Bernard Chaet: Rhythm of the Shore by LewAllen Galleries

Bernard Chaet Rhythm of the Shore

March 27 - May 9, 2020

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: The Sun, 1995, oil on canvas, 32 x 38 inches

Bernard Chaet: Rhythm of the Shore Bernard Chaet is regarded as one of the great American Modernist painters, known especially for his vibrant, expressionistic landscapes. His career spanned nearly 60 years and included a long and distinguished history of prominent gallery and museum exhibitions. Chaet takes his place in art history alongside the likes of Cézanne and, like Cézanne, Chaet saw landscape as an end in itself and a subject of intense emotion. Also like Cézanne, Chaet was an extraordinary colorist. Both artists privileged in their painting, the idea of form, line and color. In pure form, as contrasted with any particular subject, Chaet—like Cézanne and like O’Keeffe also—sought to express the intense emotion that he felt from being in the presence of the land and sea. Clive Bell, the great early 20th century critic and writer on Modernism, wrote, “Behind pure form lurks the mysterious significance that thrills to ecstasy.” This principle activated Chaet’s zeal as a painter. The forms seen in his rocks, sea and clouds have their emotional resonance founded in Chaet’s constant effort to create structures and contours that would express what he felt in that moment of inspiration being present in the land. This is true as well for Chaet’s still lifes and paintings of flowers and vegetables from his wife’s garden. In the ordinariness of these simple objects and with modulation of forms, distortion of shapes, and loosened contours, Chaet was able to extract a sense of the poetic, even the sublime. Chaet exemplified the impulse to depart from the merely familiar in order to convey a deeply felt reaction to his personal experience of nature. His reconfigurations of landscape manifested in spatially distorted forms reflect his search for that ecstatic thrill lurking behind them. Chaet was an artist who clearly delights in the tactile qualities of oil paint; his ability to capture the brilliant gradations in color and light at various times of day and year recalls the work of another of his icons, Marsden Hartley. His paintings are beautifully composed, brilliantly crafted compositions that make unusually skillful use of color and the properties of paint. His landscapes, seascapes, and still-lifes possess enormous energy and artistic conviction, combining a sense of tradition juxtaposed with a clear feeling for experimentation and innovation. He does not hesitate to explore fully the possibilities of spatial and formal distortions with riffs of loaded brushstrokes pulled across the surface then released to meld into the next block of pigment with a lively sense of improvisation. 2

One of his former students at Yale, Frank Moore, wrote of his work: “Although it is keyed from observation, it is freed from the drudgery of simulation: it is allowed to sing.” Nowhere is the joy of song more evident than in the fascinating juxtaposition of forms and shapes taken in endless variations from land, sea and sky that divide the plane of the picture like musical notes in a score, yielding innovative visual rhythms and beats to introduce new ways of seeing these rocky bluffs, sandy beaches, majestic thunderheads, foaming surf, crashing waves and rushing water. The visual treats his canvases yield up include unconventional colors for rocks or sky but ones that delight and mesmerize. Kenneth R. Marvel

“Bernard Chaet’s work is filled with that sense of delight at painting’s possibilities. Everything comes together in the seascape paintings and with an explosive energy that seems to borrow from the waves themselves. The light is extreme and calls for extreme responses. He flies free of predictable norms of tonality or graphic continuity. Descriptions can’t do justice to the way rocks are jumbled in chaos or the way their mass is shattered by the sunset’s trumpet notes. Every anticipated connection is put in jeopardy, held only by extraordinary breaks, discords, syncopations of handling and color, anti-tonalities—improvisations that weave their way across the whole canvas and bring one back just in time to the underlying theme, familiar but now transformed. His paintings are triumphant.” – Andrew Forge, Art Critic (1998)

“Bernard Chaet has one of the most respected names in American art. His painterly virtuosity and uncanny ability to turn color, texture and shape into emotional experience qualifies his canvasses as worthy candidates for important collections of contemporary painting. His prodigious influence on the world of art comes in many forms. The most important is, of course, his extraordinary pictures. But also, as a distinguished professor of painting at the Yale 3

School of Art—and for some years its head—he taught many of the people who have gone on to become some of the most recognizable and accomplished names in modern art, such as Chuck Close, Janet Fish, and Audrey Flack, to name only a few…. It is his handling of paint that makes Chaet essentially and unmistakably a contemporary painter…. One of the striking things about the Post-Modern epoch has been the gradual withdrawal from abstraction. It still exists, but is only one of a number of competing stylistic possibilities, no longer even primus inter pares (first among equals). Abstraction did one important thing, however—it taught spectators to look at the movement and rhythm of color on a surface, as a pleasure possibly quite separate from a simple recognition of what was being portrayed. Chaet’s paintings offer this pleasure full force, and in its purest form. …Basically they are about the business of sight, and about how we use our eyes to apprehend what the world has to offer us.” Edward Lucie-Smith, Art Critic and Curator (2008)

