This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Bernard Chaet studied at the Boston
Museum School with Karl Zerbe from 1942 - 45. He also got a BA
degree from Tufts University in Boston and received an Honorary Degree
of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
From 1951 until retirement, he was a professor of drawing at Yale
University Art School where he won a Distingquished Teaching Award and
became a Professor Emeritus.
He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. | |
Biography from LewAllen Galleries at the Santa Fe Railyard:
|  Bernard Chaet is anAmerican Modernist painter, known especially for his
vibrant, expressionistic landscapes, seascapes and still-life
paintings. His career spans nearly 60 years and includes a long
history of 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 for some viewers gives it a subconscious connection with the
past, yet one that is entirely free of constraint or convention.
For him, 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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