o v sailing to byzantium e the art of a t tony vevers...

COVERFEATURE

Sailing to Byzantiumthe art of

TONY VEVERSBY TOWNSEND LUDINGTON

ABOVE: HOUND VOICE, 1961, OIL ON CANVAS, 50 BY 70 INCHES; TOP RIGHT: TONY VEVERS AT LONG POINT GALLERY, PROVINCETOWN, C.1993

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2006 PROV I NC ETOWN ARTS 37

That is no country for old men. The youngIn one another’s arms, birds in the trees—Those dying generations—at their song,The salmon-falls, the mackerel crowded seas,Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer longWhatever is begotten, born, and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unaging intellect. . . .

Once out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths makeOf hammered gold and gold enamellingTo keep a drowsy Emperor awake;Or set upon a golden bough to singTo lords and ladies of ByzantiumOf what is past, or passing, or to come.

From W. B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” 1

In my family, art was our religion—a way tomake sense of the everyday and arrive at a deeperunderstanding of life. If I learned about the worldthrough countless museum visits with my parents,I learned about my father through his work. Forme, his paintings spoke volumes: living with them,I was able to see life through his eyes.

My parents moved from New York to Province-town shortly before I was born, and the joy of anature-boy reconnecting with country life is evidentin many of Tony’s paintings from the period. Hiswork celebrates the exuberant beauty of the Cape inhazy forms reduced to an essential simplicity, andone is tempted to compare it with that of MiltonAvery. But for me there is always the undercurrentof a darker mystery, a bit of Edvard Munch lurking

in the shadows, as though we can only know joy byunderstanding its opposite.

One of my earliest memories is of a whalestranding in Provincetown—its looming bodyclaiming the beach as its own. I remember theblank stare of its enormous eye, motionless, yetalive. My father immortalized this event in Whaleon the Beach, painted in 1960. In the painting,it is he who reaches out to comfort the whale as mymother turns to look at him. In contrast to thesomber browns and grays of the winter landscapeand winter clothing, my sister and I are painted inbright pink and blue, toddlers at the start of ourlives. Life and death juxtaposed, distilled into thecomplex beauty we call art.

—TABITHA VEVERS

WHALE ON THE BEACH, 1960, OIL ON CANVAS, 36 BY 44 INCHES COLLECTION OF TABITHA VEVERS AND DANIEL RANALLI


TONY VEVERS’S paintings and construc-tions, like the poems of W. B. Yeats,whom he admires immensely, mayhave touches of ageless intellect, butfar more they are about “the young in

one another’s arms,” birds, salmon-falls, mackerel-crowded seas, fish, flesh, or fowl—“whatever isbegotten, born, and dies.” Vevers’s works are fromnature, and he has used the “hammered gold andgold enamelling” of his intellect and imaginationto render “what is past, or passing, or to come.”

______

“Vevers Is at Heart of Cape Art History,” declaresthe headline of an essay about Tony Vevers thatappeared in the Boston Sunday Globe in June 2000.The reporter, Carol Dumas, was writing aboutVevers’s fifty-year retrospective exhibition at theProvincetown Art Association and Museum(PAAM), but her article is as much about the artistas about his art. Dumas noted that this was anartist who had not only painted for decades buthad also “written essays and lectured on othermembers of this renowned summer artists’colony.” She quoted Robyn Watson, then thedirector of PAAM, who said that Vevers “is thekeeper of the history of Provincetown art, both forhis generation and the period after World War II.There are artists who can exist outside of art history, but Tony has existed in the middle of it.”2

Vevers might well be called the dean of Province-town art, or, if not that, then its primary chroni-cler. And he continues to be at its center, currentlywriting its history. As Jeanne Bultman, a longtimeresident of Provincetown and wife of the LongPoint Gallery artist Fritz Bultman, succinctly put it,“Tony was always there, but he was always doinghis own thing.” In the essay “Hans Hofmann inProvincetown,” the curator and critic KatharineKuh included Vevers among an “impressively var-ied” group of artists who had studied with Hof-mann, noting that “their work adhered to nooverall or rigid patterns but represents strong idio-syncratic personalities.”3 He is, it seems, a man forall seasons of the arts as a painter, a critic, a histo-rian, a teacher, and a friend.

