Charles S. Klabunde (October 1, 1935 – June 20, 2024) was an American artist whose work has been characterized both as existential realism and as fantastical symbolism.
Klabunde was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He began drawing as a young boy. Because he was learning disabled, his parents encouraged him to become a house painter. It never occurred to anyone, including Klabunde, that art would become his career.
After high school, Klabunde studied drafting at the Omaha Technical School. When he completed the program, he went to work for his grandfather, an engineer, as a surveyor for a new housing development. Klabunde had no plans to attend college until a co-worker his own age persuaded him to enroll. Klabunde earned his B.F.A. in 1958 from the University of Nebraska and then attended graduate school at the University of Iowa, earning his M.F.A. in 1962. While at Iowa, he met the Argentine printmaker, Mauricio Lasansky, who encouraged him to build a career as an etcher.[1]
In 1965 Klabunde moved to Edgewater, New Jersey, and working as a designer of interiors - classrooms and labs - for NYU. In 1967, he found an apartment in Greenwich Village and was able to open his first studio.
One of his first commissions was from Lublin Graphics, which led to shows at local galleries. Soon, about 30 galleries were carrying his work. Museums, too, were receptive to his work. The first to purchase one of his pieces was the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 1971, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.[2]
Klabunde died June 20, 2024, at the age of 88.[3]
Klabunde was a prolific printmaker and painter. His prints were made on a custom-made English press using four-color, hand-engraved copper plates, which produces contours and colors with an antique appearance. He mixed his own ink and hand-pulls each print.
Victoria Donohoe, writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, described Klabunde as an artist who elevates printmaking because he takes great interest in exploiting the special qualities that make etching an expressive medium with unique characteristics rather than using it, say, only as a method of reproducing pencil drawings. He knows well how to handle the thin transparent scrims of color upon color, and he introduces patterned materials such as lace to obtain the surface quality he wants. His color sense and a story-telling bias distinguish him.[4]
The artist tended to focus on a subject and then create a series of works around it. While he generally drew inspiration from biblical or mythological themes, he was also inspired by African and other tribal art.
His collections included:
In style, his early drawings, and prints could be described as fantasy art. They could also be described as a cross between the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer and illustrations for Grimm's Fairy Tales. He creates symbolic vignettes using Medieval or Renaissance figures and settings, to which the viewer may apply his own interpretations.[5]
Klabunde's black-and-white or color etchings featured ensed, highly complex, and fascinating imagery. What seem at first to be simple fantasy pictures are, in fact, much more.[6] Typically, the artist's etchings were full of Gothick elements (Hellmouths, gargoyles, and elaborate tracery) and fantastic details (acrobats dangling from ropes presumably suspended on skyhooks, and cablecars with dragons on their roofs.) These technically astounding scenes require several viewings to appreciate fully. However, his best prints are his least fussy ones, works such as Icarus and The Puppeteer which feature unexpected arrangements of a limited number of figures.[7]
While many artists employ drawings either as preliminary studies for paintings or separate statements, Klabunde's are both. While serving to guide the compositions of his large oils on canvas, they are also finished statements in their own right.[8]
Klabunde is sometimes compared to Francis Bacon, as the two artists share an ability to create the sense of an encounter with a palpable human presence placed in a frontal pose at the center of the composition, invariably against dark backgrounds that cast the figures in stark relief. While Bacon assaults the viewer with the visceral jolt of seeing the human image flayed like a side of beef, Klabunde confronts us with the culture shock of a spiritual tradition far different from our own.[9]
By 2002, Klabunde had moved from inner demons and internal fantasies toward a new affirmation of life. This was a natural consequence of his move away from nihilism and existentialism, toward spiritual transcendence. Now the bodies that he presents are ideally beautiful in the majestic series of very large pencil drawing poetically entitled Burned by the Fire of Our Dreams.[10]
Klabunde has created etchings and engravings for four books. Each is printed on B.F.K. Rieves paper and boxed in clothbound deluxe European box books.
In each series, Klabunde's images illuminate, rather than merely illustrate, the texts. In the etching Cycle of Sangsaric Phenomena #III, for example, the mystical qualities of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are conveyed with surreal figures orbiting a darkly cross-hatched cosmos around a brilliant orb that could appear to be a portal to their next incarnation.[11]
By contrast, in The Seven Deadly Sins series, various preposterously grotesque beings recall Odilon Redon's desire to create figures that are impossible according to the laws of possibility. When we view Klabunde's work we recognize the bloated, covetous figure of Greed and the fanged monster of Anger as symbolic surrogates of our own worst traits.[12]
In 1982 Klabunde began making etchings for Beckett's The Lost Ones, the story of an other-worldly tribe trapped inside a cylinder. Working with Charles Altschul, publisher of New Overbrook Press, the artist's book contains seven hand-pulled intaglio prints placed loosely inside a handmade folio box with unbound pages of text.[13]
Klabunde's drawings imagine the characters as bulbous, Bosch-like concretions, twisted into contortionist poses, and labeled with such titles as The Lull, The Spectacle and The Last State.[14]
The New Overbrook Press edition of The Lost Ones was published on April 13, 1984, Beckett's 78th birthday. The next year Klabunde traveled to Paris and spent time with Beckett, who upon the book's publication, had sent his warm congratulations to the publisher and the artist for those terrifying images. Beckett signed all 250 copies of this limited edition book.[15]
This series, especially, exemplifies the Existential Realist phase of the artist's work.[16]
Klabunde's imagery and iconography, although highly individualistic, is often traced from the work of Bosch, Dürer, Breughel, Callot, Rembrandt, Blake, Goya, Meryon, Redon, Klinger, Ensor, Magritte, Klee and Picasso.