Carroll Cloar

One of the South’s most beloved painters, Carroll Cloar (1913-1993) worked daily from 1959 until his death in his home on South Greer Street in Memphis, Tennessee. His studio was lined with newspapers and magazine articles that held special significance or inspiration, and he added memorabilia from various periods of his life. The walls were a work in progress and microcosm of Cloar’s world. The studio, reconstructed in The Art Museum of the University of Memphis in 2013, is the point of departure for considering Cloar’s drawings, lithographs, and paintings as well as his artistic practice. Cloar was an insightful and witty writer as well as a painter, and selections from his manuscripts furnish the text.

Cloar was born and raised in Crittenden County, Arkansas, and educated at Southwestern (Rhodes) College and the Memphis Academy of Art. In 1936 he went to New York to study at the Art Students League expecting never to return to the South, but after twenty years of living on and off in New York, interrupted by years of international travel, World War II service, and more travel, he returned. As a tireless visual and verbal observer of the uniqueness and universality of places and patterns of behavior, he gradually realized that the South of his childhood, engrained in his soul, was equal in its authentic character to any of his exotic destinations.

Carroll Cloar: In His Studio includes eighty black-and-white and forty color photographs and provides the most extensive published treatment of Cloar and his work since 1977.