Beach Culvert

Roger Kuntz
Beach Culvert
Oil on canvas, 1960
40 x 50 inches
Gift of Mrs. Margaret Kuntz
1983.016

In 1960, during one of the summer vacations he spent at Crystal Cove, Roger Kuntz became fascinated by the forms of a concrete pedestrian culvert under the Pacific Coast Highway. It led to a series of paintings of the same ostensibly banal kind of architecture on a monumental scale, the underpasses and overpasses of the Los Angeles freeways. Neither abstract nor completely descriptive but somewhere in-between, they bring out an unexpected visual poetry—a beautiful arrangement of lines and shapes, light and shadow—in some of the most prosaic sights of the modern world.