Eden Again: The Art of Carl Hall

Carl Hall, born in 1921 in Detroit, was an accomplished Magic Realist painter on the brink of a major career in American art when World War II intervened. As a young Army recruit, he was assigned to Camp Adair near Corvallis, Oregon, in 1942. For Hall, Oregon was "Eden Again," and after military service in the Pacific he and his wife settled permanently in the state, which became the focus of Hall's consummate artistry for the next 50 years. Hall became one of western Oregon's most expressive visual interpreters, focusing for most of his lifetime on the terrain of the Willamette Valley, the mountains that enclose it, and the Pacific coast beyond. In exploring Hall's place in Pacific Northwest and American art, this book is a study of regional art and art history, of the interplay between regional and national art production in the periods before and after World War II, and of Hall's metaphorical use of natural forms as the basis for personal expression.