2006 Cover Article

Sailing To Byzantium: The Art Of Tony Vevers
By Townsend Ludington

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect. . . .

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

From W. B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"1

Tony Vevers’s paintings and constructions, like the poems of W. B. Yeats, whom he admires immensely, may have touches of ageless intellect, but far more they are about "the young in one another’s arms," birds, salmon-falls, mackerel-crowded seas, fish, flesh, or fowl—"whatever is begotten, born, and dies." Vevers’s works are from nature, and he has used the "hammered gold and gold enamelling" of his intellect and imagination to render "what is past, or passing, or to come."

"Vevers Is at Heart of Cape Art History," declares the headline of an essay about Tony Vevers that appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe in June 2000. The reporter, Carol Dumas, was writing about Vevers’s fifty-year retrospective exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), but her article is as much about the artist as about his art. Dumas noted that this was an artist who had not only painted for decades but had also "written essays and lectured on other members of this renowned summer artists’ colony." She quoted Robyn Watson, then the director of PAAM, who said that Vevers "is the keeper of the history of Provincetown art, both for his generation and the period after World War II. There are artists who can exist outside of art history, but Tony has existed in the middle of it."2 Vevers might well be called the dean of Provincetown art, or, if not that, then its primary chronicler. And he continues to be at its center, currently writing its history. As Jeanne Bultman, a longtime resident of Provincetown and wife of the Long Point Gallery artist Fritz Bultman, succinctly put it, "Tony was always there, but he was always doing his own thing." In the essay "Hans Hofmann in Provincetown," the curator and critic Katharine Kuh included Vevers among an "impressively varied" group of artists who had studied with Hofmann, noting that "their work adhered to no overall or rigid patterns but represents strong idiosyncratic personalities."3 He is, it seems, a man for all seasons of the arts as a painter, a critic, a historian, a teacher, and a friend.

First and foremost, he is a fine artist, marching to his own drummer; "a knowledgeable, wonderful human being" is how his fellow artist Paul Resika described him, while noting that his early compositions have an "Edouard Vuillard–like poetry" about them. Wolf Kahn, whose colors are as vivid as any in the contemporary art world, understood those personal qualities about Vevers and has admired his "restraint and understatement," as did Jack Tworkov, who wrote to his friend in 1980:
You know that I don’t have too much respect for the art world the way it deals with names and reputations. . . . I know few artists who bring so much imagination, integrity, and probity to their work [as you do]. Your work grows all the time in the delicacy of your compositions, in the unforced and balanced use of the medium, in achieving a kind of justness, in avoiding the flamboyant.

Tworkov praised Vevers’s "evocative use of found objects" and added that his abstractions and representational work were "unique in quality and character." Together, Tworkov declared, they "make a beautiful visual biography."4

Indeed they do. From early on Vevers knew where he was going and why. "Dear Daddy," he wrote at age seventeen from the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, to his father in England, "I have been doing a lot of painting lately—mostly landscapes—and it is my main interest—& at the moment painting is the one thing I would like to do in later life."5 That was in 1943; in 1947 Hotchkiss held an exhibition of his work, about which the school’s art instructor, Thomas Blagden, wrote, "There is unusual sensitivity and depth of feeling about these pictures. The painter makes no concessions to public taste; he indulges in no clichés of thought or style; he is neither insipid nor sentimental nor bombastic." Vevers, Blagden recalled, "simply took up brushes and paints, and became an artist." Until his graduation, he painted at a furious pace: "His room was a clutter of tubes, palettes, brushes, sketches, and canvasses. For one very fine picture he mixed his paints with an oily hair tonic because he refused to be interrupted by going to the studio for linseed oil."6 (Years later he gave Hotchkiss the painting Ah, Winter!, which Milton Avery had chosen to be included in an exhibition of young painters selected by older artists at the National Arts Club in New York.) Blagden was particularly impressed by the landscapes in that early exhibition, and to this day Vevers thinks of himself as a landscape painter. In an interview in 1965 for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, he remarked about things that had happened to him as a child, things that led him to be an artist. He recalled "Wordsworthian experiences"—moments, that is, when the observer has some sort of epiphany about nature, when some scene makes him or her comprehend something beyond the visual. For Vevers that seems to have been both an appreciation of the qualities of the natural world and an awareness of humanity’s inexorable ties to it. In England, during the winter of 1939–40, he recalled, I was moved by a sort of frost that just covers everything with a shimmering, crystalline kind of light. You don’t get it [in America] very often. In England we have this very heavy sort of precipitation, a heavy dew which makes a hoar frost. It freezes and everything is covered with frost. And I remember as a child going out and seeing a spider’s web and all the little shrubs and weeds and so on covered with this frost. It was all very impressive and . . . you know, you get enraptured by nature.7

