Greene Street Studio (Soho), 1975
American, 1945
B.A. Fine Art, CCNY,1965
M.A. Art Education. CUNY,1968
Decades before the old New York Central right of way was recast as the ”High Line”, and decades before the word gentrification entered the lexicon, Saul Chase’s visionary paintings and screenprints presented a preview of the city to come. In a series of acrylic on canvas paintings begun in 1968, Chase portrays an idealized urban vision, infusing the unkempt surrounding landscape with glorified imagery retained and distilled from an impressionable boyhood in the Bronx. In this work, scenes from New York’s aging industrial underbelly, are reconstructed, cleansed of impurity and human reference, and lighted to theatrical perfection.
As a boy growing up in the Bronx, Chase began drawing and painting at a young age. A tenth birthday gift of a set of Grumbacher oil paints became his most cherished possession.The excitement of conjuring imagery through the application of paint to a pristine two dimensional surface was all consuming then, as it is now, after more than sixty years.
Chase earned a BA in Fine Art from CCNY in 1965, and a MS in Art Education from CUNY three years later. After graduation, he instructed classes in oil and watercolor painting at his alma mater. He also taught art to high school students in the South Bronx. In 1968 he began showing his work at the venerable "ACA Gallery" in New York City, where he had a series of sold out critically acclaimed solo exhibitions. In 1975 he moved to the now infamous “Andrew Crispo Gallery” where he continued to show successfully.
An early inhabitant of Soho, arriving in 1970, before the onset of AIR legal living, Chase felt immediate affection for the grungy old factory district. It was the perfect "La Boheme" setting for a romantic young artist, but it didn't last long. The cast iron buildings were too beautiful and the newly acquired “hipness” too salable, to not attract developers. By the late 70s, the desolate enclave had evolved into a "chic", expensive and crowded place to live, shop, eat and be seen. The neighborhood’s loss of innocence and a growing disillusionment with New York made departure inevitable. After selling his Greene Street studio loft in 1981, Chase moved with his wife and children to a secluded hilltop home and studio about fifty miles north of the city, where he continues to live and work.
Selected Collections
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Hirshhom Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Excerpts From Reviews and Essays
"The New York Times" review of exhibition at ACA Gallery
"Mr. Chase is a high--key precisionist whose hard-edged views of deserted streets and industrial buildings are softened by unusually mild colors-generally pale blues, light purples, soft tans. There is a very pleasing atmospheric quality to this work, particularly in "Smith - 8th Street," a deserted el station and "Frozen Custard," a concession on an empty boardwalk. The paintings are solidly and authoritatively structured ... This is a distinctly impressive first one-man showing."
The New York Times - James R. Mellow, March 3, 1973
"Print of Decade" selection - Art News, September 1980
"Recent printmaking has been affected by currents in other art forms, and Saul Chase's screenprint Untitled (Goya) (published by the artist, 1977) could be said to be a survey within itself of printmaking's development during the decade, especially in its combination of realism, hard-edge technique and color. But apart from technique, my judgment is based on pure enjoyment of the image itself, which is very strong and capable of being appreciated for its own sake."
Art News - Andrew Chakalis, September 1980
Jerry Tallmer interview - "The World of Art" The New York Post
"Saul Chase, at 32 the master of barren cityscapes of trucks and warehouses and ramps and el stations." The New York Post - Jerry Tallmer, February 18, 1978
"Synthetic Noir Luminism"- Douglas Kelley essay for September 2004 Exhibition
"I've been trying to coin a term to describe this painter Saul Chase ... Noir Luminism. He's the Noir Luminist? It sounded about right to me...[Luminism] had among its chief concerns the romantic and heroic capture of grand atmospheric and lighting effect.....about the majestic landscape bathed in the mystical light of a pristine sky...but Chase's paintings were a little dark, not cloudy or gloomy, but emotional and complex. Like a fine wine."
"In the last 20 years he has shifted over to a Howard Hodgkin-esque vocabulary of the impossible imagery romantic semi-representational landscape. (Although he arrived from the opposite direction, from realism). Nevertheless, Chase retains his uncanny ability to render, and in a palpable way, the same scorching twilight in the canvases he painted of his native Bronx that he does with the muted but breathtaking fantasy landscapes inspired of his current region. It's the deliberate emphasis on an emotional response to nature that leaps out at you, along with small hints of creating work of a symbolic spiritual nature that conveys how the artist feels about his subject. He feels deeply."
"Mr. Chase's paintings linger because of the open ended story in every one of them that goes both forward and backward."
Douglas Kelley, September 2004
"The Paintings of Saul Chase" Ariana Reines essay for September 2004 Exhibition
"A defiant Platonist, he has no compunction at all in his pursuit of an ideal, of what he calls the excitement of first vision... His lyrical landscape based abstractions sound an echo somewhere between European Impressionism and Richard Diebenkom. They combine a revelry in pure color with a subtle investigation of depth in flatness. "Much of Chase's work over the past twenty years has been on two series: The Beautiful Hours, The small oil paintings on paper, and Answering Light, acrylics on gessoed panel. Both series are landscape-derived, though The Beautiful Hours is more overly pictorial, insofar as the paintings function as scenes, while Answering light seems to abstract both from and into nature (or from nature dreamt, nature remembered) in a way that recalls Nicolas de Stael. As would befit the work of a Platonist painter, the two series function together as a kind of dialogue - between paint and visual memory, between dream and color, flatness and depth."
"The paintings in The Beautiful Hours are of a romanticism rarely seen in contemporary art. They reveal Chase's self-assured brushwork in a dewy richness, thanks to oil paint, that makes them seem much larger than they are"
"Chase has arranged the paintings of The Beautiful Hours into diptychs, triptychs, polyptychs and floated them in plexiglass boxes. This underscores their lives as objects, not simply as images, and inevitably calls to mind the tradition of religious iconography. The whole process of entering a painting of diminutive stature, rather than being enveloped Abstract-- Expressionist-style by a vast canvas, has religious antecedents. Something about the process of looking into a small landscape and imagining oneself inside it, rather than being assailed by overpowering size, makes the mind somehow more active in the process of transubstantiation that looking is."
"Hot List - What You Need to Know This Week" - "The New York Post" Sunday, September 19, 2004
"Light Touch" Painter Saul Chase's work has been described as "noir luminism" for its otherworldly depictions oflandscapes and cityscapes. His first major solo exhibition since the 1980's is up now through Nov.l ... "
Maureen Callahan, The New York Post, Sunday, Sept.19, 2004
