A Life in Art: Modernism, Mexico, Cape Cod; Sculpture and Painting by Milton Teichman

Exhibition Dates: August 23, 2019 – October 6, 2019

Curator Statement

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of a chance encounter with a small bronze sculpture, “We are All One,” displayed in the lobby of the Mashpee Public Library. As a modernist myself, with traditional training in art and architecture, and having worked for decades within the idiom, I was immediately drawn to this tabletop tableaux.

Milton Teichman created the splendid sculptural arrangement, reminding me of spatial qualities ever-present in the amazing mid-century sculpture of Lynn Chadwick, Jean Arp, Dmitri Hadzi, Charles Ginnever, and my friend and teacher, Aldo Casanova, N.A.

A few similar works have specifically been selected for this exhibition.

On meeting Milton, I was not surprised to learn that he was a retired professor of literature and writing. Milton has a restless intellect and is ceaselessly experimenting with ideas and methods, and then, admirably, weaving each new discovery into his ongoing projects.

The selection of works in this exhibition reflect three major influences on Milton’s work—twentieth-century Modernism, the art of Mexico, and the landscape of Cape Cod.

The central feature of modernism is its capacity to pare down experience into essentials of form, color, composition, line, and volume. In the late 1940s, the most pervasive term in sculptural discourse was “essence” –think: Brancusi’s Bird in Space.

Although such uniqueness and brevity takes many directions, for me, the spectacular work Invented Alphabet (1964), shown here for the first time, exemplifies the spirit of the modern-era.

Milton possesses this sense of design and color in the highest order, drawing inspiration from the role models of our generation, who remain towering figures: Matisse, Picasso, Klee, Miro, Avery, and Motherwell. Milton carries modernism into the present day-- an alliance of common interest with many of today’s finest modernists, notably the Dutch artist Theo Schouten, Australian Billy Gruner, and Swiss art and architectural design team Ada and Marian Weber.

Please join me in celebrating fifty years of art-making with a skilled and talented artist, a Cape Cod friend and neighbor, whose treasury of art and ideas we share here.

William Hemmerdinger, August 2019 Cotuit, Massachusetts