exhibitions-archive

Intimate Distance: The Modernism of Schuyler Standish

Exhibition: March 13, 2010-June 12, 2010
Reception: March 13, 2010 from 7:00-9:00 p.m.

Schuyler Standish has been creating visual art for close to 60 years, but he has been an artist for his entire life.

Standish, who lives in Tujunga, began studying the violin at the age of three. He began working in Hollywood at the age of six, dancing in a Ruby Keeler-Dick Powell feature, Shipmates Forever. Standish’s most  prominent roles, however, came at the outset of his adolescence, including a role in Wuthering Heights in 1939 and featured roles in two films in 1941, Blood and Sand (starring Tyrone Power, Rita Hayworth, and Anthony Quinn) and Melody for Three (in which Standish played Fay Wray’s son – a violin prodigy).
 
He entered UCLA at the age of 13 to study music and within a year had been named concertmaster of the university’s symphony orchestra. He also played popular music and, when he enlisted in the Army Air Force, he spent the remaining months of World War II entertaining the troops by playing in Bobby Byrne’s big band. His involvement in music continued after his discharge, but gradually yielded to a burgeoning interest in painting.

Standish also drew from an early age, but it was only as an adult that the art bug bit him – the result of an epiphany he had when passing a used bookstore whose display table featured books on the Impressionists. Reading Lust for Life, Irving Stone’s biography of Vincent van Gogh, sealed Standish’s fate. In the ensuing decades, he has painted and drawn without pause. He has also taught art (at the Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy) and began exhibiting in 1954. He has shown all over the United States and his work has wound up in collections around the world.

Schuyler Standish’s work is unabashedly modernist. It does not so much reject Pop art and the post-modernist avant garde as reconsider and recombine the avant garde styles of the early 20th century. Best known for his landscapes, Standish is also adept at abstraction and figuration; but in all genres he betrays a loyalty to the principles of dynamic form, luminous color, and transformative imagery that motivated the giants of modern art from Monet to De Kooning.

Standish’s landscapes, acknowledging the plein air tradition, clearly recapitulate the lessons of Paul Cézanne, even mimicking his palette and his rendition of space. Of course, Cézanne’s approach, designed to capture the brilliance and pellucidity of the southern French terrain, translates easily to the similarly Mediterranean climate and ecology of Los Angeles. Standish painted in the Hollywood Hills and Highland Park, rendering the houses and streets nestled on the verdant mountainsides as if they sat in the shadow of Mt. St. Victoire. At the same time, Standish depicts space with dramatic, and often eccentric, recessional structures reminiscent of the Bay Area Figurative painters, his exact contemporaries.

As a figurative painter and draftsman himself, Standish has worked naturalistically and expressionistically with equal deftness and confidence. In fact, the selection here reveals him to be adept not only at realistic rendition, but also cubistic simplification, surrealist fantasy, and even caricature. In his figures and interiors, Standish evinces a wide familiarity with modernist examples, from Picasso and Léger to Dali and Tanguy to Klee and Schlemmer to Diebenkorn, Guston, and Saul Steinberg.

Standish’s abstractions, if anything, manifest an even wider embrace of the entire experiment, from Futurism and Dada to Constructivism and Hard-edge painting. As such, they arguably constitute his most distinctive achievement, showing him to be a master of texture, tone, and line, able to elaborate upon the simplest of arrangements – and, conversely, to elucidate the most complex arrangements with a self-possessed forthrightness.

Given the range of subjects and styles in Schuyler Standish’s oeuvre, it is remarkable to be able to so readily discern a consistent sensibility throughout his work. It is not only the relatively small scale of his pictures that unites them; Standish’s elegant touch and attentiveness to finely balanced composition also characterizes every single painting, drawing, and collage that comes from his hand. A modernist re-visionary on an intimate scale, Standish is a confident formalist, dedicated to an understanding of seeing as an act of construction, and painting as an act of feeling and seeing.

Peter Frank
March 2010