Harold Weston: Nature Composed

H A RO L D W E S T O N N AT U R E C O M P O S E D

H A RO L D W E S T O N N AT U R E C O M P O S E D

OCTOBER 21 - NOVEMBER 15, 2013

C O N TA C T A L E X A N D R A P O L E M I S , A S S I STA N T D I R E C TO R ( 212 ) 6 2 8 - 9 76 0 O R A P O L E M I S @ G P G A L L E RY N Y. C O M V I E W M O R E W O R K S BY T H I S A RT I ST AT G P G A L L E RY. C O M

24 EAST 78TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10075

H A RO L D W E S T O N N AT U R E C O M P O S E D In 1910 Harold Weston wrote in his diary that “if one could but seize the reality of the beauty of nature and preserve it longer – that is the object of painting.” I At only sixteen years of age, and not yet set on pursuing a career as an artist, Weston had already articulated the singular line of vision that would penetrate each phase of his career as an American modernist painter. His “condition of continual experimentation” II has sometimes made Weston, who was fiercely independent and eccentric in his art and in his intellect, an elusive figure to patrons, critics, modern-day collectors, and art historians. His drastically evolving style only rarely dovetailed neatly with the art movements that predominated during his long career and he delved intimately into a range of subject matter, exploring still lifes and figure studies, new architectural projects, and political events. Yet, with each new wave of creativity and each new phase of his career, Weston reliably returned to his original source of inspiration: the natural world.

Born in Merion, Pennsylvania, in 1894, Harold Weston spent much of his childhood exploring the vast territory that surrounded his family’s summer home in St. Huberts, New York. The wilderness of the Adirondack Mountains sparked his artistic, as well as his emotional and intellectual, creativity. Already motivated at a young age to document with paint and brush this realm, Weston decided to pursue art as a college undergraduate, first studying the fine arts at Harvard with Denman Ross, and later attending Hamilton Easter Field’s Summer School of Graphic Arts in Ogunquit, Maine, in 1914.

It was during his summer in Maine that Weston had his “first contact with modern art” III through works by artists such as William Zorach and Marsden Hartley. These kindred spirits similarly drew upon the natural world as a source for their artistic originality. Weston easily established his aesthetic allegiance with this strain of modernism, eschewing the urban, modernized world and favoring instead the natural. Soon describing himself as a “composer of nature,” Weston explained that “if I have anything vital to say I must work it out with this great and ever changing source of inspiration about me.”

IV

Indeed, this source sustained Weston’s creativity from the beginning to the end of his career. His early work, which resulted from his three years during World War I as a YMCA volunteer stationed in Mesopotamia and Persia (now Iraq and Iran, respectively), often ignored the foreign people, dress, animals, or architecture V that he encountered. Weston instead focused his efforts on documenting the light and color of the Near-Eastern landscape, so different from what he knew from home. He exclaimed of these remote vistas: “Color oh what color…such as I have never seen.” VI

4

Upon returning to the United States in 1919, Weston quickly abandoned New York City and retreated to the Adirondacks in 1920, building his studio in Keene Valley where he was eager to “stay and paint the glory of God in nature.” VII For five years Weston remained in St. Huberts, surrendering himself, with paper and brush in hand, to his natural surroundings. He absorbed the outdoors in the summer and created them anew within his studio throughout the long winters.

Late in his career, after a hiatus from the easel and now grappling with increasing physical immobility, Weston found artistic renewal in the minutia of his natural surroundings. Explaining how a person “can sense from a single fern frond, a leaf, a stone…, the quintessence of the kind of freedom a wilderness tract can convey,” VIII Weston connected to the world he could no longer access physically through the act of creating his abstracted, focused studies of stones, ice, and lichen – pieces of nature that he could bring into his studio.

Even as Weston experimented with and changed his style through the middle decades of the twentieth century, his sources remained the same: the hills of Mesopotamia, the Adirondack Mountains, or the minutia of rock, lichen, leaf, and flower that populated these natural domains. Weston articulated and re-articulated each in his ever-changing vocabulary of color, line, and form, striving for each to convey “beauty on the surface and something of the spiritual joy and emotion of earth underneath.” XI Weston’s reverence for his surroundings remained sovereign.

I II

III IV V VI VII VIII IX

Harold Weston Diary, 1910, as quoted in Valerie Ann Leeds, Harold Weston: A Retrospective (New York: Gerald Peters Gallery, 2007), p. 7.