Later in the same interview he spoke about "the experience you have feeling nature . . . like having an instantaneous reaction just like Wordsworth" (whose heart leapt up when he beheld a rainbow, or when wandering "lonely as a cloud" he saw "a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils"). Like the poet, Vevers recognized that these moments continued to affect him, that "The Child is father of the Man." He also understood that, for him, at least, the English landscape was "too much of a poet’s country for a painter, so cultivated . . . too worked over." But when he arrived in America, he recalled, he felt immediately "very much rapport with the countryside, which seemed new and different."

His descriptions of these early experiences reveal a great deal about his work. Nature and people are central to it, but his love of the natural world does not mean that he has romanticized it. Nature and man can have a benign relationship, as in North Haven Celebration III; it can also be a bleak one, as shown in the frigid, faceless figures at a Funeral at Truro, which portrays the funeral of Jan Müller, a leader of the Sun Gallery group in Provincetown. In Winter Self-Portrait the lone figure of the artist in a winter mood recalls Wallace Stevens’s last lines from "The Snow Man": "the listener . . . nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." One must be careful about generalizing: Winter Self-Portrait may seem bleak. But it also expresses a sense of release that the artist felt, free of the necessary work at construction and carpentry jobs during the summer months in Provincetown to make ends meet. Certainly Ah, Winter! conveys an exuberance; for Vevers’s fellow artist Varujan Boghosian it is marvelous in its directness and simplicity, with a warmth that is frequently lacking in the Pop Art of some of their contemporaries. The relationship can be as harsh as the raw pain of a leopard clawing the back of the naked, struggling artist in Man and Leopard, which one critic called "a nightmarish vision with psychologically haptic powers," and about which Vevers recalled, "I had a job doing heavy construction work and hadn’t been able to get into the studio. I was frustrated."8

The "shimmering, crystalline kind of light" he mentioned in his letter explains in part what he sought in such works as Across the Dunes and Cranberry Marsh, both of which were painted in 1956, the year he and his wife, Elspeth Halvorsen, first lived in Provincetown. Not that all of his work has been shimmering and crystalline: during the same period he painted what he called his "winter paintings" in the 1965 interview for the Archives of American Art. But the brighter ones—and his works generally—use paints and canvas in a particular way. Dorothy Gees Seckler, the interviewer, commented that she thought some of his most recent works "were very thinly painted. Of course, that was one way you moved against abstract expressionism I guess." He acknowledged that, and she continued, "And color just sort of gets into the surface of the canvas, almost like it’s staining it." To this he replied, "Well, I don’t use much white, so in order to get the luminosity I have to use the white of the canvas’ ground. So I won’t say I stain—I paint very thinly and let the luminosity of the canvas come through and give the canvas light that way." We see this effect in Winter Dunes, where thinly applied paint allows the canvas’s white ground to come through to suffuse the colors, and the soft edges of each color bring a unity to the scene.9 The luminosity and unity are what, as a child, Vevers came to sense about the world of nature and mankind, when it was not simply oppressive. His landscapes are never literal; they are his imaginative responses to what he saw.

If he needed to learn about the darkest side of human nature, he did during the last days of World War II, when in 1945 and much of 1946, he served in the U.S. Army of Occupation in Germany. There he saw the massive destruction of the cities, the eerie horror of headless cadavers piled in the basement of what had apparently been a medical school, and the desperation of displaced people being forced back into the Soviet Union. Before being sent back to the United States, he visited his father in England and spent some days in Paris. Back in the States, he was discharged in October 1946 and matriculated at Yale University, where he majored in painting and drawing at the Yale School of Art. He also studied art history and English literature, which had a significant effect on what he would later paint. Each summer he traveled widely in America and in Europe, where he returned soon after graduating from Yale in 1950. He headed for Italy, where, in his own words,