Tworkov praised Vevers’s “evocative use offound objects” and added that his abstractionsand representational work were “unique in qualityand character.” Together, Tworkov declared, they“make a beautiful visual biography.”4

Indeed they do. From early on Vevers knewwhere he was going and why. “Dear Daddy,” hewrote at age seventeen from the Hotchkiss Schoolin Lakeville, Connecticut, to his father in England,“I have been doing a lot of painting lately—mostlylandscapes—and it is my main interest—& at themoment painting is the one thing I would like to doin later life.”5 That was in 1943; in 1947 Hotchkissheld an exhibition of his work, about which theschool’s art instructor, Thomas Blagden, wrote,“There is unusual sensitivity and depth of feelingabout these pictures. The painter makes no con-cessions to public taste; he indulges in no clichés of thought or style; he is neither insipid nor sent-imental nor bombastic.” Vevers, Blagden recalled,

First and foremost, he is a fine artist, march-ing to his own drummer; “a knowledgeable, won-derful human being” is how his fellow artist PaulResika described him, while noting that his earlycompositions have an “Edouard Vuillard–likepoetry” about them. Wolf Kahn, whose colorsare as vivid as any in the contemporary art world,understood those personal qualities about Veversand has admired his “restraint and understate-ment,” as did Jack Tworkov, who wrote to hisfriend in 1980:

You know that I don’t have too much respectfor the art world the way it deals with namesand reputations. . . . I know few artists whobring so much imagination, integrity, and pro-bity to their work [as you do]. Your work growsall the time in the delicacy of your composi-tions, in the unforced and balanced use of themedium, in achieving a kind of justness, inavoiding the flamboyant.

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been both an appreciation of the qualities of thenatural world and an awareness of humanity’sinexorable ties to it. In England, during the winterof 1939–40, he recalled,

I was moved by a sort of frost that just coverseverything with a shimmering, crystalline kindof light. You don’t get it [in America] veryoften. In England we have this very heavy sortof precipitation, a heavy dew which makes ahoar frost. It freezes and everything is coveredwith frost. And I remember as a child going outand seeing a spider’s web and all the littleshrubs and weeds and so on covered with thisfrost. It was all very impressive and . . . youknow, you get enraptured by nature.7

Later in the same interview he spoke about“the experience you have feeling nature . . . likehaving an instantaneous reaction just likeWordsworth” (whose heart leapt up when hebeheld a rainbow, or when wandering “lonely as acloud” he saw “a crowd, a host, of golden daf-fodils”). Like the poet, Vevers recognized thatthese moments continued to affect him, that “TheChild is father of the Man.” He also understoodthat, for him, at least, the English landscape was“too much of a poet’s country for a painter, socultivated . . . too worked over.” But when hearrived in America, he recalled, he felt immediately“very much rapport with the countryside, whichseemed new and different.”

His descriptions of these early experiencesreveal a great deal about his work. Nature andpeople are central to it, but his love of the naturalworld does not mean that he has romanticized it.


“simply took up brushes and paints, and becamean artist.” Until his graduation, he painted at a furi-ous pace: “His room was a clutter of tubes,palettes, brushes, sketches, and canvasses. For onevery fine picture he mixed his paints with an oilyhair tonic because he refused to be interrupted bygoing to the studio for linseed oil.”6 (Years later hegave Hotchkiss the painting Ah, Winter!, which Mil-ton Avery had chosen to be included in an exhibi-tion of young painters selected by older artists atthe National Arts Club in New York.)

Blagden was particularly impressed by thelandscapes in that early exhibition, and to this

day Vevers thinks ofhimself as a landscapepainter. In an interviewi n 1 9 6 5 f o r t h eArchives of AmericanArt at the SmithsonianInstitution, he remarked about things that hadhappened to him as a child, things that led him tobe an artist. He recalled “Wordsworthian experi-ences”—moments, that is, when the observer hassome sort of epiphany about nature, when somescene makes him or her comprehend somethingbeyond the visual. For Vevers that seems to have

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURE, 1958, OIL ON CANVAS, 36.875 BY 34 INCHES

