THE PAINTED ENVIRONMENT: LANDSCAPES & STILL LIFES BY
HAROLD WESTON
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THE PAINTED ENVIRONMENT: LANDSCAPES & STILL LIFES BY
HAROLD WESTON April 1 - April 27, 2019
24 East 78th Street, New York, New York 10075 212 628-9760 | www.gpgallery.com
North Wind From Noonmark, 1939, oil on canvas, 30 x 28 inches 4
The Painted Environment: Landscapes and Still Lifes by Harold Weston spans the breadth of Weston’s career with works from 1918 through 1971. The exhibition explores the essential role that the environment played in Weston’s artistic production. Born in Merion, Pennsylvania, in 1894, Harold Weston decided early on a career as an artist, studying art as an undergraduate at Harvard and attending Hamilton Easter Field’s Summer School of Graphic Arts in Ogunquit, Maine, where he had his “first contact with modern art” through works by William Zorach, Marsden Hartley, and others. Establishing his aesthetic allegiance with a strain of modernism that eschewed the urban, modernized world in favor of the natural, Weston found his inspiration in the world that surrounded him. From his earliest forays into art, Weston painted his environment. He found sustaining inspiration in the physical world. The seemingly exotic landscapes of Mesopotamia and Persia (now Iraq and Iran) that he encountered during his service with the YMCA during World War I; the familiar yet inspiring mountains of the Adirondacks that surrounded the cabin he built in St. Hubert’s, New York, in 1920 – these were among his earliest sources. Weston continued this line of exploration as he traveled to the Pyrenees in the late 1920s-early 1930s and to Greece in the 1940s, delineating the landscape on canvas and paper through every stage. Finally, his focus narrowed to the microcosm of lichen, leaf, and stone that inspired his final series of landscape environments beginning in the late 1960s. But even when Weston began to broaden his subject matter, the landscape remained primary. In the 1930s he began to paint intricately realized still lifes, interior scenes built of autobiographical objects that speak of his life, his family, and his home. In these, Weston did not abandon his natural surroundings but rather incorporated them – physically or stylistically, or both – into his indoor compositions. These became Weston’s “still-life environments,” as Valerie Ann Leeds has described. The landscape, which Weston continued to paint, informed them. Elements of the out-of-doors – a mimosa branch; a hawthorne clipping – became stand-ins for the world beyond his home, out of sight but not out of mind. A pillow or carpet was rendered in the same undulating, curving form that he used to delineate the mountains beyond his door, bringing the landscape inside with each brushstroke and each new composition. Weston’s interiors became landscapes in their own right, inextricably linked to the outside world in form and philosophy, allowing this “composer of nature” a new venue for his vision of the environment.
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The Fern, ca. 1931 oil on canvas 21 1/2 x 18 1/4 inches
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Noonmark Ledges, 1940 watercolor on gray paper 12 x 9 1/4 inches Nippletop, 1941 oil on canvas 13 x 18 inches
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Persian Caravan - Path Near Hamadan, 1919 oil on board 10 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches
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Elwand Range - Hamadan, 1918 oil on board 5 5/8 x 8 inches
Golden Palace of Darius, Hamadan, 1919 oil on board 10 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches
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Gothics Mountain, Autumn, 1922 oil on canvas 16 x 18 inches 10
Winter Wilderness, 1920 oil on board 6 x 8 inches
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From Hopkins on Spread Eagle, 1932 gouache on paper 9 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches
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The Range, 1925 oil on canvas 18 x 20 inches 13
Beating Rugs, 1932 oil on canvas 28 3/4 x 19 3/8 inches 14
Studio Window, 1927 oil on canvas 11 1/2 x 18 inches
Skylight, 1931 oil on canvas 24 x 20 inche
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Vermont, 1936 gouache on paper 9 3/4 x 14 inches
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Snow on Terraced Fields, 1927 oil on canvas 24 x 15 inches 17
Still Life With Paint Brushes, 1929 oil on canvas 22 x 18 inches 18
Mimosa and Teddy Bear, 1930 oil on canvas 20 x 26 inches
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Witch Hobble, 1931 oil on canvas 24 x 18 inches 20
Ice Cubes, 1933 oil on canvas 13 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches
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Palette on Couch, 1931-2 oil on canvas 22 1/8 x 16 1/8 inches 22
Two Cats (Kitten Nursing), 1929 oil on canvas 20 x 16 inches 23
March Thaw, 1941 gouache on paper 10 x 14 inches
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Desert Shower, 1949 gouache on paper 19 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches
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Rhodes - Terraces to the Sea, ca. 1958 gouache on paper 9 3/4 x 14 inches
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And the Glory, 1967 oil on canvas 29 1/4 x 49 1/4 inches
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Cream Waves, ca. 1958 gouache on paper 19 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches
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Sea Floor, 1959 gouache on paper 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches
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Genesis, 1960 oil on canvas 22 x 26 inches 30
Fantasy of Flight, 1962 gouache on paper 25 x 19 inches 31
Relic - Stone Series #32, 1968 gouache on paper 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches 32
Growth - Stone Series #76, 1971 gouache on paper 26 x 20 1/4 inches 33
For Further Information Please Contact: Alexandra Polemis Vigil, Director (212) 628-9760 | apolemis@gpgalleryny.com
24 East 78th Street, New York, New York 10075 www.gpgallery.com