I spent two busy and fruitful years, attending the Academy of Fine Art [in Florence] and traveling to museums and sights in Europe. Came back to U.S. in 1952, settling in NYC—in time to participate in the abstract expressionist movement; studied briefly at Hans Hofmann’s School of Art on 8th St. in the Village. I later managed to acquire a loft/studio in the lower east side, on Delancey Street (nothing fancy!). On a painting trip to Maine [in 1953] I had the good fortune to meet my future wife, Elspeth, also an artist. She made a home for us out of my shabby studio, and we lived and worked there until the birth of our first daughter, Stephanie [in 1955], when we had the offer of a house by the water in Provincetown. . . . After a winter there we’d fallen in love with the town and the Cape. By this time we were living rather hand-to-mouth, helped by occasional sales of artwork.10

While living in New York, Vevers and his wife were among the young artists who gathered at the Cedar Bar and art openings as the Abstract Expressionist movement grew to dominate the American art scene. "There was a large group of followers for whom the Abstract Expressionist movement was everything: disciples of Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still; developing painters who found in the freedom of the style a way of dealing with their lack of preparation," Vevers wrote in a perceptive piece entitled "The Idea of an Avant Garde in the Late ’50s." He noted that:
This was hailed as the beginning of the demise of Life Drawing as the basis of an artist’s education—now made painfully evident in the figurative expressionism of the 1980s. And there was the new-found art world of New York: critics, collectors, editors and a new public reveling in the formation of an American School—echoing the expansion of American power everywhere.

Vevers recalled that on Easter Sunday in 1955 he had made a painting of a nude woman, which, innocuous though it was, had "made me the unknowing member of a stylistic underground—an avant-garde minority of young artists." He had been working at landscape abstractions—Lungarno is a good example—so he hesitated to show people his painting of the nude, but he "continued to use the figure more and more from this time on—letting go of abstraction and the Expressionist veneer that I had assumed while in New York." That fall he and his family stayed for the winter in Provincetown. This led the following summer to both Vevers showing at the Sun Gallery, which had opened in Provincetown the previous year and whose owners were interested in contemporary figurative art. He explained the confluence of impulses that had drawn the exhibitors at the Sun Gallery to figuration:
Partly a youthful rebellion against Abstract Expressionism; partly due perhaps to our immersion in World War II, which gave us a sense of the importance of the individual after so many years of group-think. Again, many of us were married, in a time when Levittown was a post-war Shangri-la—a Cosmopolitan magazine dream of matrimonial conformity that we fledging bohemians could not contemplate. Finally, while we admired the painterly achievements of Pollock, de Kooning and the rest, we did not want to put on the mantle of an art developed—through their struggle—by these older heroes. Personally, I admired Milton Avery whose Yankee individuality shone throughout his career, and of course I was enchanted by his use of color.

In Provincetown and the Sun Gallery, Vevers had found his artistic home, the place where he might be as free as he wished from the overweening force of the New York scene. "In the long run we of the Sun were perhaps not a true avant-garde, giving birth to a new vision as the Impressionists, Cubists, and Abstract Expressionists had done," he declared. "We perhaps were more like the little boy and the Emperor’s new clothes, in resisting the status quo, and in pursuing a personal vision and our own personality. In this we were inspired by Lester Johnson and Jan Müller, who were leading the move to figuration at the Sun."
Such pursuits are what creative people do. At any moment in the arts, there are what Vevers termed "convergences," instances when certain ideas and styles are in the air, but this is not the same thing as some sort of slavish copying. He admired the works of Milton Avery and Stephen Pace, for example, but he did not set out to emulate their work. What those two artists offered was a "total commitment to art, uncompromising," and on their own terms. "Actually," Vevers has asserted, "the artist who was most on my mind in those early years was Edvard Munch whose brooding figures in moody landscapes grabbed my attention." When he began painting figuratively, by 1958, he found remarks that his work was obviously influenced by Avery to be irritating. Such comments struck him as showing an ignorance of what he and Avery were doing: the latter was "mainly using his family and close friends as models." Vevers was using "figures in scenes that were imaginary—or that were derived from poetry." The real link between the two artists was that they both were using figures when abstraction was the rage.11
His major painting Hound Voice is an excellent summary. The title is that of a Yeats poem, in which the last stanza reads:

Some day we shall get up before the dawn
And find our ancient hounds before the door,
And wide awake know that the hunt is on;
Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once
more,
Then stumbling to the kill beside the shore;
Then cleaning out and bandaging of wounds,
And chants of victory amid the encircling
hounds.12