MOON DOG, 1961, OIL ON CANVAS, 49.875 BY 37.875 INCHES

CRANBERRY MARSH, 1956, OIL ON CANVAS, 26 BY 34 INCHES

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Nature and man can have a benign relationship,as in North Haven Celebration III; it can also be ableak one, as shown in the frigid, faceless figuresat a Funeral at Truro, which portrays the funeral ofJan Müller, a leader of the Sun Gallery group inProvincetown. In Winter Self-Portrait the lone figureof the artist in a winter mood recalls WallaceStevens’s last lines from “The Snow Man”: “the lis-tener . . . nothing himself, beholds / Nothing thatis not there and the nothing that is.” One must becareful about generalizing: Winter Self-Portrait mayseem bleak. But it also expresses a sense of releasethat the artist felt, free of the necessary work atconstruction and carpentry jobs during the sum-mer months in Provincetown to make ends meet.Certainly Ah, Winter! conveys an exuberance; forVevers’s fellow artist Varujan Boghosian it is mar-velous in its directness and simplicity, with awarmth that is frequently lacking in the Pop Art ofsome of their contemporaries. The relationshipcan be as harsh as the raw pain of a leopard claw-ing the back of the naked, struggling artist in Manand Leopard, which one critic called “a nightmarishvision with psychologically haptic powers,” andabout which Vevers recalled, “I had a job doingheavy construction work and hadn’t been able toget into the studio. I was frustrated.”8

The “shimmering, crystalline kind of light” hementioned in his letter explains in part what hesought in such works as Across the Dunes and Cran-berry Marsh, both of which were painted in 1956,the year he and his wife, Elspeth Halvorsen, firstlived in Provincetown. Not that all of his work hasbeen shimmering and crystalline: during the sameperiod he painted what he called his “winterpaintings” in the 1965 interview for the Archivesof American Art. But the brighter ones—and hisworks generally—use paints and canvas in a par-ticular way. Dorothy Gees Seckler, the interviewer,commented that she thought some of his mostrecent works “were very thinly painted. Of course,that was one way you moved against abstractexpressionism I guess.” He acknowledged that,and she continued, “And color just sort of getsinto the surface of the canvas, almost like it’sstaining it.” To this he replied, “Well, I don’t usemuch white, so in order to get the luminosity Ihave to use the white of the canvas’ ground. So Iwon’t say I stain—I paint very thinly and let theluminosity of the canvas come through and givethe canvas light that way.” We see this effect inWinter Dunes, where thinly applied paint allowsthe canvas’s white ground to come through tosuffuse the colors, and the soft edges of eachcolor bring a unity to the scene.9 The luminosityand unity are what, as a child, Vevers came tosense about the world of nature and mankind,when it was not simply oppressive. His land-scapes are never literal; they are his imaginativeresponses to what he saw.

If he needed to learn about the darkest side ofhuman nature, he did during the last days ofWorld War II, when in 1945 and much of 1946,he served in the U.S. Army of Occupation in Ger-many. There he saw the massive destruction ofthe cities, the eerie horror of headless cadaverspiled in the basement of what had apparentlybeen a medical school, and the desperation of

displaced people being forced back into the Sovi-et Union. Before being sent back to the UnitedStates, he visited his father in England and spentsome days in Paris. Back in the States, he was dis-charged in October 1946 and matriculated atYale University, where he majored in painting anddrawing at the Yale School of Art. He also studiedart history and English literature, which had a sig-nificant effect on what he would later paint. Eachsummer he traveled widely in America and inEurope, where he returned soon after graduatingfrom Yale in 1950. He headed for Italy, where, inhis own words,

I spent two busy and fruitful years, attendingthe Academy of Fine Art [in Florence] andtraveling to museums and sights in Europe.Came back to U.S. in 1952, settling in NYC—in time to participate in the abstract expres-sionist movement; studied briefly at HansHofmann’s School of Art on 8th St. in the Vil-lage. I later managed to acquire a loft/studioin the lower east side, on Delancey Street(nothing fancy!). On a painting trip to Maine

[in 1953] I had the good fortune to meet myfuture wife, Elspeth, also an artist. She madea home for us out of my shabby studio, andwe lived and worked there until the birth ofour first daughter, Stephanie [in 1955], whenwe had the offer of a house by the water inProvincetown. . . . After a winter there we’dfallen in love with the town and the Cape. Bythis time we were living rather hand-to-mouth, helped by occasional sales of art-work.10

While living in New York, Vevers and his wifewere among the young artists who gathered atthe Cedar Bar and art openings as the AbstractExpressionist movement grew to dominate theAmerican art scene. “There was a large group offollowers for whom the Abstract Expressionistmovement was everything: disciples of Hans Hof-mann and Clyfford Still; developing painters whofound in the freedom of the style a way of dealingwith their lack of preparation,” Vevers wrote in aperceptive piece entitled “The Idea of an AvantGarde in the Late ’50s.” He noted that:

Sometime in the early spring of 1958, Istretched canvas on a large (44” x 66”) stretcherthat I had been saving for a special occasion. Upuntil that time, the largest painting I’d done inProvincetown had been in the 30” x 40” range. Ilaid out five figures against a Cape-end landscapeof dunes, sea, and sky. The figures, all nude, weretwo couples in the foreground with a female figurecoming out of the water to the rear of the other figures. The closest pair on the right was a malereaching to embrace a woman who turned asthough having her own agenda—my wife andmyself. Across from them on the left was a youngercouple with the blonde woman walking past hercompanion with a dismissive gesture. A seagull fliesinto the scene—just over their heads.

