Roger Kuntz

Roger Edward Kuntz (January 4, 1926 – August 22, 1975) was a highly accomplished Southern California landscape painter and a member of the Claremont Group of painters - professors and graduates of Pomona College, Scripps College, and the Claremont Graduate School. A figurative artist with an eye for abstract form, he won critical acclaim for striking compositions that transform an unusual array of subjects, including tennis players, domestic interiors, freeways, road signs, bathtubs and the Goodyear Blimp. A retrospective exhibition of his work, at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA in 2009, was aptly titled "Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction". In the exhibition catalogue, curator Susan M. Anderson wrote: "Kuntz's work of the late 1950s and early 1960s quintessentially embodied the experimentation, fragmentation, and paradox in American culture of the time."

Roger Kuntz was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1926, the second son of Helena Grace Towle Kuntz and Clyde Antoine Kuntz, a U.S. Army pilot whose father had emigrated from the Alsace-Lorraine area of France. Soon after Roger's birth, the family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where Clyde Kuntz died in a plane crash in 1929. His widow took their two young sons to California, moving from San Francisco to Riverside to Coronado and, finally, to Lomaland, home of the Theosophical Society's community of artists, writers and philosophers.

Roger Kuntz began drawing and painting in his youth. After graduating from Pt. Loma High School, in 1943, he enrolled at Pomona College in Claremont, CA. He dropped out for two years to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps and returned in 1946 to study art and psychology. Upon graduation, in 1948, Kuntz married fellow student Margaret Durr and enrolled at the Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University). He studied with artists Henry Lee McFee, Millard Sheets, Sueo Serisawa and Carlos Lopez and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1950. His classmates included painters Paul Darrow, Douglas McClellan and Karl Benjamin and sculptor Jack Zajac.

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