“Chaet’s oil-on-canvas paintings are a sort of visual jazz. Loaded brushstrokes are pulled across the surface and then released in a lively syncopation. Images are built layer by layer with an obvious delight in the tactile qualities of the paint itself…. “Chaet’s deep knowledge of painting and drawing gives his work a connection with the past, but also frees it from constraint or convention. He combines tradition with improvisation, and it is no coincidence that in the studio he paints to the accompaniment of classic jazz.” Kate McGraw, The Journal Santa Fe (2008)

“Chaet’s still lifes defy conventionally inert associations. His dynamic brush strokes dance across the surfaces, breathing life and vitality into a vase of flowers or a passing cloud. Each background plays a role as central to the painting as its apparent subject. His colors intermingle and meld into one another; shadows are vibrant and intriguing. 4

His seascapes utilize fantastical colors, far from those found in rocks or sky, but seem natural and at home. Each painting embodies the artist’s energy. His sunsets do not sink lazily below the horizon but retreat with an explosion of color that ricochets between land and sky. Despite such dynamism, Chaet’s harmony of color and composition results in inviting serenity. These works are not loud; they are simply alive.” Lisa Amato, Art New England (2002)

“The recent work of Bernard Chaet tells us that the art of painting is alive and well … He paints the landscape of Gloucester and Cape Ann, as artists before him have for 200 years….He paints en plein air, discovering in the landscape new sensations that activate what he has called “the preferred structures, configurations, and patters” that reside in his painterly memory, developed from long experience…The intensity of these paintings, their rhythmic force, points to his roots in a long tradition of expressionism that we can trace to van Gogh, Soutine, and Beckmann, and closer to home, to Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Milton Avery, and his old teacher in Boston, Karl Zerbe.” William C Agee, Professor of Art History, Hunter College (1999)

Folly Cove Low Tide, 2002, oil on canvas, 36 x 42 inches

The Orchard, 1961, oil on canvas, 48 x 40 inches

Yellow Morning, 1996-99, oil on canvas, 32 x 42 inches

Folly Cove, 1989, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches

Green Cloud, 2005-06, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 inches

Lowland, 2002, oil on canvas, 10 x 20 inches

Basin, 1994, oil on canvas, 24.25 x 26 inches

Island, 2010, oil on canvas, 26 x 40 inches

AM, 2003-08, oil on canvas, 26 x 49 inches

September Gray, 1990-1998, oil on canvas, 22 x 54 inches

Morning Waves, 2010, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 inches

Provincetown, 2008, oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches

Cape Ann Toolworks, 1990, oil on canvas, 15 x 29.75 inches

May, Green Dawn, 1982-83, oil on canvas, 36 x 50 inches

Bass Rocks, White Sky, 1997, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

September Storm, 1984-2001, oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches 22

Small Island, 2008, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches 23

Swirl, 2006, oil on canvas, 36 x 47.5 inches

Untitled (Tree), 1975-76, oil on canvas, 40 x 44 inches

Swirl, 1998-2000, oil on canvas, 33 x 37 inches

The Pool, 2002-04, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 in

White Light, 2002, oil on canvas, 34 x 46 inches

White Dawn, 2006, oil on canvas, 30 x 42 inches

Rocky Shore, 2006, oil on canvas, 32 x 32 inches

Rising, 1984-2003, oil on canvas, 36 x 62 inches

Light of Gray, 1991, oil on canvas, 27 x 67 inches

Blue Sun II, 2003-04, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Red Echo, 1977, oil on canvas, 36 x 42 inches

Purple Hat, 1992, oil on canvas, 14 x 10 inches

2 Bathers, 1990, oil on canvas, 22 x 28 inches

3 Bathers, 1988, oil on canvas, 14 x 8 inches 37

Bather, 1968, oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches

Bather II, 2004-05, oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches

Beach Party, 2006, oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches

Untitled (Bathers), 1989, oil on canvas, 16 x 21 inches

Bernard Chaet

(1924-2012)

Education

1978

Marilyn Pearl Gallery, New York, NY, traveling to The

1942-47 School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA; Hermitage

1942-47 Tufts University, Medford, MA

Foundation Museum, Lockhaven, VA; Weatherspoon Art

Gallery; University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC

Selected Solo Exhibitions

1975

Forum Gallery, New York, NY

2020