Exhibits in Amherst, Northampton honor late artist and professor Richard Yarde
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He was not only one of the Valley's most talented artists but a significant figure among modern American painters. He mined his own life experience and that of the African-American community to produce beautiful watercolors distinctive for their use of rich color, unusual compositional grids and dramatic themes in a medium better known for quiet and intimacy.
When painter and former University of Massachusetts art professor Richard Yarde died last month, he left behind a body of work that many believe will gain even greater recognition in the future. And if the phone calls and emails he's received since Yarde's death are any indication, says Herter Gallery director Trevor Richardson, Yarde was also a beloved teacher whose art and gentle personality touched many.
"I can't tell you the number of people who have contacted me since he passed away," said Richardson, who is curating a retrospective exhibit, "In the Realm of the Senses: The Works of Richard Yarde," that opens Jan. 26 at the Herter Gallery on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. "My phone has been ringing off the hook."
The Herter Gallery show, which runs through Feb. 23, will be matched on the west side of the Connecticut River by another Yarde exhibit, this one at R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, where a selection of the artist's work from the 1980s and 1990s will be on display from Jan. 27 through Feb. 24.
"We still get a constant stream of people asking to see his art," said owner Richard Michelson, who has featured Yarde's paintings for years in his gallery. "A lot of times it's former students of his who want to point out his work to their friends, and they'll say, 'He was the best teacher I ever had.' ''
Yarde, who lived in Northampton, was born in Roxbury in 1939 to emigrant parents from Barbados and came to the Valley in the 1970s. He taught at UMass from 1990 until retiring in summer 2010. He had been ill for some time with kidney problems, Richardson said, and his wife, Susan Donovan Yarde, had passed away in September.
His work has won national recognition and critical acclaim; his paintings are part of nearly three dozen permanent public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
During his four-decade career, Yarde also won a Massachusetts Commonwealth Award for Fine Art, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Academy of Design.
Both Richardson and Michelson say Yarde, who received a master's degree in fine arts from Boston University, made his biggest mark with his watercolors.
"There's really no one else like him [in the country]," Richardson said. "He took this medium known for its small-scale landscapes and intimacy and really transformed it to this heroic scale."
Geoffrey Owen Miller, a New York artist who earned a master's degree in art at UMass in 2009, had limited experience with watercolors before studying with Yarde. "What I learned in that class changed how I understood the medium, but also the direction of my art," he said in an email. "What was so powerful was being in the presence of a man who dedicated his life toward the betterment of his craft." Yarde's work has inspired him to work on his own large-scale watercolors, Miller added: "I feel blessed to have gotten a chance to work with him."
Welcome to the Savoy
In his catalog notes for the Herter exhibit, which will feature 25 works from throughout Yarde's career, Richardson writes that the artist's watercolors were "dazzlingly new," taking on "a sensuous, dramatic quality and distinctive sense of color" in which he explored themes both from his own past and from the larger African-American experience. In the early 1980s, Yarde began a series of paintings dedicated to the dancers and musicians of the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, which had its heyday during the Swing Era.
"That was his great breakthrough, the one that put him on the map," Michelson said. "It was a theme he would come back to in different ways over the years ... he was ahead of his time, and a genius."
In those first paintings, Yarde debuted some of his trademark techniques, such as his use of compositional grids. In "Saturday Night, Midnight," for instance, four joyous dancers move across a floor and backdrop consisting predominantly of irregularly shaped rectangles; closer inspection shows a similar but more subtle pattern on some of the dancers.
Yarde later took his "Savoy" themea step further, creating a three-dimensional reconstruction of the Savoy Ballroom in an exhibit that included over 20 free-standing painted figures, from orchestra members to Lindy-Hopping dancers, that were "an amalgam of painting and sculpture," as Richardson puts it. The show, which conveyed Yarde's excitement about the Swing Era, toured the country in 1982-'83 and earned rave reviews.
As Michelson sees it, Yarde's work also touched on racial pride as well as reconciliation and healing. He suffered serious kidney failure and motor-skill problems in 1991 that left him unable to paint at all for a year, and only with difficulty for some years after that. When he eventually took up his brushes again, the results were very different: His new paintings featured disembodied heads, hands and feet, Braille dots and acupuncture charts and darker backgrounds.
As Richardson writes, Yarde now aspired to art that "mirrored his belief in the healing powers of touch and a heightened spiritual consciousness." In an interview in 2007 with the Gazette, Yarde recalled the difficult time that led to his new subjects and style: "My body seemed to collapse on me. The positive effect of that was to turn my focus inward, and to think about alternative aspects of healing ... I had this feeling that art can be healing, and I was experimenting on myself. The process and ritual of painting became healing for me."
One of Yarde's best-known works from that mid-1990s period, "Mojo Hand," alludes to the healing ritual of the laying on of hands, as six pairs of hands, palms outward, frame a floating X-ray image of the artist's torso. A message in Braille dots spells out words from the Bible's twenty-third Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil ..."
"I think his strongest work came out of that period," said Amherst artist Terry Rooney, who curated two shows for Yarde. "That material was so powerful and personal."
Though primarily a painter, Yarde sometimes worked with other mediums. His 2003 "Ringshout" exhibit, at the Worcester Art Museum, was based on an African-American slave-era ceremony in which people would dance around a central space. In addition to nine enormous - as large as 10 feet by 10 feet - watercolor paintings evoking that theme, the show included a wooden platform on which Yarde placed 52 pairs of shoes cast in plaster, set in two concentric circles around a third circle of alternating hands and mouths in bas-relief. The display was designed to recreate the way two waves of dancers would clap and move.
Aside from being an outstanding artist, Michelson says, Yarde was also a "thoughtful and very decent guy, always generous to other artists ... this is a great loss to the Valley's artistic community and to the national arts community, too."
Yet, Richardson writes in the Herter exhibit catalog, Yarde's legacy will continue to be felt - and to grow. Both as an artist and teacher, he says, Yarde "created work that reached out to us directly and carried a special sense of warmth and involvement. ... We are perhaps still some way from grasping the full scope and importance of Yarde's achievement, but, hopefully, this exhibition moves us a little closer in that direction."
"In the Realm of the Senses: The Works of Richard Yarde" will be on view at the Herter Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from Jan. 26 through Feb. 23. There will be an opening reception from 2-4 p.m. on Jan. 28. Immediately before the reception, at 1 p.m., there will be a memorial service for Yarde at First Baptist Church of Amherst, 434 Pleasant St.
R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton will feature "Saturday Night, Midnight," an exhibit focusing on Yarde's "Savoy" series of paintings, from Jan. 27 to Feb. 24.
For more information and for hours on both shows, call the Herter Gallery at 545-0976 or the Michelson Galleries at 586-3964, or visit the latter online at www.RMichelson.com.
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
