Karl Albert Kasten (March 5, 1916 – May 3, 2010) was an American painter, printmaker, and educator, from the San Francisco Bay Area.

[4] He was a student of art from an early age and regularly competed with his older brother Fred in battleship drawing contests[vague].

His early mentors came from the "Berkeley School" - John Haley, Erle Loran, Margaret Peterson and Worth Ryder.

His work from this period earned him recognition and prizes in annual painting competitions held at the San Francisco Museum Of Art (now MOMA).

As part of the Rally Committee, Kasten designed and directed the card stunts for the 1938 Rose Bowl against Alabama's Crimson Tide.

Following his graduation he taught briefly at the California School of Fine Arts but the attack on Pearl Harbor led him to wartime service.

Kastens' memories of the war are dark and he recalls bluntly, "My job was to kill people", and "I was pretty miserable inside.

Ultimately the Michigan winters drove his return to the Bay Area where he again took an assistant professor of art position at the San Francisco State University.

"[4] In the early 1950s Kasten experimented with Cubism and non-objective painting but after studying at the Hans Hofmann School in Provincetown, Mass in '51 he turned to Abstract Expressionism.

"[9] In her biography of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism Susan Landauer noted Kasten as the artist who came closest to these tenets.

Kasten's collographs are noteworthy for the sensitivity in texture and for the use of insertable parts such as coins and found objects to print a range of colors.

After viewing his colorful etchings of the 1950s, art critic Alfred Frankenstein observed that Kasten had "discovered a new softness, liquidity, and fluency of effect in the bitten plate and with this a new way of expressing the modern artist's preoccupation with space and movement."

Texts dealing with his work include "Etching" by L. Edmondson, 1973; "Modern Woodcut Techniques" by A. Kurasaki, 1977; "The California Style", by G. McClelland and J.