CAA News Today

The following obituary was submitted by the brother of the deceased, Robert F. Schmalz, and edited by CAA.

Carl N. Schmalz Jr., an artist and art historian who taught for many decades at Bowdoin College and Amherst College and a CAA member since 1951, died February 22, 2013. He was 86 years old.

Born in 1926 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Schmalz was the son of the late Carl N. Schmalz and Esther (Fowler) Schmalz of Belmont, Massachusetts. he earned AB, AM, and PhD degrees in fine arts from Harvard University and was later awarded an honorary degree by Amherst College. He studied watercolor painting with Eliot O’Hara in 1943–44 and began a long teaching career while instructing at the O’Hara School at Goose Rocks Beach in 1946–47. As assistant professor at Bowdoin College from 1952 to 1962, he taught both the history and practice of art, while serving simultaneously as curator and ultimately as associate director of the Walker Art Museum (now the Bowdoin College Museum of Art). He moved to Amherst in 1962 and was made full professor seven years later.

In 1969 Schmalz inaugurated the popular summer Watercolor Workshops in Kennebunkport, Maine, which he ran for twenty years. He retired from Amherst at the end of 1994 but enjoyed teaching watercolor painting at Rock Gardens Inn in Sebasco Estates, Maine, since the early 1990s. He also taught at the Heartwood College of Art in Kennebunk until his recent hospitalization.

Schmalz was the author of several books on watercolor painting and of articles in professional journals. He taught classes, juried many exhibitions, and lectured on the subject of watercolor throughout the United States, as well as in Canada and Bermuda. His work won him election as a charter member of the Watercolor USA Honor Society and national and regional prizes. His artwork was handled by galleries in Maine, Florida, Bermuda, and Boston, and his paintings hang in numerous public collections and in hundreds of private homes. He painted landscapes in Britain and Europe—and loved Italy especially. Apart from the Indian subcontinent, he painted on every continent on the globe. In recent years his particular focus was still life.

Schmalz held a wide range of public-service positions in the communities in which he lived: vice president of the board of directors of the Portland Museum of Art; member of the executive board of Interfaith Housing Corporation in Amherst; president of the board of trustees of Amherst Day School; art consultant for the O’Hara Picture Trust; chairman of the board of assessors in Pelham, Massachusetts; member of the Pelham Arts Lottery Council; and consultant on undergraduate science education for the National Academy of Sciences.

Schmalz leaves his wife Dolores T. Schmalz; his son Mathew N. Schmalz and his wife Kristin; and his daughter Julia I. Schmalz and her partner Janice. He is also survived by two grandchildren, Anna Teresa and Katherine Dolores Schmalz; and two brothers, Robert F. Schmalz of State College, Pennsylvania, and David H. Schmalz of Amsterdam, Holland. His first son, Stephen Theodore Schmalz, predeceased him.