“The Ghost” is an eerie painting from 1955 by Arkansas artist Carroll Cloar. It depicts a bed covered in a checkerboard quilt. Standing at the foot of that bed is what appears to be the ghost of a woman whose hand rests on the brass bed rail. The walls of the room are blue; the view outside from a pair of windows shows nothing but blackness.
It’s a quintessential Cloar — Southern, weird, magical, mesmerizing. And it’s missing.
“The Ghost” was recently mentioned in a post at Historic Arkansas Museum’s Facebook page, Arkansas Made, that quoted “The Lost Cloars,” a Sept. 4, 2013, story about five Cloar paintings whose whereabouts were unknown at the time. Along with “The Ghost,” the others, which are pictured in the article, were “Green River,” “The Idyl,” “The Draught of Fishes” and “The Luckless Fishermen.”
Of them, perhaps the most stunning is “Green River,” which shows a creek covered by green duckweed and a person on the bank. The scene is both familiar and otherworldly.
Cloar was born Jan. 18, 1913, on a farm near Earle in Crittenden County. He earned a degree in English from Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis and studied at the Memphis Academy of Art and the Art Students League in New York. After serving in the Army Air Corps during WWII, he traveled through Mexico and South America before settling in Memphis in the mid-’50s, where he developed his painting style, with subjects inspired by memories and stories from his Arkansas childhood.
“Cloar’s work almost always contains a strong narrative strain,” according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “and even if the story being told is not straightforward, its power can be sensed in the mysteriousness of the circumstances, whether that be a tree full of panthers or a football team lining up against an unseen opponent. His style has been described as both primitive and progressively modern. It is grounded in reality and touched by surrealistic, or dream-like, overtones…”
On April 10, 1993, after a long struggle with cancer, Cloar died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His ashes were scattered across the land where he grew up in Earle.
Not all of the works mentioned in the 2013 article remain missing. “The Draught of Fishes,” from 1965, has been in the collection of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts since 2017.
There are about 900 known paintings by Cloar in private hands, though there is no catalogue raisonné of his works, according to the 2013 article. Prices for Cloar’s paintings can start at around $20,000 and ascend to the low six figures, which may send some intrepid searchers on a quest through closets and attics to track down one of the fabled “lost Cloars.”
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Publish date : 2024-12-14 16:45:00
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