Karl Benjamin never intended to become an artist. He graduated in 1949 with a degree in English literature, history, and philosophy, and later became interested in art, eventually earning a Master of Arts degree from Claremont Graduate School in Southern California. He immersed himself in the art, architecture and design of the mid-twentieth century, and became associated with the hard-edge painting that developed in Southern California at that time.

In 1959, Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin were all included in the era-defining exhibition Four Abstract Classicists at the Los Angeles County Museum (then in Exposition Park). The exhibition’s curator, Jules Langsner, described hard-edge compositions as “finite, flat, rimmed by a hard, clean edge. These forms are not intended to evoke in the spectator any recollections of specific shapes he may have encountered in some other connection. They are autonomous shapes, sufficient unto themselves as shapes.” This can be seen in Interlocking Forms (blue, lavender, white), where Benjamin uses asymmetrical and repeating forms and colors to create balance and disharmony, stasis and dynamism.