The five figures were in the picture, when I sud-denly felt the need to include a mysterious, dark formbehind the left-hand couple. Casting a dark shadowon the ground behind them, the figure is basically a

presence, heeded more by the onlooker than by thepeople in the painting. As I finished work on the picture, I was aware that it was conceivably autobio-graphical, for the male figures looked like me, but Ieluded further analysis by calling the painting, Alle-gory. It was a cop-out that succeeded for some time,for no one asked me for the meaning of the images.

Later in that 1958 summer, Yvonne Andersonand Red Grooms came by, and chose Allegory fora solo show of my new work that they were planningfor the Sun Gallery in Provincetown. A couple ofyears later, Mrs. X, an enthusiastic Boston collector,picked out Allegory from my studio for her collec-tion. By then I had heard from a friend that thepersonage I had visualized as the blonde womanwalking dismissively out of the picture had died ofcancer at about the time I’d made the painting.Suddenly, I realized that I had, in fact, producednot an allegory, but a fragment of autobiography.

—TONY VEVERS

ALLEGORY, 1958, OIL ON CANVAS, 44 BY 66 INCHES PRIVATE COLLECTION

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This was hailed as the beginning of thedemise of Life Drawing as the basis of anartist’s education—now made painfully evi-dent in the figurative expressionism of the1980s. And there was the new-found artworld of New York: critics, collectors, editorsand a new public reveling in the formation ofan American School—echoing the expansionof American power everywhere.

Vevers recalled that on Easter Sunday in 1955he had made a painting of a nude woman, which,innocuous though it was, had “made me theunknowing member of a stylistic underground—an avant-garde minority of young artists.” He hadbeen working at landscape abstractions—Lungar-no is a good example—so he hesitated to showpeople his painting of the nude, but he “contin-ued to use the figure more and more from thistime on—letting go of abstraction and the Expres-sionist veneer that I had assumed while in NewYork.” That fall he and his family stayed for thewinter in Provincetown. This led the followingsummer to both Vevers showing at the SunGallery, which had opened in Provincetown theprevious year and whose owners were interestedin contemporary figurative art. He explained theconfluence of impulses that had drawn theexhibitors at the Sun Gallery to figuration:

Partly a youthful rebellion against AbstractExpressionism; partly due perhaps to ourimmersion in World War II, which gave us asense of the importance of the individual afterso many years of group-think. Again, many ofus were married, in a time when Levittown wasa post-war Shangri-la—a Cosmopolitan maga-zine dream of matrimonial conformity that wefledging bohemians could not contemplate.Finally, while we admired the painterlyachievements of Pollock, de Kooning and the

rest, we did not want to put on the mantle ofan art developed—through their struggle—bythese older heroes. Personally, I admired Mil-ton Avery whose Yankee individuality shonethroughout his career, and of course I wasenchanted by his use of color.

In Provincetown and the SunGallery, Vevers had found his artistichome, the place where he might be asfree as he wished from the overween-ing force of the New York scene. “Inthe long run we of the Sun were per-haps not a true avant-garde, givingbirth to a new vision as the Impres-sionists, Cubists, and Abstract Expres-sionists had done,” he declared. “Weperhaps were more like the little boyand the Emperor’s new clothes, inresisting the status quo, and in pursu-ing a personal vision and our own per-sonality. In this we were inspired byLester Johnson and Jan Müller, whowere leading the move to figuration atthe Sun.”