The painting, like the poem, is a rendering of an image "that waken[s] in the blood" the "slumber-bound" people whose passivity Yeats decried. Some, half reawakened to the world around them, "proclaim their hidden name—‘Hound Voice.’" The image in both the poem and the painting is of a moment when these people had risen—as Yeats and others had in the Irish Rebellion of 1916—in the "hour of terror [that] comes to test the soul." Hemmed in by the bleakness Winter Self-Portrait conveys and by the angst expressed in Man and Leopard, and perhaps as well in Landscape with Figure, in Hound Voice Vevers affirms that the hunt is still on, although both the poet and the painter may be ambivalent about the "blood-dark track" that preceded the "chants of victory amid the encircling hounds" during that moment on the shore. Twenty-five years later, in response to his daughter Tabitha’s comment that his figures "seem more involved with mythology or fantasy—perhaps because they were all nudes," he observed that he "was very involved with the idea of a personal mythology—which is why I did so many things that came out of Yeats’s poems." As his daughter noted, the nearly faceless figures are "not so much portraits of individuals, but portraits of human feelings."13 Hound Voice was painted in a flat, classical style. Its order and balance convey the timelessness of what the scene symbolizes, rather like John Keats’s Grecian urn, upon which a scene is frozen in time and shall remain "in midst of other woe than ours" for others to contemplate.

If Vevers’s paintings from the late 1950s and early ’60s are sometimes about large themes, they can also catch quick, intimate moments, as in Moon Dog, also painted in 1961, in which a lively dog gambols wildly on a Provincetown beach. But the work is not about coldness and bleakness; rather, it celebrates the animal and the intense color and beauty of a scene in which a full moon plays against vivid swatches of the blue ocean and the whiteness of breakers that pile onto the shore. No other painting of his better captures Vevers’s appreciation of the natural world. The same celebration occurs in Gull and Ice Floes, where the fluid shape of the soaring bird is set in the blue sky above the deeper blue of the ocean and contrasts with the sharp angles of the ice to remind us that winter is not just bleak and frigid; there is life as well amid nature’s stark, angular beauty.

Vevers’s early paintings had always been about his personal reactions to what he saw and felt. In the first half of the 1960s they began to take another turn, at least partly because the Vevers family set off in a new direction, leaving Provincetown during the winters. Vevers taught painting and drawing, first at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1963–64, and subsequently at Purdue University in Indiana, where, in addition to studio art, he taught art history. He had always been impressed by Italian Renaissance paintings such as Giorgione’s La Tempesta, which Vevers has called the first modern painting, partly because of its personal quality; Giorgione went beyond the formulaic. As Vevers broke away from Abstract Expressionism, he knew that what he wanted to paint were works that came "out of my own personal involvement with life," as he explained in his interview for the Archives of American Art. Seeing the narrative paintings of the pre-Renaissance artists, which often encompassed several subjects or images and frequently used more than one panel, he knew that something of the same technique would achieve his goal.

The result was a new direction in his work, as seen in paintings such as Transition and Greensboro Morning, which tell of his family’s move from Provincetown to North Carolina. Transition, a grouping of painted images delineated as if on separate panels, reflects the change from the stark landscape of the left panel and the winter mood of the lower one in the middle, to the gentler, enclosed ground of the panel on the right, all of them related to and held together by the female nude seen through a window. Small, domestic matters? Certainly, but ultimately the paintings are about humanity’s relation to the world, and about the changes that happen to us all. Our lives are made up of such matters: a family’s move to a new location; summer visits to places like Maine (North Haven Celebration I and II and North Haven Celebration III); winters in Indiana (Chauncey Street); a late snow melting as the first vestiges of spring appear (Last Snow Indiana); or the lovemaking in Gull Couple, where the sway of the naked couple’s bodies as they make love indoors is united with the panel above through both the graceful shape of the flying gull and the undulating coastline—things are one, the painting is saying.

The quotidian is interrupted on occasion by something as momentous as a moon shot, an event Vevers marked with a painting, Moon Shot, in which the left-hand panel shows a broad band of white that is the path of a powerful rocket to the moon, while the right-hand panel is a "shot of the moon," the real thing, shining down on a nighttime setting of woods, a lake, greenery, small stones, and even two small animals and a bird in the foreground, partly caught in the reflection of the moon on the lake. Both panels are "moon shots"; the artist’s wry observation sets technology against the world of nature.

