Frederick S. Wight
Encyclopedia
Frederick S. Wight or Fred Wight, was a multi-talented cultural leader who played a significant role in transforming Los Angeles into a major art center. An influential educator at the University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...

, who presented museum-quality exhibitions at the campus gallery later named for him, Wight was also a highly accomplished painter and writer. In his final years he concentrated on his painting, producing radiant landscapes that appear to be animated by mysterious, spiritual forces.

Early life

Frederick Stallknect Wight was born in New York City, the only child of Carol Wight, who became a professor of English and the classics at Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 after a struggle with mental illness, and Alice Stallknect, an artist with a forceful personality who encouraged her son's creative proclivities. The family moved repeatedly during Frederick's childhood, finally settling in Chatham, a small fishing town on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1910. He graduated from high school in 1917, at 15, and spent the following year preparing to enter the University of Virginia
University of Virginia
The University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...

. Upon graduation in 1923, his uncle, Dr. Sherman Wight, who had financed the young man's college education, provided additional funds for him to spend two years studying art at the Académie Julian
Académie Julian
The Académie Julian was an art school in Paris, France.Rodolphe Julian established the Académie Julian in 1868 at the Passage des Panoramas, as a private studio school for art students. The Académie Julian not only prepared students to the exams at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, but offered...

 in Paris.

Career beginnings

Wight returned to Cape Cod in 1925 and attempted to support himself as a portrait painter. His subjects included family friends, local sea captains and, eventually, prominent arts figures such as writers Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Preston Caldwell was an American author. His writings about poverty, racism and social problems in his native South like the novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre won him critical acclaim, but they also made him controversial among fellow Southerners of the time who felt he was...

, James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell, ; April 14, 1879 – May 5, 1958) was an American author of fantasy fiction and belles lettres. Cabell was well regarded by his contemporaries, including H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. His works were considered escapist and fit well in the culture of the 1920s, when his...

 and Henry Seidel Canby
Henry Seidel Canby
Henry Seidel Canby was a critic, editor, and Yale University professor.Canby was born in Wilmington, Delaware and attended Wilmington Friends School...

, sculptor for Jacques Lipchitz
Jacques Lipchitz
Jacques Lipchitz was a Cubist sculptor.Jacques Lipchitz was born Chaim Jacob Lipchitz, son of a building contractor in Druskininkai, Lithuania, then within the Russian Empire...

 and painter Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Charles Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist.-Life and work:...

. He also developed an interest in psychologically charged landscapes and established himself as a writer. His first novel, "South", was published in 1935.

Personal life

His marriage in 1936 to a young English woman, Joan Elizabeth Bingham, led to a blissful period of travel in Joan's homeland and the South of France, where Frederick painted landscapes, experimented with a new style that he called Semi-Surrealist and pursued his writing. In 1938, the couple returned to the United States and settled in Chatham, where Frederick devoted most of his time to literary work, in the hope of forging a career in writing. Their only child, George Frederick Wight, was born in nearby Hyannis, in 1942.

War years and beyond

Wight had considerable success as a novelist and short story writer, but World War II changed his professional course. When the United States entered the war, he joined the Navy and was sent to Europe. He initially worked as an illustrator. Later, when his superiors became aware of his literary talent, he was editor of the amphibious forces' newspaper. Toward the end of the war, he was sent to London, where he made drawings of Normandy beaches in preparation for the 1944 invasion. After taking part in the liberation effort, he worked for the Naval Division of Office of Strategic Services in London as an interrogator of prisoners and espionage suspects. In his final assignment, he interviewed French Resistance leaders and wrote a report on their work.

Discharged from the Navy in 1945 as a lieutenant commander, Wight returned to Chatham. Faced with the uncertain prospect of supporting his family as a writer or painter, he decided to go into museum work with the help of the G.I. Bill of Rights. He enrolled in Harvard's museum training program led by Paul J. Sachs
Paul J. Sachs
Paul Sachs was Harvard associate director of the Fogg Art Museum, a partner in the financial firm Goldman Sachs and the developer of one of the early museum studies courses in the United States.-History:...

 at the Fogg Art Museum
Fogg Art Museum
The Fogg Museum, opened to the public in 1896, is the oldest of Harvard University's art museums. The Fogg joins the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum as part of the Harvard Art Museums....

, where he also worked with noted art historians Agnes Mongan, John Rewald
John Rewald
John Rewald was an American academic, author and art historian. He was known as a scholar of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cézanne, Renoir, Pissarro, Seurat, and other French painters of the late 19th century. He was recognized as a foremost authority on late 19th-century art...

 and Jakob Rosenberg. The oldest and most experienced member of his class, Wight wrote the principal essay for the catalog of the students’ exhibition, "Between the Empires: Géricault, Delacroix, and Chasseriau: Painters of the Romantic Movement." He graduated with a master's degree in 1946.

Wight spent the next six years at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, first as director of education, then associate director of the institute. Among his projects were exhibitions of the work of Louis Sullivan
Louis Sullivan
Louis Henri Sullivan was an American architect, and has been called the "father of skyscrapers" and "father of modernism" He is considered by many as the creator of the modern skyscraper, was an influential architect and critic of the Chicago School, was a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an...

, José Clemente Orozco
José Clemente Orozco
José Clemente Orozco was a Mexican social realist painter, who specialized in bold murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and others...

, Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier , was a Swiss-born French architect, designer, urbanist, writer and painter, famous for being one of the pioneers of what now is called modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930...

 and Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School who, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture....

.

Mid-career

In 1953 Wight accepted an offer to teach at UCLA's art department and direct of the university's new art gallery. He stayed for 20 years, becoming chair of the department and shaping a stellar exhibition program in a period when Los Angeles had relatively few museums. To raise funds and the gallery's profile, he organized a private support group and circulated UCLA's shows to other institutions.

During his 20-year tenure, UCLA presented the work of major figures including Jean Arp
Jean Arp
Jean Arp / Hans Arp was a German-French, or Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper....

, Morris Graves
Morris Graves
Morris Cole Graves was an American expressionist painter. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, William Cumming, and Mark Tobey, he founded the Northwest School. Graves was also a mystic.-Early years:...

, Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...

, Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.-Youth and education:...

, Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...

, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

 and Richard Neutra
Richard Neutra
Richard Joseph Neutra is considered one of modernism's most important architects.- Biography :Neutra was born in Leopoldstadt, the 2nd district of Vienna, Austria Hungary, on April 8, 1892. He was born into both-Jewish wealthy family...

, as well as thematic exhibitions. In addition to organizing the shows, Wight wrote essays in dozens of exhibition catalogs and authored monographs on prominent artists. He also helped to establish the university's Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts and Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. Midway in his tenure, in 1964, he was a resident artist and scholar at the American Academy in Rome
American Academy in Rome
The American Academy in Rome is a research and arts institution located on the Gianicolo in Rome.- History :In 1893, a group of American architects, painters and sculptors met regularly while planning the fine arts section of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition...

.

Art

Wight painted throughout his life and frequently showed his work, but his career as an artist took off with surprising force after his retirement from the university in 1973. Moving from relatively quiet still lifes to highly expressive landscapes, he painted celestial fireworks, planets in motion, dramatic sunsets and sunrises, ominous winds and clouds, powerful mountain ranges and seismic shocks.

"While for many artists the twilight of a career often represents a refinement of familiar gestures, it was for Wight nothing less than a new dawn, the beginning of his true artistic originality," art historian Edith A. Tonelli wrote in the catalog of UCLA's 1991 exhibition of Wight's work. "He became in these years that rarity at any age, a great painter."

"The ultimate theme Wight explored," she wrote, "was the interaction between the ocean shore, the water, and the sky beyond. The continuously shifting illumination of the coast under a variety of climactic conditions and the essential simplicity of the primordial entities of shore, water, and sky encouraged him to an ever greater pictorial freedom."

In a catalog essay for a 2008 exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood, Michael Duncan described Wight as a late bloomer who perpetuated "a tradition of hallucinatory American landscape painting by artists such as Agnes Pelton, Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.-Early life and education:Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha...

, Raymond Jonson
Raymond Jonson
Raymond Jonson was an American-born Modernist painter known for his paintings of the American Southwest.- Biography :Raymond Jonson was born in Chariton, Iowa in 1891, but grew up in Portland, Oregon. At twenty, Jonson attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Later, he continued the...

 and Georgia O’Keeffe."

"His luminous landscape paintings made from 1974 until his death in 1986 are his true legacy," Duncan wrote, "a body of work that significantly contributes to American and Californian art. Still fresh, powerful, and wildly underrated, Wight's landscapes are one of the premier achievements of west-coast art of the 1980s."

Wight died July 26, 1986.

Selected Art Publications

"Milestones of American Painting in Our Century," exhibition catalog, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. New York: Chanticleer Press, 1949.
"The Work of Lyonel Feininger," exhibition catalog, Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1951.
"Milton Avery," exhibition catalog, Baltimore Museum of Art. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1952.
"Goya." New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1954.
"Hans Hofmann," exhibition catalog, UCLA Art Galleries. Los Angeles: Regents of the University of California, 1957.
"Modigliani: Paintings and Drawings," exhibition catalog, Los Angeles County Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Los Angeles: Committee on Fine Arts Productions, University of California, Los Angeles, 1961.
"Bonne Fete Monsieur Picasso," exhibition catalog, UCLA Art Galleries. Los Angeles: Committee on Fine Arts Productions, University of California, Los Angeles, 1961.
"Years of Ferment: The Birth of Twentieth Century Art: 1886–1914," exhibition catalog, UCLA Art Galleries. Los Angeles: UCLA Art Galleries, 1965.
"Henri Matisse," exhibition catalog, UCLA Art Galleries. Los Angeles: UCLA Art Council and UCLA Art Galleries, 1966.
"The Negro in American Art," exhibition catalog, UCLA Art Galleries. Los Angeles: UCLA Art Galleries, 1966.
"New British Painting and Sculpture," exhibition catalog, Whitechapel Gallery. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1968.
"The Potent Image: Art in the Western World from Cave Paintings to the 1970s." New York: Collier Books, Division of Macmillan Publishing Inc., 1976.

Novels

"South." New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1935.
"The Chronicle of Aaron Kane." New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1936.
"Youth in Trust." New York and Toronto: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc. 1937.
"Inner Harbor." Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1949.
"Kindling." Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951.
"Verge of Glory." New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1956.
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