Such pursuits are what creativepeople do. At any moment in thearts, there are what Vevers termed“convergences,” instances when cer-tain ideas and styles are in the air,but this is not the same thing assome sort of slavish copying. Headmired the works of Milton Averyand Stephen Pace, for example, buthe did not set out to emulate theirwork. What those two artists offeredwas a “total commitment to art,uncompromising,” and on their ownterms. “Actually,” Vevers has assert-ed, “the artist who was most on mymind in those early years was Edvard

Munch whose brooding figures in moody land-scapes grabbed my attention.” When he beganpainting figuratively, by 1958, he found remarksthat his work was obviously influenced by Averyto be irritating. Such comments struck him asshowing an ignorance of what he and Avery weredoing: the latter was “mainly using his family and

NORTH HAVEN CELEBRATION I AND II, 1966, OIL ON CANVAS, 45.5 BY 62.5 INCHES NORTH HAVEN CELEBRATION III, 1966, OIL ON CANVAS,45.5 BY 29.25 INCHES

GULL/COUPLE, 1968, MIXED MEDIA, 32.125 BY 20 INCHES

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Vevers’s early paintings had always been abouthis personal reactions to what he saw and felt. Inthe first half of the 1960s they began to takeanother turn, at least partly because the Veversfamily set off in a new direction, leaving Province-

close friends as models.” Vevers was using “fig-ures in scenes that were imaginary—or that werederived from poetry.” The real link between thetwo artists was that they both were using figureswhen abstraction was the rage.11

His major painting Hound Voice is an excellentsummary. The title is that of a Yeats poem, inwhich the last stanza reads:

Some day we shall get up before the dawnAnd find our ancient hounds before the door,And wide awake know that the hunt is on;Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once

more,Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,And chants of victory amid the encircling

hounds.12

The painting, like the poem, is a rendering of animage “that waken[s] in the blood” the “slumber-bound” people whose passivity Yeats decried.Some, half reawakened to the world around them,“proclaim their hidden name—‘Hound Voice.’”The image in both the poem and the painting is ofa moment when these people had risen—as Yeatsand others had in the Irish Rebellion of 1916—inthe “hour of terror [that] comes to test the soul.”Hemmed in by the bleakness Winter Self-Portraitconveys and by the angst expressed in Man andLeopard, and perhaps as well in Landscape with Figure,in Hound Voice Vevers affirms that the hunt is stillon, although both the poet and the painter may beambivalent about the “blood-dark track” that pre-ceded the “chants of victory amid the encirclinghounds” during that moment on the shore. Twen-ty-five years later, in response to his daughterTabitha’s comment that his figures “seem moreinvolved with mythology or fantasy—perhapsbecause they were all nudes,” he observed that he“was very involved with the idea of a personalmythology—which is why I did so many things thatcame out of Yeats’s poems.” As his daughternoted, the nearly faceless figures are “not so muchportraits of individuals, but portraits of humanfeelings.”13 Hound Voice was painted in a flat, classi-cal style. Its order and balance convey the timeless-ness of what the scene symbolizes, rather like JohnKeats’s Grecian urn, upon which a scene is frozenin time and shall remain “in midst of other woethan ours” for others to contemplate.

If Vevers’s paintings from the late 1950s andearly ’60s are sometimes about large themes, theycan also catch quick, intimate moments, as inMoon Dog, also painted in 1961, in which a livelydog gambols wildly on a Provincetown beach. Butthe work is not about coldness and bleakness;rather, it celebrates the animal and the intensecolor and beauty of a scene in which a full moonplays against vivid swatches of the blue ocean andthe whiteness of breakers that pile onto the shore.No other painting of his better captures Vevers’sappreciation of the natural world. The same cele-bration occurs in Gull and Ice Floes, where the fluidshape of the soaring bird is set in the blue skyabove the deeper blue of the ocean and contrastswith the sharp angles of the ice to remind us thatwinter is not just bleak and frigid; there is life aswell amid nature’s stark, angular beauty.

town during the winters. Vevers taught paintingand drawing, first at the University of North Car-olina at Greensboro in 1963–64, and subse-quently at Purdue University in Indiana, where, inaddition to studio art, he taught art history. Hehad always been impressed by Italian Renaissancepaintings such as Giorgione’s La Tempesta, whichVevers has called the first modern painting, partlybecause of its personal quality; Giorgione wentbeyond the formulaic. As Vevers broke away fromAbstract Expressionism, he knew that what hewanted to paint were works that came “out of myown personal involvement with life,” as heexplained in his interview for the Archives of Amer-ican Art. Seeing the narrative paintings of the pre-Renaissance artists, which often encompassedseveral subjects or images and frequently usedmore than one panel, he knew that something ofthe same technique would achieve his goal.