Rebecca Foster, “Spirit of Intensity: The Life of Harold Weston,” in Rebecca Foster and Caroline M. Welsh, Wild Exuberence: Harold Weston’s Adirondack Art (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, in association with The Adirondack Museum, 2005), p. 9.

Harold Weston, “A Painter Speaks,” Magazine of Art 32 (January 1939), 18.

Harold Weston to Hamilton Easter Field, transcribed in his diary, November 25, 1920, as quoted in Rebecca Foster, p. 16.

Weston did create figure studies while in Baghdad; however, his landscapes predominate in this period.

Harold Weston Diary, September 7, 1916, as quoted in Foster, p. 14.

Foster, p. 16.

Harold Weston, Freedom in the Wilds: A Saga of the Adirondacks, 3rd edition (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), pp. 138-39.

Weston, as quoted in Henry Tyrrell, “Weston’s Persia and Adirondacks, A Roundabout Modernist,” New York World (November 12, 1922).

5

ELWAND RANGE - HAMADAN, 1918 oil on board, 5 5/8 x 8 inches

6

ELWAND RANGE - LATE SUMMER, 1918 oil on board, 5 1/2 x 7 5/8 inches

7

KERMANSHAH - CAPITOL OF KHURDISTAN, 1918 oil on board, 5 5/8 x 8 inches

8

MILITARY BRIDGE, 1918 oil on board, 5 9/13 x 8 inches

9

GOLDEN PALACE OF DARIUS, HAMADAN, 1919 oil on board, 11 x 15 inches

10

PERSIAN CARAVAN – PATH NEAR HAMADAN, 1919 oil on board, 10 7/8 x 15 inches

11

HAMADAN FROM THE MUSHALLA, 1919 oil on board, 6 x 9 3/4 inches

12

MOUND OF MUSHALLA, 1919 oil on board, 8 x 10 inches

13

ROAD TO CASPIAN, 1919 oil on board, 8 x 10 inches

14

ADIRONDACK SCENE, 1921 oil on artist board, 7 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches

15

MARCH THAW , 1921 oil on canvas, 16 x 18 inches

16

WINTER MORNING, 1921 oil on canvas, 16 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches

17

CORNFIELD, 1926 oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

18

STUDIO WINDOW , 1927 oil on canvas, 11 1/2 x 18 inches

19

ADIRONDACK VIEW, 1933 watercolor on paper , 8 1/4 x 10 3/4 inches

20

VERMONT, 1936 gouache on paper, 9 3/4 x 14 inches

21

MARCH THAW , 1941 gouache on paper, 10 x 14 inches

22

NIPPLETOP, 1941 oil on canvas, 13 x 18 inches, 16 x 21 inches framed

23

DESERT SHOWER, 1949 gouache on paper, 19 3/4 x 25 3/4 inches

24

DIX RANGE WINTER, 1949 gouache on paper, 11 3/4 x 20 inches

25

FALL LEAVES, 1949 gouache on paper, 19 3/4 x 14 inches

26

PUSSY WILLOWS, 1949 watercolor on paper, 19 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches

27

MOSS SPROUTS, CA. 1950 gouache on paper, 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches

28

LIFE OF A WAVE, 1958 gouache on paper, 19 1/4 x 25 inches

29

RHODES --TERRACES, CIRCA 1958 watercolor on paper, 9 3/4 x 14 inches

30

SEA FLOOR, 1959 gouache on paper, 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches

31

GENESIS, 1960 oil on canvas, 22 x 26 inches

32

PEBBLES, 1962 gouache on paper, 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches

33

CREAM WAVES, ca. 1965 gouache on paper, 19 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches

34

AND THE GLORY, 1967 oil on canvas, 29 1/4 x 49 1/4 inches

35

RELIC - STONE SERIES #32, 1968 gouache on paper, 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches

36

DREAM (INDIA), 1969 gouache on paper, 19 1/2 x 25 1/2 inches

37

SPRING - STONE SERIES #61, 1970 gouache on paper, 20 1/4 x 26 inches

38

GROWTH - STONE SERIES #76, 1971 gouache on paper, 26 x 20 1/4 inches

39

C O N TA C T A L E X A N D R A P O L E M I S , A S S I STA N T D I R E C TO R ( 212 ) 6 2 8 - 9 76 0 O R A P O L E M I S @ G P G A L L E RY N Y. C O M V I E W M O R E W O R K S BY T H I S A RT I ST AT G P G A L L E RY. C O M

24 EAST 78TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10075