That world is what connects all his art, from abstractions to figurations to collages made from found objects—"three dimensional wall-hung collages," the critic Ann Wilson Lloyd has termed them—as well as to highly personal representations such as the Italian works Italia I and Italia II, inspired by a semester’s leave from Purdue to teach in Cortona, Italy; the New Mexico paintings San Cristobal Window and Imaginary Landscape New Mexico, emerging from winter visits to Santa Fe, San Cristobal, and Taos; and finally the collages that also draw on his many experiences (Provincetown/Taos and Aphorism Series III).14
Vevers at least partly explained these substantial shifts in the forms of his art in a 1995 catalogue for an exhibition at the Long Point Gallery in Provincetown. "While abstraction is vital for its ability to show ideas and images that could not be expressed otherwise," he wrote, "I like the polarities that have been present since the birth of abstraction with Mondrian and Kandinsky—the dualities of form and content that each of the two pioneers suggested in their visions of this new art."15

The collages, a radical change for him, were begun in Mexico in 1972 when, intending to do a photographic essay of some sort, Vevers had his camera jam the first day. Anxious to work and much taken with the landscape, "which was in direct contrast to the lush, carefully laid-out rectangles of the mid-west," he decided to create directly from the land, "to make a landscape out of its own materials, to literally use earth pigments."16 He told his daughter later that the resulting sand pieces, Chute is a good example, came "out of the 20th century trend toward viewing the work of art as an object . . . my work intends an anonymous handling." He had been impressed by one of Henry Moore’s stone figures "which seemed to have been formed by natural means. You just didn’t see the hand of the artist or the interposition of his ego."17
Works such as Chute evolved from earlier sandpaintings to include found objects. They are Minimalist, at first glance revealing little or nothing of the artist’s hand; yet if the viewer is responsive, he or she soon "feels" the work that comes out of the world that is always Vevers’s subject. "His collages of sand and found objects do some subtle work on you, like strains of haunting music," the astute critic Ann Wilson Lloyd observed, adding:
The background of sand, in earthy neutral tones, paradoxically provides a sea of buoyancy for his found objects, a sea with textures that are visually soft and soothing, yet intellectually abrasive. The sand, he says, provides "a plane that isn’t flat, that’s different from a painted plant. It has some sort of substance to it."18
An example of his work in this style is Buoy III: what may at first seem to be merely an accretion of objects and materials—Styrofoam, rope, sand, and acrylic on canvas—draws the viewer in by its form and somewhat muted colors, the blue of the ocean, the browns of the shore; and set upon them are the ropes and a buoy that remind one of the ships that fill Provincetown harbor. Another level of interpretation for this piece is what Vevers wrote in the 1995 catalogue to accompany illustrations of three Buoy collages:
I find myself going back in time by using strips of canvas taken from earlier, unresolved pictures to make surfaces that are striated in a manner reminiscent of geology (itself a measure of time). Against these clear cut environs the rope forms are placed to invoke the intuitive, random and emotional forces that conflict us in life. Thus one hopes to move one’s work beyond aestheticism to an invocation of nature that has been part of art since the caves.19

Ever since the mid-1950s Vevers has been centered in and by Provincetown. It has provided him with a foundation, something like T. S. Eliot’s "still point of the turning world." The landscape, the people, and the ideas coalesced in a way that encouraged his artistry, especially as he drew away from the New York gallery scene, which he came to believe was not worth the hassle. Long Point Gallery, of which he was a founding member, was a cooperative effort of fourteen artists that began in 1977. It was a kind of support group and ideal for him. "Here," he observed about the gallery, "I can handle things on my own terms."20 When it began, the artists were showing in New York as well, but in Provincetown they could take chances. "You’re much freer," he said. "There’s no gallery owner to contend with, and of course you have the input of your peers. There’s a lot of feedback, and not all of it is complimentary."21 It was also a good deal of fun. Robert Motherwell, one member of the group, said in 1984, "We all love each other; we’re an extended family. We put on shows for each other, really. We’re all middle-aged or old, and when we meet we’re like old warhorses acting young again."22 One way they expressed their freedom was to have theme shows, such as the one in 1983 that was inspired by Wallace Stevens’s poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," for which Vevers made a painting by that name. One can get into the issues of perspective and relativity—nothing is what it first seems to be; it all depends on your point of view—which is what the three clusters of rope are about. But the painting is also ornamental, and humorous, reflecting the artist’s wry wit.

