Harold Weston “The Painted Environment: Landscapes and Still Lifes”

Gerald Peters Gallery, New York

poster for Harold Weston “The Painted Environment: Landscapes and Still Lifes”

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Gerald Peters Gallery presents the upcoming exhibition, The Painted Environment: Landscapes and Still Lifes by Harold Weston. Spanning the breadth of Weston’s career with works from 1918 through 1971, the exhibition will explore the essential role that the environment played in Weston’s artistic production.

Born in Merion, Pennsylvania, in 1894, Harold Weston decided early on a career as an artist, studying art as an undergraduate at Harvard and attending Hamilton Easter Field’s Summer School of Graphic Arts in Ogunquit, Maine, where he had his first contact with modern art through works by William Zorach, Marsden Hartley, and others. Establishing his aesthetic allegiance with a strain of modernism that eschewed the urban, modernized world in favor of the natural, Weston found his inspiration in the world that surrounded him.

From his earliest forays into art, Weston painted his environment. He found sustaining inspiration in the physical world. The seemingly exotic landscapes of Mesopotamia and Persia (now Iraq and Iran) that he encountered during his service with the YMCA during World War I; the familiar yet inspiring mountains of the Adirondacks that surrounded the cabin he built in St. Hubert’s, New York, in 1920 – these were among his earliest sources. Weston continued this line of exploration as he traveled to the Pyrenees in the late 1920s and to Greece in the 1950s, delineating the landscape on canvas and paper through every stage. Finally, his focus narrowed to the microcosm of lichen, leaf, and stone that inspired his final series of landscape environments beginning in the 1960s.

But even when Weston began to broaden his subject matter, the landscape remained primary. In the 1930s he was painting intricately realized still lifes, interior scenes built of autobiographical objects that speak of his life, his family, and his home. In these, Weston did not abandon his natural surroundings but rather incorporated them – physically or stylistically, or both – into his indoor compositions. These became Weston’s “still-life environments,” as Valerie Ann Leeds has described. The landscape, which Weston continued to paint, informed them. Elements of the out-of-doors – a mimosa branch; a hawthorne clipping – became stand-ins for the world beyond his home, out of sight but not out of mind. A pillow or carpet was rendered in the same undulating, curving form that he used to delineate the mountains beyond his door, bringing the landscape inside with each brushstroke and each new composition. Weston’s interiors became landscapes in their own right, inextricably linked to the outside world in form and philosophy, allowing this “composer of nature” a new venue for his vision of the environment.

Media

Schedule

from April 01, 2019 to April 27, 2019

Artist(s)

Harold Weston

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