Abstract painter and printmaker Karl Kasten was born in San Francisco in 1916. While he studied at the California School of Fine Arts, Kasten received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in art at the University of California, Berkeley. As an undergraduate, he served as Art Editor for the Daily Californian, and designed the card stunts for the 1938 Rose Bowl game. He later studied with abstract painter Hans Hofmann.

Kasten began working primarily with paintings and pastels but by the early 1950s he was dividing his time with printmaking. His paintings, quite abstract in style, worked with geometric forms and texture seemingly referring to landscape. In collagraph prints, he developed a way of printing a multi-colored image on a single run thr...