MOUNT VERNON - An exhibition of ink drawings, watercolors and oil paintings by Grant Wood contemporary Karl Mattern, who taught at Drake University and showed often at the Des Moines Art Center, opens Aug. 15 at Cornell College.
"Karl Mattern: Artist & Teacher," featuring landscapes, self-portraits and genre-related imagery, continues through Sept. 22 in the Cole Library Gallery. A reception is Sunday, Aug. 29, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the gallery. Admission is free. For library hours, call (319) 895-4271 or go to www.cornellcollege.edu.
Born in Germany in 1892, Mattern immigrated to the United States and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Art Students League under the direction of George Bellows. Mattern joined the art faculty at the University of Kansas in 1925. During his time in Lawrence, his wife, Mary Lieberman Mattern, attended Iowa's Stone City Colony and Art School, directed by Grant Wood and Marvin Cone, during the summers of 1932 and 1933.
Mattern left Kansas in 1948 to become an art professor at Drake where he taught until age 70. He taught painting and art history at Simpson College for a year before retiring.
The year Mattern arrived at Drake, the Des Moines Art Center opened and he served on its acquisitions committee. One-man exhibitions of his work were held there in 1948, 1951, 1954 and 1960, and a memorial exhibition was held in 1970.
"Well-informed about art's changing styles, his own work became more abbreviated, more cursory about details. Having survived many epidemics of art fashions he mistrusted the instant flashes and almost instantaneous clashes that kept the scene newsworthy. Mattern followed no identifiable trends, but had gradually shifted the emphases in his own productions according to inimitable convictions," wrote longtime friend and colleague Leonard Good in the memorial exhibition's catalog essay.
The Cornell exhibition features works from the collection of Mary E. Kohl of Des Moines and lent by J. Richard Simon, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa. Works by Mattern are also in the collections of several Midwest museums including the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas.
