Karl Mattern

Karl Mattern was born in Germany, and emigrated to the United States in 1906 when he was fourteen, then moved to the Midwest to work on a farm in Oklahoma owned by a friend of his family when he was sixteen. After working at the farm, Mattern travelled and worked odd jobs and eventually arrived in Chicago to study art intermittently at the Chicago Art Institute.

When he graduated, he taught painting at the Fine Arts Academy in Chicago. While there Albert Bloch, who was part of Der Blaue Reiter, a pioneering group of abstract artists in Germany from the 1911 to 1914 (that included Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee), encouraged Mattern to be more self-confident in his work, and eventually brought him to the Kansas Art Institute to teach painting in 1925. In 1948 he moved to Des Moines to teach in the Drake University art department.