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Born in Vienna, Austria on 10 June 1880 to Julius and Victoria Karfunkle. Karfunkle came from an artistic family, in which both his father and brother were also painters and his sister was a fashion illustrator. The family immigrated to New York in the early 1890s. Karfunkle returned to Europe and studied with Ludwig von Herterich and Antoine Bourdelle in Germany, before returning to New York and studying at the National Academy of Design, with William Glackens. In 1911, he showed at Salmagundi Club. In 1916, he held a solo exhibition at the galleries of the Berlin Photographic Company in New York, where critics stated his work had a “plastic quality” but was beautiful and had “fair color.” In 1931, he painted murals based on the poems of Omar Khayyam for the dining room of the St. Moritz. Through his participation in the Federal Art Project, which aimed to provide artists with employment during the Great Depression, he was given the commission to paint a mural on the Harlem Courthouse. The result, the Exploitation of Labor and Hoarding of Wealth, painted in 1936, is his most well-known work.