Carl Hall embraced the landscape of Northwest with 'magic realism'

It may take an outsider to understand the essential beauty of a place. So it was with the late Carl Hall, an Eastern artist who came west to Oregon and stayed here half a century to paint our trees, beaches and moody atmosphere, attracting national prominence along the way. A small show of Hall's works opens Tuesday and runs through July at the Karin Clarke Gallery, 760 Willamette St.

Hall, who died in 1996, taught art for four decades at Salem's Willamette University. Though he was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Michigan, Hall became a Oregonian, falling in love with the Northwest landscape soon after arriving here as a young soldier to train at Camp Adair during World War II. He met Phyllis, a dance hall hostess, at a USO club in Ashland in 1943. They married the following year. Hall served as a combat artist during the war in the Pacific, seeing action in Leyte and Okinawa, sometimes mailing sketches for publication in the Detroit Free Press. After the war ended, the couple lived briefly in the East but soon set out for Oregon with a panel truck and an 18-foot house trailer. They broke down in Montana, where Hall paid for repairs by painting a mural - in six hours - in a dance hall owned by the mechanic. They soon lived in a trailer park in Salem, and - from the obscurity of the Northwest - Hall began to make his mark on the national art scene. His work soon hung in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He was represented by Julian Levy, the same Manhattan gallery that staged U.S. shows by surrealists such as Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Arshile Gorky.

In 1948, Life magazine published six of Hall's paintings in a four-page spread on the young artist, whom the magazine called a "magic realist." "Hall paints the details of log piles, misty valleys, rivers and mountains of Oregon with careful realism," the magazine said. "But over his scenes, the critics feel, he casts a 'magic realism' which reflects his own mystical feeling for nature." In 1949, Hall was awarded a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in a ceremony attended by Robert Frost, John Marin, Archibald MacLeish and Georgia O'Keeffe.

But Hall's flirtation with fame soon came to a close, as his representational style of painting was eclipsed by the abstract expressionists, about to take the stage in New York. Hall insisted that his art was about something other than pigment and canvas, but the art world had become fascinated by the notion that a painting existed for its own sake, without reference to the outside world. Landscape was out. Writes Roger Hull, who curated a show of Hall's work at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem in 2000: "Carl Hall had become a prolific anomaly that accorded with no contemporary trends ... he was increasingly an outsider in his own region and on the national scene."

Sixteen of Hall's paintings and half a dozen drawings were selected by gallery owners Karin Clarke and her mother, artist Margaret Coe, from Phyllis Hall's private collection. "He is one of the really great Northwest painters representing a period of time in the 1950s," says Coe, who numbers Hall among such better known Northwest mystic painters as Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. "He is a very strong member of that group and that style." Coe, in fact, met Hall when she was a young artist in Salem and entered a painting at the Oregon State Fair. Hall, who judged the fair art that year, awarded her work Best of Show. But beyond that chance encounter, they had no more than a passing acquaintance, though Coe was always aware of Hall and his work.

So when Coe and her family opened the Clarke Gallery last year, she immediately thought to phone Phyllis Hall and ask whether any of Carl's paintings would be available to show. A daylong scouting trip to the Hall home found scores of paintings and drawings. "I am thrilled with the show," Coe said. "I feel like the gallery is honored to have his work."

June 29, 2003