Word: cavallon
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Some artists have long, honorable careers but are continually ignored. They are swamped by their colleagues' bow waves. Giorgio Cavallon's career has been of this submerged kind. He is now 73, having been born near Vicenza in northern Italy in 1904, and he was one of the first abstract painters in New York in the 1930s, when painting abstract seemed automatically to consign an artist to ridicule and obscurity. In the '60s some of Cavallon's contemporaries, such as Milton Resnick or Lee Krasner, long written down as minor or fringe figures in the aesthetic...
...There is nothing overtly spectacular about his work. Nor has his career ever shown the kind of violent oscillation between styles and influences that invites a rhetoric of "breakthroughs." So the general attitude toward him has been one of benign neglect. But the current retrospective of 65 works by Cavallon at the Neuberger Museum at Purchase, N.Y.-amplified by two Manhattan exhibits of 25 early Cavallon paintings at the Patricia Learmonth Gallery and nine late ones at the Gruenebaum Gallery-shows how unjust that neglect has been. It brings into full view one of the most lucid, steadfast and lyrically...
...Cavallon immigrated to the U.S. in 1920, at 16. He worked as a mechanic, winding armatures at a plant in Springfield, Mass., but "I put the idea of being a mechanic out of my mind because I didn't like the smell of oil." The smell of linseed oil was another matter; he spent five years studying art at the National Academy of Design in New York, did odd jobs as a carpenter and studied with the pioneer abstractionist Hans Hofmann. "I really didn't understand abstract painting," he recalls. "It took a long time to penetrate...
Delectable Glow. He came to abstract painting through still life, canceling out recognizable objects until the tabletop became a flat plane inlaid with small, quirky geometrical forms. But Cavallon's formative encounter was with Mondrian's work, and it is to Mondrian that the grid paintings he made from the late '30s onward incessantly allude. Cavallon's geometrical works, like one dated 1946, are not Utopias: there is little of Mondrian's austere, architectonic rectitude in them. They are sociable, warm, busy and a bit sloppy. They stand to the more purist kinds of geometrical...
...long, 82-year history of "The Game," no Yalemen ever had so satisfying an afternoon. And few Yale teams ever put on so polished a performance. Incredibly calm and casual, Eli Quarterback Dick Winterbauer stood up behind his fine line and lofted high-spin passes that led End Mike Cavallon and Halfback Herb Hallas to easy touchdowns. Harvard Tackle Bob Shaunessy raged behind the weak Crimson forwards, belting their padded sterns and begging them to fight. But it did no good. Even at angry fistfighting. Harvard came out second best...