The result was a new direction in his work, asseen in paintings such as Transition and GreensboroMorning, which tell of his family’s move fromProvincetown to North Carolina. Transition, agrouping of painted images delineated as if on sep-arate panels, reflects the change from the starklandscape of the left panel and the winter mood ofthe lower one in the middle, to the gentler,enclosed ground of the panel on the right, all of

When his friend Jan Müller died in January1958, Vevers made six or eight studies for the elegiac painting Funeral at Truro, which was even-tually purchased by Joseph Hirshhorn. Vevers hadseen young people die in the army, but didn’t expectartists to die young. Müller had come to the UnitedStates to study with Hofmann, with whom he couldspeak in their native German. Müller had a heartailment and was fitted with a plastic valve thataudibly thumped in his chest; the valve gave out, ashis doctors warned it would if he continued to paint.

Funeral at Truro exemplifies Vevers’s classicidiom: elongated f igures with obscured,Rothkoesque edges. Faces are without features.There are a dozen mourners with their headsbowed, shrouded in black while standing in pristine

white snow. Vevers was present at the Trurocemetery, but he does not depict himself. Instead, hetakes the same point of view as the viewer. The tallbearded fellow on the right is recognizably Paul Resika. At the time, Vevers did not know Resika, butyears later Resika mentioned that he had been at thefuneral. Next to the minister on the far right is theartist’s widow, Dody Müller, bending to place aflower on the grave. Al Leslie was also at the cere-mony, Vevers remembers. At the conclusion, just asthe minister finished reading his lines, sun brokethrough the clouds. That was the “magic moment”that Vevers tried to capture on canvas. Later they allwent to Myron Stout’s place on Brewster Street inProvincetown for drinks and consolation.

—CHRISTOPHER BUSA

FUNERAL AT TRURO, 1958, OIL ON CANVAS, 28.25 BY 36.125 INCHES

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TONY VEVERS IN FRONT OF HIS PAINTING LUNGARNO (1952)IN HIS DELANCEY STREET STUDIO, NEW YORK CITY, 1952

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them related to and held together by the femalenude seen through a window. Small, domesticmatters? Certainly, but ultimately the paintings areabout humanity’s relation to the world, and aboutthe changes that happen to us all. Our lives aremade up of such matters: a family’s move to a newlocation; summer visits to places like Maine (NorthHaven Celebration I and II and North Haven CelebrationIII); winters in Indiana (Chauncey Street); a late snowmelting as the first vestiges of spring appear (LastSnow Indiana); or the lovemaking in Gull Couple,

where the sway ofthe naked couple’sbodies as they makelove indoors is unit-ed with the panelabove through boththe graceful shapeof the flying gull and the undulatingcoastline—thingsare one, the paint-ing is saying.

The quotidian is interrupted onoccasion by some-thing as momen-tous as a moonshot , an event Vevers marked with a painting, MoonShot, in which theleft-hand panelshows a broad

band of white that is the path of a powerful rocketto the moon, while the right-hand panel is a “shotof the moon,” the real thing, shining down on anighttime setting of woods, a lake, greenery, smallstones, and even two small animals and a bird inthe foreground, partly caught in the reflection ofthe moon on the lake. Both panels are “moonshots”; the artist’s wry observation sets technologyagainst the world of nature.

That world is what connects all his art, fromabstractions to figurations to collages made from

found objects—“three dimensional wall-hung col-lages,” the critic Ann Wilson Lloyd has termedthem—as well as to highly personal representa-tions such as the Italian works Italia I and Italia II,inspired by a semester’s leave from Purdue toteach in Cortona, Italy; the New Mexico paintingsSan Cristobal Window and Imaginary Landscape NewMexico, emerging from winter visits to Santa Fe,San Cristobal, and Taos; and finally the collagesthat also draw on his many experiences (Province-town/Taos and Aphorism Series III).14

Vevers at least partly explained these substantialshifts in the forms of his art in a 1995 catalogue foran exhibition at the Long Point Gallery in Province-town. “While abstraction is vital for its ability toshow ideas and images that could not be expressedotherwise,” he wrote, “I like the polarities that havebeen present since the birth of abstraction withMondrian and Kandinsky—the dualities of formand content that each of the two pioneers sug-gested in their visions of this new art.”15

