Santa Fe, NM – In a distinguished career spanning more than six decades, Bernard Chaet (1924-2012) blended an unremitting commitment to painterly craft with daring improvisational expression that fascinated other artists, attracted major collecting interest and prompted noted critic Edward Lucie-Smith to dub him “one of the most respected names in American art [whose] virtuosity and uncanny ability to turn color, texture and shape into emotional experience qualifies his canvases as worthy candidates for important collections of contemporary painting.”

Best known for his sumptuous landscapes and engaging still-lifes, Chaet’s notable facility for thick paint and technical excellence has earned him and an enduring and important place in the history of American Modernism. His celebrated expressionistic landscapes and seascapes are characterized by their highly energetic palette, variegated surface qualities, and a sustained resonance between compositional rigor and emotional vibrancy.

Bernard Chaet: Form in Nature, opens February 27 and runs through March 29, 2015. It features works newly released from the estate of this legendary painter and former head of the Yale Art School. Works both exemplary of his best known styles and some very divergent from the main part of his oeuvre are included in this exhibition. These include examples of his celebrated vibrantly impressionistic landscapes alongside more realist figurative work from the 1960s and 1970s demonstrating the wide scope of this American master.

Regardless of subject matter, Bernard Chaet’s paintings invariably evidence movement and rhythm of color on a surface as a joyful counterpoint to recognition of what is being portrayed. They are always about what is seen, how one’s eyes are used to apprehend what is there to be seen.

Uniting Chaet’s diverse types of compositions are his pictorially eloquent forms and his strong attention to line, color, tone, and mass. In all his work, Chaet always privileged form and especially the manner in which color can emphasize the mood of a time or place. There is a sense of classicism in Chaet’s work both in his abstracted and expressionistic seascapes and his more structured still-life and portrait paintings that suggest a respect and connection with the past that was also notably free of emulation or convention.

As a chair and Emertitus Professor at the Art Department of the Yale University School of Art, and author of An Artist’s Notebook(1979), and several other canonical art texts, Chaet exerted a profound influence over several generations of American artists. Featured in significant exhibitions internationally, his work is included in collections of such esteemed public institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, among numerous others.