Frederick S. Wight
Frederick S. Wight (June 1, 1902 – July 26, 1986) was a multi-talented cultural leader who played a significant role in transforming Los Angeles into a major art center.
The family moved repeatedly during Frederick's childhood, finally settling in Chatham, a small fishing town on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1910.
Upon graduation in 1923, his uncle, Dr. Sherman Wight, who had financed the young man's college education, provided additional funds for him to spend two years studying art at the Académie Julian in Paris.
His subjects included family friends, local sea captains and, eventually, prominent arts figures such as writers Erskine Caldwell, James Branch Cabell and Henry Seidel Canby, sculptor for Jacques Lipchitz and painter Lyonel Feininger.
In 1938, the couple returned to the United States and settled in Chatham, where Frederick devoted most of his time to literary work, in the hope of forging a career in writing.
Wight had considerable success as a novelist and short story writer, but World War II changed his professional course.
After taking part in the liberation effort, he worked for the Naval Division of Office of Strategic Services in London as an interrogator of prisoners and espionage suspects.
The oldest and most experienced member of his class, Wight wrote the principal essay for the catalog of the students’ exhibition, "Between the Empires: Géricault, Delacroix, and Chassériau: Painters of the Romantic Movement."
He stayed for 20 years, becoming chair of the department and shaping a stellar exhibition program in a period when Los Angeles had relatively few museums.
To raise funds and the gallery's profile, he organized a private support group and circulated UCLA's shows to other institutions.
During his 20-year tenure, UCLA presented the work of major figures including Jean Arp, Morris Graves, Hans Hofmann, Arthur Dove, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Richard Neutra, as well as thematic exhibitions.
In addition to organizing the shows, Wight wrote essays in dozens of exhibition catalogs and authored monographs on prominent artists.
Moving from relatively quiet still lifes to highly expressive landscapes, he painted celestial fireworks, planets in motion, dramatic sunsets and sunrises, ominous winds and clouds, powerful mountain ranges and seismic shocks.
The continuously shifting illumination of the coast under a variety of climatic conditions and the essential simplicity of the primordial entities of shore, water, and sky encouraged him to an ever greater pictorial freedom.
"[5] In a catalog essay for a 2008 exhibition at Louis Stern Fine Arts in West Hollywood, Michael Duncan described Wight as a late bloomer who perpetuated "a tradition of hallucinatory American landscape painting by artists such as Agnes Pelton, Marsden Hartley, Raymond Jonson and Georgia O'Keeffe."
"His luminous landscape paintings made from 1974 until his death in 1986 are his true legacy," Duncan wrote, "a body of work that significantly contributes to American and Californian art.
