Philip Pavia (1911-2005) was a culturally influential American artist of Italian descent, known for his scatter sculpture and figurative abstractions, and the debate he fostered among many of the 20th century's most important art thinkers. A founder of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, he "did much to shift the epicenter of Modernism from Paris to New York," both as founding organizer of The Club and as founder, editor and publisher of the short-lived but influential art journal It Is: A Magazine for Abstract Art. Reference to the magazine appears in the archives of more than two dozen celebrated art figures, including Picasso, Peggy Guggenheim, and art critic Clement Greenberg. The Club is credited with inspiring art critic Harold Rosenberg’s influential essay “The American Action Painters" and the historic 9th Street Show.
Sculpture
Pavia's spent two years studying architecture at Yale, before transferring to the Art Students League of New York in 1931 where he met life-long friend, fellow abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. For the next few years, Pavia alternated between art studies in New York and traveling studies in Europe. In 1937, he finally settled in New York City permanently. Soon after, he was hired as WPA Federal Art Project artist, which he later described as an invaluable training ground for himself and for friends and contemporaries like Willem de Kooning, Landes Lewitin, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov. The experience solidified their discipline and their dialogue, while also giving them ready access to others with a daily practice of making, and therefore thinking about, art.
By 1946, Pavia had started to show professionally, but he was, according to the Times, "something of a loner in his work, and arguably more of an original than some of his better-known contemporaries." As a result, Pavia's first major show was in the 1960s, and featured "tumbling blocks of coloured stone that echoed the effects de Kooning had achieved in his paintings, and which are perhaps," the Times underscored, "underrated for their originality."
In a 1971 article for the New York Times, Pavia explained his work this way:I like to get light to come out of the stone — that's the beauty of it.... I try to carve so as to convey the feel of the light simmering up along the piece and down.... Color and light make the marble real, otherwise it looks just like a balustrade. When I'm finished, the three pieces should go around like a carousel, like one big shaft.Best known for his large-scale abstract assemblages, Pavia also created figurative pieces. His most monumental work been installed on the grounds of several major public sites. In 1971, he was one of four chosen to help sculpt 10 pieces for New York City's first Sculpture Symposium at the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design. In 1973, he showed a six-foot-tall bronze head of President Kennedy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other major installations included the 10-foot-high marble abstraction Wind, Sand and Stars, installed at New York's Cloisters Museum, and the Ides of March, which stood on Sixth Avenue, outside of the New York Hilton, for nearly 25 years. The Times described the latter piece as "four large, rough-hewn diamond shapes whose edges appeared to follow the viewer wherever he walked." Pavia's marble scatter sculpture "East Pediment, Sun-up" was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 1966, before traveling to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and its permanent home at the UB Art Galleries in Buffalo, New York in 2020.
Pavia also created large-scale abstract figuration, including "imaginary portraits of many members of The Club" in 1982. John Russell, writing for the New York Times, describes them as "... remarkably ''like,'' without being merely descriptive, and when the light falls on their polished surfaces, the sitters really look like people who are growing old in the service of art." In Pavia's final show, in 2005, he exhibited "12 colossal terracotta heads, executed in a menacingly primitive style [that] drew comparisons with the work of Giacometti."