco in the Sierra Madre Mountains southwest of Mexico City, where he spent much of the rest of his life. Peppe was close friends with many of leading 20th century Mexican muralists, painters, and sculptors including Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Carlos Merida, Juan O'Gorman, Ruffino Tamayo, and Jose Orozco. While he established his reputation as a post-impressionist landscape artist, over his long life Peppe's work increasingly became more abstract, influenced by the whimsical line drawings of Klee as well as cubist abstractions to be seen in indigenous Nahuatl petroglyphs.

    Peppe leaves a body of work in many media including oil, pastel, watercolor, metal sculpture, pencil and ink drawings, woodcuts, and etchings. He also illustrated his wife's books of Mexican fables. Collections of Carl Peppe's work reside in several Mexican art museums, the Library of Congress, Philadelphia's Woodmere Art Museum, and in private collections.

    Submitted December 2003 by John Barrett, collector, who credits River Street Gallery and several Spanish language websites.