Suzanne Muchnic reports on the death of painter Karl Benjamin, July 26 at the age of 86. Benjamin's work was recently on view in the exhibition Karl Benjamin and the Evolution of Abstraction, 1950-1980 at Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles.

Muchnic notes that "in a 1986 essay Benjamin wrote: 'I am an intuitive painter, despite the ordered appearance of my paintings, and am fascinated by the infinite range of expression inherent in color relationships.' Although he often set up a systematic structure based on numerical progressions, modular constructions or random sequences, he came up with surprising results."