The collages, a radical change for him, werebegun in Mexico in 1972 when, intending to doa photographic essay of some sort, Vevers hadhis camera jam the first day. Anxious to workand much taken with the landscape, “which wasin direct contrast to the lush, carefully laid-outrectangles of the mid-west,” he decided to cre-ate directly from the land, “to make a landscapeout of its own materials, to literally use earthpigments.”16 He told his daughter later that theresulting sand pieces, Chute is a good example,came “out of the 20th century trend towardviewing the work of art as an object . . . my workintends an anonymous handling.” He had beenimpressed by one of Henry Moore’s stone fig-ures “which seemed to have been formed by nat-ural means. You just didn’t see the hand of theartist or the interposition of his ego.”17

Works such as Chute evolved from earlier sand-paintings to include found objects. They are Min-imalist, at first glance revealing little or nothing ofthe artist’s hand; yet if the viewer is responsive, heor she soon “feels” the work that comes out ofthe world that is always Vevers’s subject. “His col-lages of sand and found objects do some subtlework on you, like strains of haunting music,” theastute critic Ann Wilson Lloyd observed, adding:

The background of sand, in earthy neutraltones, paradoxically provides a sea of buoy-ancy for his found objects, a sea with tex-tures that are visually soft and soothing, yetintellectually abrasive. The sand, he says,provides “a plane that isn’t flat, that’s differ-ent from a painted plant. It has some sort ofsubstance to it.”18

An example of his work in this style is Buoy III:what may at first seem to be merely an accretionof objects and materials—Styrofoam, rope, sand,and acrylic on canvas—draws the viewer in by itsform and somewhat muted colors, the blue of theocean, the browns of the shore; and set uponthem are the ropes and a buoy that remind one ofthe ships that fill Provincetown harbor. Anotherlevel of interpretation for this piece is what Veverswrote in the 1995 catalogue to accompany illus-trations of three Buoy collages:

ITALIA I, 1984, MIXED MEDIA, 17.375 BY 21.175 INCHES

PROVINCETOWN/TAOS, 1992, MIXED MEDIA, 44.75 BY 42.75 INCHES

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1 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1956),191–92.2 Carol K. Dumas, “Vevers Is at Heart of Cape Art History,”Boston Sunday Globe, June 18, 2000, C3.3 Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art, ed. AvisBerman (New York: Arcade, 2006), 258.4 The remarks of Jeanne Bultman, Paul Resika, and WolfKahn are from interviews with the author. Jack Tworkov, let-ter to Vevers, August 20, 1980, Provincetown.5 Vevers, letter to his father, January 24, 1943.6 Thomas Blagden, “Corridor Exhibit Shows Alumnus’ ArtWorks; Sketches, Water Colors and Oils in Display,” HotchkissRecord, May 8, 1947, 1–2.7 Tony Vevers, interviewed by Dorothy Seckler, Province-town, Massachusetts, September 1, 1965, SmithsonianArchives of American Art, Washington, D.C. Original pub-lished sources are footnoted throughout this essay. Tony Vev-ers has added occasional words and phrases for clarity.8 Anne Wilson Lloyd, “Symptoms of Joy,” in Tony Vevers: Ret-rospective, exh. cat. (Provincetown, Mass.: Provincetown ArtAssociation and Museum, 2000), 11. The retrospective wason view June 2–July 4, 2000.9 Vevers, interview by Seckler. 10 Lloyd, “Symptoms of Joy,” 11. 11 Unpublished essay by Vevers, 2000.12 Yeats, Collected Poems, 330–31.

13 Tabitha Vevers, “A Conversation with MyFather,” Provincetown Arts (Fall 1986):16.14 Ann Wilson Lloyd, “Tony Vevers: The Manand His Work,” Cape Cod Antiques and Arts (Sep-tember 1987): 8.15 Tony Vevers, in Tony Vevers: Recent Work, exh.cat. (Provincetown, Mass.: Long Point Gallery,1995), 3. The exhibition lasted from July30–August 12, 1995.16 Kathy Matter, “Vevers’ Styles Evident in Ret-rospect,” Lafayette-West Lafayette (Ind.) Journal andCourier, February 8, 1986, B1.17 Tabitha Vevers, “A Conversation,” 16.18 Lloyd, “Tony Vevers,” 8.19 Vevers, “Tony Vevers,” 7.20 Lloyd, “Tony Vevers,” 9.21 Ann Wilson Lloyd, “The Life and Times ofLong Point Gallery,” 4. The original Long PointGallery Members were:1. Varujan Boghosian 2. Fritz Bultman3. Carmen Cicero 4. Sideo Fromboluti5. Eddie Giobbi 6. Budd Hopkins7. Leo Manso 8. Robert Motherwell9. Paul Resika 10. Judith Rothschild11. Sidney Simon 12. Nora Speyer13. Tony Vevers 14. Rick Klauber

(left in 1981)22 Grace Glueck, “‘Family’ Revived Art on CapeCod,” New York Times, August 1, 1984, C17.

