Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt (1889-1989) was an American painter, writer, and philosopher of art whose long life and sustained artistic vocation produced a distinctive body of work grounded in his deep Christian faith and his lifelong meditation on the nature of art itself. Born in Warren, Ohio, Schmitt eventually settled in Silvermine, Connecticut, where he became closely associated with the celebrated Silvermine artistic community. He lived to the remarkable age of one hundred, producing paintings, drawings, and voluminous notebook writings on aesthetics and spirituality throughout his extraordinary career.

Schmitt once wrote in one of his many notebooks:

"The artist must have absolute faith in the truth of his imaginative vision."

Thus his goal as an artist was to paint his own personal aesthetic vision of creation. His guides throughout his long career were his own intuition and reason, alongside his deeply rooted Christian faith. Schmitt explained this conviction in another characteristic passage:

"All art is born in lyricism, begins in color and must never lose its lyrical impulse no matter how far sustained."

These twin commitments to the truth of imaginative vision and to the primacy of lyrical color shaped Schmitt's painterly practice at every level, and they distinguish his work from that of many of his American contemporaries. His mature pictures include portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and religious subjects, all handled with a distinctive sensitivity to color relationships and a warmly personal treatment of his subject matter.

Schmitt continued to search into the mysteries of painting and the arts throughout his career, maintaining his good humor and acute intellect through years of debilitating and crushing poverty. His willingness to sustain a serious artistic life despite chronic financial difficulty stands as one of the more inspiring stories in twentieth-century American art. His writings on art, philosophy, and Christian aesthetics constitute a substantial intellectual achievement alongside his paintings, and they have attracted renewed scholarly interest in recent years.

Schmitt's paintings are held today in significant American museum and private collections, particularly the Silvermine Arts Center, where his legacy is preserved and celebrated. He is remembered as one of the more genuinely independent voices in twentieth-century American painting, an artist whose steadfast commitment to his own vision produced a body of work of unusual coherence and spiritual depth.