Reception: Friday, April 2, 2010, 5:30 - 7:30pm
Santa Fe, NM—LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Bernard Chaet: Observations & Intentions. On view from April 2 through May 2, 2010, at LewAllen Galleries’ downtown venue, this monographic presentation will feature works by this renowned painter from a period spanning more than 40 years. Deriving its title from a comment on the artist’s work made by a former student of Chaet’s during his many years teaching at the Yale University School of Art, “Although it is keyed from observation, it is freed from the drudgery of simulation: it is allowed to sing,” the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s ability to distill lived experience into a foundation for paintings that evince a quiet but persistent rhythm and resonance.
In a distinguished career spanning more than six decades, Bernard Chaet has maintained a principal position among painters and educators evolving the history of American Modernism. His celebrated expressionistic landscapes, seascapes, and still-life paintings are characterized by their highly energetic palette, expertly variegated surface qualities, and a sustained resonance between compositional rigor and daring improvisation. Each of the works on exhibit in Observations & Intentions deploys the artist’s striking technical proficiency and instinctual command of art’s subtlest emotional cues to synergize and refine the key visual stratagems of Modernist aesthetics.
As a former chair and current Emeritus Professor at the Yale University School of Art, and as author of several widely utilized texts on materials and techniques, including An Artist’s Notebook (1979), The Art of Drawing (three eds., 1970-83), and Artists at Work (1960), Chaet has exerted a profound influence over several generations of American artists. His work is included in the collections of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hood Museum, Dartmouth College; Baltimore Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Art Institute of Chicago; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Yale University Art Gallery; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to having been elected as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design, New York, he is the recipient of a Jimmy Ernst Award; American Academy of Arts & Letters Award; Benjamin Altman Prize, Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize, and a Henry Ward Ranger Purchase Prize, at the National Academy; and received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts, Maryland Institute, College of Arts. Born in Boston, in 1926, he received his arts education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1942-43, 1947) and Tufts University (1947-49). The artist lives and works in New Haven, CT.