Karl Bitter was born on December 6, 1867, in Austria. His father, Carl Bitter, was a Protestant who, with his journeyman's kit on his back, had come from Baden in South Germany to seek his fortune in Vienna, where later he became a chemist. He married Henriette Reitter, a Catholic, by whom he had three sons. Karl Theodore Francis was the second of these, and grew up a headstrong, beauty-loving child, with his father's independence, his mother's idealism, and a keen mind of his own.
After a period at the Volksschule, Karl went to the Gymnasium. Here, when he was ten years of age, his encounters with the all-important Latin grammar were markedly unsuccessful. In explanation to his parents, he declared, as an ingenious defense, that the Latin teacher was so ugly to look at that one simply could not learn. As Karl had the gift of eloquence and an interest in affairs, his father had planned for him a career in law, while his mother, a devout woman, had dreamed of the priesthood. But without Latin, what hope in either field? The boy was not sorry. Near his home was a stoneyard, where he had spent magical hours watching the workmen, until at length he was allowed to try his hand. He thereupon became an apprentice, of sorts, in his spare moments. When his anxious parents found it out, they concluded that it was better to let nature, which in Karl's case was art, take its course. He was entered at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the imperial school for applied arts, from which, when old enough, he passed to the Kunstakademie. Attending these schools from 1882 to 1887, he was eager, tireless, filled with delight in his work, and often an arrogant leader of rebellion against the less progressive instructors.
When Bitter was twenty, his studies, together with his labors as an obscure assistant in Vienna's adornment, were interrupted by his call to military service. Most of his comrades were regarded as professional students, and therefore were to serve but one year. Bitter, however, had left the Gymnasium too early to have the required certificate, and so was drafted for three years. This injustice he felt keenly. After serving faithfully one year, he took matters into his own hands, renounced his allegiance, and fled to Germany, where he picked up a living as best he might, en route for America. In Berlin he found a friend in a former comrade, Rudolph Schwartz, who aided him with money for his passage, and for his immediate needs in a strange land.
The day after Bitter reached New York, Bitter found work at the first door at which he knocked. He had stumbled on a firm of architectural modelers. Having no English, he let his drawings and photographs speak for him. He was shown some clay, with a crude indication of an angel within it, and was motioned to go to work. He obeyed to such purpose that at the end of a week he received to his amazement a pay envelope of $48. His modeling in this shop met the kindly eye of Richard M. Hunt, the famous architect. Hunt urged him to set up for himself, promising him considerable interior sculpture for the C. P. Huntington house, then under way. Bitter's talent and training made him just the sculptor Hunt had long been looking for, namely, a facile, imaginative modeler, versed in ornament. That Bitter's gift had also its serious side appears from the fact that in 1891, sixteen months after his arrival in New York, he won the competition for the most important of the three bronze gates of Trinity Church, provided for by the John Jacob Astor bequest, the subject of the competitive panel being "The Expulsion from Paradise. " Then came the Chicago Exposition. As Hunt's protégé, Bitter distinguished himself in the elaborate scheme of sculptural decoration for Hunt's Administration Building at the head of the Court of Honor, a scheme in which battalions of forms at once decorative and functional embossed the whole structure with their impassioned story of "The Elements, Controlled and Uncontrolled" (1893).
His next achievement was a host of interior and exterior sculptures, of fluent technique and admirable variety, in relief and in the round, in stone, wood, bronze, and polished steel, created to adorn "Biltmore, " the Vanderbilt villa in North Carolina (1895). During the following year he completed three colossal stone atlantes, representing the White, Negro, and Malay races, for the façade of the St. Paul Building, in New York, and three years later he undertook the four figures, Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, and Music, for the front of the Metropolitan Museum. In 1899 he made his contribution, a spirited naval group, to that extraordinary sculptural improvisation, the Dewey Arch. In his bronze statue of Dr. William Pepper, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, a meditative seated figure in academic gown, Bitter expressed himself with a deeper significance than ever before (1898). But the architects were still clamoring for his decorative work, and his gift of leadership still kept him at the head of a group of assistants profitably turning out an amazing amount of architect's fodder, even while he himself longed to make some nobler use of his power.
