Bernard Chaet: Songs of Joy (Memorial Exhibition)
Exhibition: September 6 - October 13, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 5-7pm
Gallery Hours: Mon-Fri 10-6, Sat 10-5, Sun by appt.

Santa Fe, NM — LewAllen Galleries at the Railyard is pleased to present Bernard Chaet: Songs of Joy, a memorial exhibition for the legendary painter known for his expressionistic, luminescent and robustly colored seascapes, intimately reductive interiors and figuration, and major influence on American Modernism.

Chaet died in October of last year after a distinguished career spanning more than 60 years and that included 40 years of service on the art faculty of the Yale School of Art which he headed for a number of years. Along with his colleague, the acclaimed hard-edge abstractionist and Op Art pioneer Josef Albers, Chaet is credited with having transformed Yale’s traditional art program into a modern and progressive one that gained preeminent national prominence. As a painter and teacher, Chaet exerted a vast amount of influence on countless students including celebrated artists such as Janet Fish, Chuck Close and Richard Serra to name just a few.

On view from September 6 – October 13, 2013 at its Railyard location, this exhibition will feature more than 45 years of work by this renowned master, sampling outstanding examples of his celebrated impressionistic and vibrant seascapes from the latter decades of his life, shown alongside earlier realist work of figure and interiors from the 1960s and 1970s.

Truly a “painter’s painter”, Chaet is widely respected among historians, critics and colleagues as well as having work included among leading collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, to name but a few – as well as those of innumerable private collectors.

Describing Chaet as having “one of the most respected names in American art,” the internationally prominent art historian and critic Edward Lucie-Smith also observed: “His painterly 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.” Noted painter and Yale colleague William Bailey said of Chaet: “He is one of the great figures in American art.” Also emphasizing the importance of Chaet’s artistic career with his time spent teaching at Yale, Bailey goes on to say, “The greatest teachers I’ve known have been the greatest artists, and Bernie certainly fits that.”

There is a sense of classicism in both his vibrantly expressionistic seascapes and his more structured interior portraits that suggests a profound respect for and subconscious connection with the past but which is also notably free of emulation or convention.

In his exuberant seascapes, for example, tradition and an affinity for techniques and materials of forebears such as Van Gogh, Constable, Cezanne and Marin is juxtaposed with a clear feeling for improvisation. His pictures 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.

In the earlier paintings of rooms, objects and people, with their spare line and eccentric forms, there is a distinctive manner of drawing and rigorous line that yields tableaus of intimate experience – as though the artist is allowing peeks into a domestic life about which he is delighted to share his authentic joy in the commonplace. Chaet talked about his intent to “document” rooms in his homes and his family. The more restrained and structured interior composition from this earlier period plays into the subtleties of flat color plane interactions. They offer an intriguing glimpse of a more personal Chaet, and their domestic placidity contrasts with the energetic universality of the later-period seascapes.

The figures in Chaet’s work demonstrate his attentive eye to the smallest detail in a person’s demeanor or dress and seem to remark on an individual’s connection to his interior environment. In these early room and figure paintings an affinity with the flattened form and reductive color areas associated with his friend and foremost American Modernist painter Milton Avery is evident. In comparing Chaet’s work of this period to that of Avery, Lucie-Smith noted approvingly the sense in both of “a kind of awkwardness that miraculously translates into elegance.” A sense of the simple realities of ordinary people in structured interior environments contrasts strikingly with his later more exuberant paintings of the liberated open-air world.

In his highly regarded gestural seascapes, Chaet’s eloquence of rhythmic brushstroke combines with up-swelling color harmonies to create in the seascapes a near perfect equivalence between the visual sense of his work and the physical experience of standing perched amidst a rocky shoreline. These works reflect his experience of – rather than an effort to imitate –nature. They offer a vibrant and original interpretation of Chaet’s favorite subject, Cape Ann. As Chaet observed, “The themes of light and Cape Ann’s unique rock shapes have become, it seems, my primary focus.” He called the rocks there “his friends.”

Pervading Chaet’s entire body of work is a resilient sense of enthusiasm for his subject matter and for the very delight of painting -- what one writer called Chaet’s “high spirits” – a feeling that never waned throughout his long career. Chaet expressed a sense of joy, exclaiming “Every day is a good day for painting.” Freed from any sense of simulation but rooted in a resolute dedication to close observation and a drive to bring that experience to the canvas, Chaet made work that, in the words of a former student, was “allowed to sing.” It is these extraordinary visual songs of joy that this exhibition celebrates.