I find myself going back in time by usingstrips of canvas taken from earlier, unre-solved pictures to make surfaces that are stri-ated in a manner reminiscent of geology(itself a measure of time). Against these clearcut environs the rope forms are placed toinvoke the intuitive, random and emotionalforces that conflict us in life. Thus one hopesto move one’s work beyond aestheticism toan invocation of nature that has been part ofart since the caves.19

Ever since the mid-1950s Vevers has been cen-tered in and by Provincetown. It has provided himwith a foundation, something like T. S. Eliot’s “stillpoint of the turning world.” The landscape, thepeople, and the ideas coalesced in a way thatencouraged his artistry, especially as he drew awayfrom the New York gallery scene, which he came tobelieve was not worth the hassle. Long PointGallery, of which he was a founding member, was acooperative effort of fourteen artists that began in1977. It was a kind of support group and ideal forhim. “Here,” he observed about the gallery, “I canhandle things on my own terms.”20 When it began,the artists were showing in New York as well, but inProvincetown they could take chances. “You’remuch freer,” he said. “There’s no gallery owner tocontend with, and of course you have the input ofyour peers. There’s a lot of feedback, and not all ofit is complimentary.”21 It was also a good deal offun. Robert Motherwell, one member of the group,said in 1984, “We all love each other; we’re anextended family. We put on shows for each other,really. We’re all middle-aged or old, and when wemeet we’re like old warhorses acting young again.”22

One way they expressed their freedom was to havetheme shows, such as the one in 1983 that wasinspired by Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Waysof Looking at a Blackbird,” for which Vevers madea painting by that name. One can get into the issuesof perspective and relativity—nothing is what it firstseems to be; it all depends on your point of view—which is what the three clusters of rope are about.But the painting is also ornamental, and humor-ous, reflecting the artist’s wry wit.

In 1988 Vevers retired from teaching at Pur-due, and the family moved back to Provincetownto live year-round. He did notslow down, painting, lectur-ing, and traveling more thanhe had been able to whileteaching. He remained deeplyinvolved with the Long PointGallery, serving as its presi-dent until it closed in 1998. Bythen he had suffered a severestroke, which hindered hispainting but also led to hisnew emphasis on writing. Hiswork has continued to beexhibited regularly in Bostonand in New York. During hislong career in the world of art,he has established himself asa significant artist and writer.

Three late works seem tome to capture very well TonyVevers’s intellect and humanity:

Leonardo Variation III; Provincetown/Taos; and Aphorism Series III. None is amimicry of some scene, but eachuses the earth itself as well as foundobjects—rope, a square bit of cloth,flowers—to convey humanity’s per-petual relationship with the naturalworld. The rope circles, and even thecircle around the flower at the topof Aphorism Series III, pick up onLeonardo da Vinci’s Uomo Vitruviano,his demonstration of man’s perfectsymmetry within a circle and asquare. The collages are in a very realway “not ideas about the thing, butthe thing itself,” as Wallace Stevenswould have his poetry be. Anothermodernist poet, William CarlosWilliams, put the matter thus: “Noideas but in things.” Vevers’s collagesare the things themselves, the stuff ofnature, and from them we drawmeaning, which to me seems finallyto be his assertion that there is a sym-metry about all things excellent, diffi-cult and rare as they may be toattain. The circle and the square,Provincetown and Taos, bits of fadedsilk flowers found on walks near localcemeteries all symbolize Tony Vevers’s ideal, aworld that acknowledges the fact of interrelated-ness and the necessity of harmony.

TOWNSEND LUDINGTON is Boshamer Distin-guished Professor Emeritus at the University of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill, where for many years he direct-ed the American Studies curriculum. He is author of,among other books, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey. He edited Fourteenth Chroni-cle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, andfor the Library of America he has edited three volumesof Dos Passos’s work: Novels 1920–1925—OneMan’s Initiation: 1917; Three Soldiers; and Man-hattan Transfer.

A version of “Sailing to Byzantium” appeared as thecatalogue essay for Tony Vevers’s retrospective this springat Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York.

APHORISM SERIES III, 1997, MIXED MEDIA, 20.25 BY 14.5 INCHES

ELSPETH HALVORSEN AND TONY VEVERS, PROVINCETOWN, 1986

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