In 1896 he gave up his New York establishment for a romantic site at Weehawken, building there in due season, house, studio, stable. He was not only the maker of equestrian groups, such as the dashing "Standard Bearers" of the Buffalo Exposition (1901), called by Saint-Gaudens the finest of the Exposition sculptures, and the noble presentment of Gen. Sigel on Riverside Drive, New York (1907). Perhaps his military experience was a help to him in his able leadership of the workers associated with him while he was director of sculpture at the Pan-American Exposition (1899 - 1901), at the St. Louis World's Fair (1902 - 1904), and even at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, where his directorship was generally advisory rather than personal (1912 - 1915).
In 1909 Bitter received his amnesty from Franz Josef. In 1910 he revisited his native city, and with great satisfaction renewed old ties, only to realize more fully than ever how dear to him was his American citizenship, which he had obtained as early as possible after his arrival in New York. His first step was to reorganize his studio.
Bitter's enormous productivity is shown by the host of works created by him and his assistants during the interval between the St. Louis Fair and the San Francisco Fair. Included are two important pediments and four heroic groups for the Wisconsin State Capitol at Madison (1908 - 1912), four Chinese figures for the façade of the Brooklyn Museum (1909), statues of Lords Somers and Mansfield for the Court House at Cleveland (1910), and many portraits in relief or in the round.
By frequent trips abroad, Bitter, master of many materials, kept himself abreast of all the new movements in art. In the granite panels for his finely conceived and nobly placed Schurz monument in New York (1913), as in the perforated marble screen behind his statue of Thomas Lowry, a leading citizen of Minneapolis (1915), and the sternly cut granite figures for the First National Bank Building in Cleveland (1908), he showed himself an adept in modern simplicity; while on the other hand, in his memorials to Dr. Angell and to Dr. Tappan at Ann Arbor, Michigan. (1910, 1913), he made a sober return to a generally useful realism of manner, not untouched by poetic idealism. The frieze of little children in his Prehn Memorial at Passaic, the graceful kneeling figure in the Kasson Memorial at Utica, the Goose Girl fountain at Pocantico Hills, and the unfinished studies for the Depew fountain for Indianapolis finely express their opposed emotions of joy and sorrow. In his relief portrait of Dr. Angell for Ann Arbor and in his bronze statue of PresidentWhite of Cornell University (1915), Bitter enjoyed the opportunity, rare for sculptors, of studying his subjects from life rather than afterward.
His last work, not yet put into bronze at the time of his tragic death, but faithfully completed by his friend Isidor Konti, is a calm and happy figure of "Abundance" crowning the great fountain in New York's Plaza. In a spirit of elation on the evening of the very day when he had put the last touches to his full-sized model, he and his wife attended the opera. The performance over, they started across Broadway, when suddenly an automobile out of control swept them down. Mrs. Bitter escaped with minor injuries, her husband lived but a few hours. His life was cut short before he had reached the fullness of his powers. In his latest work, every element attested and prophesied still further growth, still higher ideals.
Karl Bitter is considered as a many-sided sculptor of increasingly high ideals. His most famous work is seated statues of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton to flank the entrance to the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio. He was head of the sculpture programs at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, and the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco, California. During his career Bitter was awarded many honors.
Bitter was president of the National Sculpture Society(1906, 1914); a member of the New York Municipal Art Commission; the National Institute of Arts and Sciences; the National Academy of Design; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Players' Club; Century Club; and vice-president of the Architectural League (1904-1906; 1909-1911).
Tall, slender, dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-bearded, Bitter had nothing of the Teuton in his aspect. The headstrong youth had matured into the thoughtful, kindly man who had learned to persuade instead of to domineer.
In 1901 Bitter was married to Marie A. Schevill of Cincinnati, Ohio, a lady of marked musical talent and of sensitive artistic appreciation. His marriage was an ideal one. They had three children: Francis T. R. Bitter, Marietta C. E. Bitter and John F. Bitter.
