ARTIST OVERVIEW
Giorgio Cavallon (1904-1989) was a leading member of the New York School. His quiet, abstract compositions are celebrated for their richly textured and painterly qualities. Unlike the work of his contemporaries who looked to Picasso and cubism for direction, Cavallon's painting, despite its geometric qualities, is more closely aligned to that of Cézanne, Matisse, Kandinsky, and Jean Hélion.
Born in Sorio, Italy, in 1904, Cavallon moved to New York at the age of sixteen and began his education as an artist at the National Academy of Design, which he attended from 1925 to 1930. In the early years of the Depression, Cavallon returned to Italy for three years. When he came back to the U.S. in 1933, he spent several summers studying at Hans Hofmann's school in Provincetown, MA. In 1935, Cavallon joined his contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Adolph Gottlieb, painting murals for the Works Progress Administration, where he acted as an assistant to Arshile Gorky. Along with de Kooning, Rothko, Marca-Relli, and Newman, Cavallon was a charter member of the Club, the downtown artists' group associated with the Cedar Tavern, and he also participated in Leo Castelli's seminal “Ninth Street Show” (1951), which brought abstract expressionism to the foreground of American visual culture.
Cavallon's artistic development was strongly influenced by the high-modernist and formal concerns of his European predecessors Piet Mondrian and Jean Hélion, as evidenced in Cavallon's adherence to the grid and his use of right-angle geometry. However, in contrast to Mondrian's clinical, neo-plastic precision or Hélion's emphasis on logic and “pure painting,” Cavallon's canvases have a richly textured, painterly quality reminiscent of Cézanne and Matisse. Compositionally, Cavallon's defining rectangles are neither perfectly straight nor sharply drawn, and the geometry within the compositions is slightly distorted. The result is flat shapes that simultaneously advance and recede within the picture plane, creating an atmosphere that suggests both stability and ethereality. In an exhibition review of Cavallon's late work, critic Michael Brenson wrote that the "colors can seem like elements in themselves. His whites suggest clouds, or bodies of water that float over and pour through the walls and passageways of his pictorial architecture."
This intuitive, textural quality has been compared to the early color shapes of Matisse, and characterizes Cavallon's works from the 1950s and 1960s. The sunny yellows, rich blues, and brilliant whites prevalent in Cavallon's work speak to his Mediterranean background-the light and landscape of the Aegean region. In a 1958 review, poet Frank O'Hara, with whom Cavallon collaborated, described a Cavallon painting: "It resembles a town in southern Italy the walls of which have absorbed the sunlight for centuries and even on a cloudy or raining day give off the intense light of what they have absorbed.''
Giorgio Cavallon's work is held in major museum collections in the U.S. and Europe including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and University Art Museum, Berkeley.