In 1988 Vevers retired from teaching at Purdue, and the family moved back to Provincetown to live year-round. He did not slow down, painting, lecturing, and traveling more than he had been able to while teaching. He remained deeply involved with the Long Point Gallery, serving as its president until it closed in 1998. By then he had suffered a severe stroke, which hindered his painting but also led to his new emphasis on writing. His work has continued to be exhibited regularly in Boston and in New York. During his long career in the world of art, he has established himself as a significant artist and writer.
Three late works seem to me to capture very well Tony Vevers’s intellect and humanity: Leonardo Variation III; Provincetown/Taos; and Aphorism Series III. None is a mimicry of some scene, but each uses the earth itself as well as found objects—rope, a square bit of cloth, flowers—to convey humanity’s perpetual relationship with the natural world. The rope circles, and even the circle around the flower at the top of Aphorism Series III, pick up on Leonardo da Vinci’s Uomo Vitruviano, his demonstration of man’s perfect symmetry within a circle and a square. The collages are in a very real way "not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself," as Wallace Stevens would have his poetry be. Another modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, put the matter thus: "No ideas but in things." Vevers’s collages are the things themselves, the stuff of nature, and from them we draw meaning, which to me seems finally to be his assertion that there is a symmetry about all things excellent, difficult and rare as they may be to attain. The circle and the square, Provincetown and Taos, bits of faded silk flowers found on walks near local cemeteries all symbolize Tony Vevers’s ideal, a world that acknowledges the fact of interrelatedness and the necessity of harmony.

TOWNSEND LUDINGTON is Boshamer Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where for many years he directed the American Studies curriculum. He is author of, among other books, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey. He edited Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, and for the Library of America he has edited three volumes of Dos Passos’s work: Novels 1920–1925—One Man’s Initiation: 1917; Three Soldiers; and Manhattan Transfer.
A version of "Sailing to Byzantium" appeared as the catalogue essay for Tony Vevers’s retrospective this spring at Hollis Taggart Galleries in New York.

1 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 191–92.
2 Carol K. Dumas, "Vevers Is at Heart of Cape Art History," Boston Sunday Globe, June 18, 2000, C3.
3 Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art, ed. Avis Berman (New York: Arcade, 2006), 258.
4 The remarks of Jeanne Bultman, Paul Resika, and Wolf Kahn are from interviews with the author. Jack Tworkov, letter to Vevers, August 20, 1980, Provincetown.
5 Vevers, letter to his father, January 24, 1943.
6 Thomas Blagden, "Corridor Exhibit Shows Alumnus’ Art Works; Sketches, Water Colors and Oils in Display," Hotchkiss Record, May 8, 1947, 1–2.
7 Tony Vevers, interviewed by Dorothy Seckler, Provincetown, Massachusetts, September 1, 1965, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. Original published sources are footnoted throughout this essay. Tony Vevers has added occasional words and phrases for clarity.
8 Anne Wilson Lloyd, "Symptoms of Joy," in Tony Vevers: Retrospective, exh. cat. (Provincetown, Mass.: Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 2000), 11. The retrospective was on view June 2–July 4, 2000.
9 Vevers, interview by Seckler.
10 Lloyd, "Symptoms of Joy," 11.
11 Unpublished essay by Vevers, 2000.
12 Yeats, Collected Poems, 330–31.
13 Tabitha Vevers, "A Conversation with My Father," Provincetown Arts (Fall 1986):16.
14 Ann Wilson Lloyd, "Tony Vevers: The Man and His Work," Cape Cod Antiques and Arts (September 1987): 8.
15 Tony Vevers, in Tony Vevers: Recent Work, exh. cat. (Provincetown, Mass.: Long Point Gallery, 1995), 3. The exhibition lasted from July 30–August 12, 1995.
16 Kathy Matter, "Vevers’ Styles Evident in Retrospect," Lafayette-West Lafayette (Ind.) Journal and Courier, February 8, 1986, B1.
17 Tabitha Vevers, "A Conversation," 16.
18 Lloyd, "Tony Vevers," 8.
19 Vevers, "Tony Vevers," 7.
20 Lloyd, "Tony Vevers," 9.
21 Ann Wilson Lloyd, "The Life and Times of Long Point Gallery," 4. The original Long Point Gallery Members were:
1. Varujan Boghosian 2. Fritz Bultman
3. Carmen Cicero 4. Sideo Fromboluti
5. Eddie Giobbi 6. Budd Hopkins
7. Leo Manso 8. Robert Motherwell
9. Paul Resika 10. Judith Rothschild
11. Sidney Simon 12. Nora Speyer
13. Tony Vevers 14. Rick Klauber
(left in 1981)
22 Grace Glueck, "‘Family’ Revived Art on Cape Cod," New York Times, August 1, 1984, C17.