Hugh Weiss

The work

Capital Capitals
1985
95 x 78 cm
Oil on canvas

The title of this work plays on the similarity of two words: the capital of a classical column and its capital importance, associating an almost childlike play on words with the stridency and apparent complexity of the work due to the density of objects that populate it.

The work, from 1985, is part of the thematic work that began in 1980. After his visit to India for the first time in 1975 where he won first prize at the New Delhi Triennial, he developed his theme of elephants and other animals in 1974 and moved on to architecture in 1978. The themes of cathedrals and domes began in 1980. Inspired by his travels to Egypt, he explored the theme of sacred boats and rivers.

L’artista

(Philadelphia, 1925 – Paris, 2007)

After studying at the Philadelphia High School and the Academy of Fine Arts in 1940, he joined the Barnes Foundation in 1943, graduated in art history, and served in the Pacific War during World War II. The vision of dismembered bodies would reappear in his paintings toward the end of his life. After the war, he received several scholarships and awards that allowed him to travel to Europe. In 1948, he moved to Paris and, at the invitation of Geneviève Asse, participated in the Salon of Artists under Thirty.

In 1949, he traveled to Italy and met photographer Sabine Weber, known as Sabine Weiss, whom he married in 1950 and settled in Paris.

That same year, he held his first solo exhibition. Between 1950 and 1975, he held twenty exhibitions in galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. In 1964, he created his first soft biplanes.

The artist’s work reflects a highly personal and experimental world in which dreamlike aspects go hand in hand with a certain primitivism and references to children’s drawings. He never rejected the influence of the CoBrA movement—the origins of three European cities: Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam—founded in Paris the same year Weiss arrived in the French capital. Critics noted the presence of Dubuffet, de Kooning, and some aspects of Lyrical Abstraction in his painting. He also enjoyed an artistic closeness and friendship with the painters of Narrative Figuration, participating in the 1977 exhibition Everyday Mythologies II at the ARC (Arch of Modern Art) in Paris. However, his work moves away from group approaches and is distinctly personal and difficult to classify. Weiss invents his own tragicomic images that allude to the strangeness of the world. The color of his paintings is brilliant, while the paradoxes and astonishing stridence of the characters who inhabit his world reveal an underlying humor and irony not devoid of a caustic critique.