Painter Bernard Karfiol grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York, an American who was born in 1886 in Budapest, Hungary. He attended the National Academy of Design, New York City, when he was only fourteen. He traveled by himself to Paris at the tender age of fifteen to study at the Academie Julien with Jean-Paul Laurens, and the Ecole de Beaux-Arts. He exhibited at the Grand Salon and the Salon d'Automne.

In Paris, Karfiol was influenced by the work of Paul Cezanne and Pierre Auguste Renoir. Karfiol was also attracted to the painting of Andre Derain.

Karfiol returned to the United States in 1906. In 1913, he participated in the famous New York City Armory show, on Lexington Avenue, where European modernism was introduced to the American public for the first time en masse, along with American artists well-known at the time.

Karfiol painted nudes and still lifes in the manner of Picasso's pink and blue periods. By the late 1920s, Karfiol's style had moved toward Renoir.

Karfiol, an author and teacher, as well as a painter, spent his summers in Ogunquit, Maine from 1914 until his death at Irvington-on-Hudson, New York in 1952.
He was a member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Academy of Art.

His work is in the Addison Gallery, Andover, Massachusetts; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Detroit Institute of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City; Newark Museum, New Jersey; the Phillips Collection and National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Source: Michael David Zellman, "300 Years of American Art"