Reception: March 7, 5:30-7:30

Bernard Chaet (born 1924) is one of the great American Modernist painters. In the words of noted international art historian and critic, Edward Lucie-Smith, Chaet’s is “one of the most respected names in American art.” Lucie-Smith has written: “His painterly virtuosity and uncanny ability to turn color, texture and shape into emotional experience qualifies his canvasses as worthy candidates for important collections.”

Chaet’s mostly oil-on-canvas paintings can be likened to a sort of visual jazz: riffs of loaded brushstrokes are pulled across the surface then released in lively syncopation; images are built layer upon layer with an obvious delight in the tactility of the paint. His is a vibrant talent that adeptly distills the experience of place with a quiet and uplifting verve.

A former student of Chaet’s during his many years as a member of the Yale Art School painting faculty 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 rhythms of land, sea and sky that populate Chaet’s seascapes, a number of which are included in this exhibition along with other landscapes and portraits spanning 45 years.

Chaet is professor emeritus of painting and drawing at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where he also chaired the art department for many years. He is author of several widely used texts on materials and techniques, including An Artist’s Notebook (1979), The Art of Drawing (three eds., 1970-83), and Artists at Work (1960).

Paintings from Chaet’s career of nearly 60 years are included in some of the most esteemed public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, and the National Academy Museum in New York, among many others.

Chaet’s deep knowledge of painting and drawing tradition gives his work a subliminal connection with the past, but one that is entirely free of constraint or convention. He combines tradition with a clear feeling for improvisation, much as a jazz musician uses deep understanding of music theory to improvise around a theme. (In his studio, Chaet paints while listening to American jazz performances from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.)

In Chaet’s paintings clouds are given the same materiality and solidity as the rocks through thick, painterly brushwork that unifies the whole. An energetic palette, contrast between opaque and translucent pigments, interaction of colors and the play of textures—all suggest the intensity of the Atlantic light coloring the clouds and reflecting from the surface of ocean and rocks. Chaet sometimes chooses unconventional colors for rocks and sky, and these delight and mesmerize the viewer while evoking the mood of a particular time of day and season.

Some viewers will see in the painterly vivacity of Chaet’s landscapes a reflection of the French Impressionists’ fascination with changes in color and light at different moments of the day; yet Edward Lucie-Smith, catalogue essayist for this exhibition, draws comparisons to other early French modernists—Cézanne, Van Gogh, Vlaminck and Derain—and to Americans Fairfield Porter and Milton Avery. Recalling Avery’s handling of “high-key, transparent color, juxtaposing clear hues of almost equal value to make them evocative of light,” he remarks: “The very movement of the brush [in Chaet’s paintings] seems to evoke light, to draw it up from the surface of the canvas.”

Chaet’s technical mastery of the medium is revealed in his dynamic brush stroke and brilliant compositions that seem alive with innovative, sometimes unexpected, colors and textural combinations, juxtapositions and harmonies. As Lucie-Smith has written, “It is his handling of paint that makes Chaet essentially and unmistakably a contemporary painter.”

Chaet works en plein air and in the studio and says he sees no difference now between his studio work and his work in open air. However, he recalls that when he began sketching with watercolors on the Cape Ann (Massachuetts) seashore many years ago it changed how he painted with oils: he began painting more directly with oils after he learned to work more directly with watercolors.

A fascinating aspect of this exhibition, besides the seascapes, are several early portraits of the artist’s wife and daughter—Girl in Yellow Chair (1964) and Scrabble (1964), for example—as well as selected self-portraits from a series the artist has made every year since 1943, when he was age nineteen; all are 8x10 inches in size. For someone expecting a complex motivation for these portraits, Chaet’s response is surprisingly simple. Asked why he paints them, he answers, “Because other people don’t want theirs made. So I do my own and my daughter’s and my wife’s.”

Chaet’s canvasses evoke the precept of the brilliant art historian Henri Focillon who wrote that painting technique is not a craft but rather “a whole poetry of action.” As visual poems, the pictures of Bernard Chaet can hardly be rivaled.