A specialist in American scene subject matter, Cleveland-born Carl Gaertner exhibited an early aptitude for drawing. As a high-school student he studied mechanical design, but during his senior year he decided to make painting his primary avocation. In 1920 he enrolled at the Cleveland School of Art, graduating three years later after studying with Henry Keller and Frank Wilcox. In 1925 the school hired Gaertner to teach painting. During the 1920s and 1930s he went on summer painting excursions to Provincetown, Massachusetts, with Ora Coltman and George Adomeit. One of the most widely exhibited artists working in Cleveland, Gaertner showed at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1922–53), the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (1924–52), the Art Institute of Chicago (1925–49), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1943–48), and the National Academy of Design (1944–50). The Cleveland School of Art organized solo exhibitions of his paintings (1928, 1941), as did the Philadelphia Art Alliance (1948). In 1945 he began a long association with the Macbeth Galleries in New York. In 1952, after experiencing a severe headache while teaching at the art school, he went home and died unexpectedly of a brain hemorrhage.
Transformations in Cleveland Art (CMA, 1996), p. 228