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Bernard Chaet (American, born 1924) is one of the
great American Modernist painters, known especially for his vibrant,
expressionistic landscapes, seascapes and still-life paintings. His career spans
nearly 60 years and includes a long and distinguished history of prominent
gallery and museum exhibitions. Now painting full time, he is a chaired
professor at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture and also served
for many years as chair of its Art Department.
Chaet’s paintings are known for possessing
enormous energy and artistic conviction. There is a sense of classicism in his
work that gives it a subconscious connection with the past, yet one that is
entirely free of constraint or convention. Tradition 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 her essay for the catalogue of one of Chaet’s
museum shows, art historian Isabelle Dervaux concludes, "Chaet has found the
natural expression of the abstract ideas he pursues in his art, the balance of
forms, colors, rhythms, and textures that best materialize his sensations and
emotions on the canvas." 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 innovative, visual rhythms of land, sea and sky forms
that populate his seascapes like musical notes in a score: the rocky bluffs,
sandy beaches, majestic thunderheads, foaming surf, crashing waves and rushing
water.
Lance Esplund wrote in Art in America, “His
best landscapes are reminiscent of the lyric simplicity of Constable, and in the
seascapes we sense a profound engagement with the motif that recalls his
American predecessors Dove and Marin.” Other writers have noted a concern
for structure inherited from Cezanne and Mondrian. His use of heavy line and
voluptuous forms also suggests an aesthetic kinship with Philip Guston, Marsden
Hartley and David Bates. His facility with color calls to mind the words of
Andre Gide, who in 1905 wrote of Vuillard: “He explains each color by its
neighbor and obtains from both a reciprocal response.”
This apt description of the magic that color can work in
a picture at the hands of a skillful painter applies perfectly to Chaet’s
work, which is now included in some of the most esteemed public
collections—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, the National Academy Museum
in New York, among many others.
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