Thyra Davidson

Hudson Valley Magazine
April 1975
Art Focus
by Tom Enger

Many an amateur gallery visitor has had the experience of looking at an interesting abstract of a circus clown only to discover that the painting was of a “Banana Tree.” It’s things like that which send so many people wandering out of galleries muttering, “I guess I just don’t understand art.” Then they buy the first abstract painting they see, hang it on their wall, and pretend to their friends that they understand it perfectly.

It was refreshing to find a New Paltz couple who both turned away from abstract painting in favor of realism. George Wexler paints landscapes, mostly of the Hudson Valley. In fact, the Mohonk Tower just west of New Paltz seems to appear in his paintings with unusual frequency. His wife, Thyra Davison, is a sculptor. Her bronze castings of seashells and fruit come as a bit of a surprise. “I started around 1961,”she told us. “nobody was doing realism then – let alone still life.”

According to Thyra, “We’re from the pre-college generation. We both went to professional art schools.” She studied at the National Academy and at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. George studied at Cooper Union. Both came out as abstract painters.

George, who teaches in the Art Department at New Paltz State College, gradually gave up abstractions in favor of realism. His large panoramic views of area landscapes are carried by a pleasant understatement of color. With his attention to detail, some come close to being large photographs. “No,” George corrected us, “Photorealism, that’s another school altogether.”

He is, for example, willing to take liberties in interpreting a scene. George pointed to a large painting which included a painter at his easel. “I sketched him in his home and added him as I worked on this painting.” Unfortunately, he sketched the artist facing the wrong direction, so reversed him in the painting. “He doesn’t really paint left-handed,” he explained.

Three of George Wexler’s paintings hang in the Legislature in Albany. They’re among the first things you see as you enter the building.

When Thyra made her change from abstract to realism, she kept trying to get more depth into her work. Trapped by the two-dimensionality of drawings, she turned to sculpture.

Several of her sketches hang in their home and most of these correspond to sculpture that she has done. Most of her work is life-size, including busts of several family members and a number of typical still life subjects. (It’s just not that often that you find sculpture of a pear reclining on folds of cloth.)

When we visited, Thyra was working on a full-length standing figure. A brace kept the wax from sagging while she worked on it. When finished, it will be sent out to be cast.

Recently, she’s been doing several small bas-relief pieces derived from pictures out of the family photo album. When these are cast in bronze, they’ll make an interesting way of displaying the old pictures.

Most of Thyra Davidson’s work is shown at the First Street Gallery, the Albany Institute, and Provincetown. She is currently preparing for a one-woman show in the fall at the First Street Gallery in SoHo, New York City.

Every week, Thyra travels to New York to teach a sculpture class at Brooklyn College. She says she gt the job because she was “just about the only realist sculptor around.”

If you get a chance to see the work of George Wexler and Thyra Davidson, go. It’s pleasant to be able to look at a painting or sculpture and be able to ask, “Where is that?” or “Who is that?” instead of “What is that?”

Arts Magazine
Jan 1976

Thyra Davidson’s work in bronze is a surprise in the world of present-day sculptural fashion. Its realism and expressiveness defy the dominant modernists and turn to the 19th century for their source of inspiration. Davidson experiments in unusual ways with scale. She does miniatures, in which a tabletop still life measures no more than 12 inches across, smaller-than-life figures, and life-size portrait heads and objects. She also explores a range of textures and finishes, from the very smooth, unlined skin of a young boy to the visibly kneaded, uneven ridges of a piece of fabric or muscle. All of her work is of very high caliber. The portrait heads of her parents are particularly good. Without knowing the identity of the subjects, the viewer cannot doubt that these two individuals are of great importance to the sculptor. Her still lifes, especially one of a single pear posed on a piece of cloth, are beautiful. The drawings are so fine and delicate that they can be mistaken for silverpoint.

Arts Magazine
Sept 1979

In her recent show, Thyra Davidson included a broad range of sculptures and drawings. Several portrait busts of contemporary artists were featured, among them representations of Ilya Bolotowsky, Arnold Levine, and George Wexler. The portraits were well done, but the most interesting objects in the show were several bas-reliefs. The most ambitious of these was a 4-foot bronze figure of Icarus falling to his death. Tense, outstretched hands and an open “screaming” mouth were the expressive aspects of the figure. Davidson’s Icarus also had a convincing sense of depth and motion.
Daedalus, according to Greek legend, had fashioned wings of feathers, wax, and rope so that he and his son Icarus could escape from Crete. During the escape Icarus becomes enchanted with the feeling of flight. He disregards his father’s instructions and flies too close to the sun. His wings soon melt and Icarus falls to his death. In representing this legend, Davidson focuses solely on Icarus’ falling figure. She has done this because she see the figure as a relevant metaphor for contemporary society’s relationship to modern technology.

ArtSpeak
Bi-Weekly Gallery Review
Vol IV, No. 7, Nov; 1982

Despite the fact that Thyra Davidson stems from the pure classic tradition, her direction, in sculpture, pastels and drawings at First Street Gallery, 383 West Broadway, till December 1, is just as modern, or do we call it ‘Post Modern’? One can begin with the classic if one prefers, but apparently one can never belie one’s own modern existence.

The effort to be classic merely makes one modern by indirection, as in a gradual movement toward fantasy, as though by inadvertence, as in the narrative sequences of two bas reliefs, “Carefree” and “Interplay”, or else toward the bizarre, as by the way a portrait head of a woman is presented in her sculpture, or, perhaps the strongest, the sculpture of a large scale open rose. Davidson is a sensitive artist, as seen in the expression around the mouth in “Luz Pensive No. 1”, the color touch in “Pitcher with Daffodil” or the limpid rhythm of “Flowers with Blue Vase”, which one would like to see more often.

American Artist
Aug 1988
By Eunice Agar

Whether she is creating drawings or sculptures, Thyra Davidson works slowly and methodically so that the result is a meaningful expression of her attitude toward the subject. She also refines each form within the pictures and sculptures so they convey the strength and dignity of the classical spirit.

The term classical is often loosely applied to all representational art or, more specifically, to archaic themes – figures draped in Greek and roman costumes and arranged in complex historical or mythological tableaux. A more accurate and at the same time wider-ranging definition, encompassing both abstract and realistic subjects, postulates a perfect balance between form and expression. It is a feat achieved by rare individuals, usually for brief periods in history. The pendulum then swings to one side or the other, to hierarchic stiffness and a formal aesthetic or to the unihibited expression of emotion. We have lived for so long, for the better part of the twentieth century, with the notion that art must be deeply expressive and call attention to itself with a strident urgency that the contemplative mode of a true classicist can easily go unrecognized.

Thyra Davidson’s sculpture fits the traditional definition, but her classicism is of an intimate type – figures in informal and private moments rather than the standard ceremonial poses. That may be why she describes her work as humanist realism, outlining her goals as follows:

A recapturing of the manifestations of natural (nonmechanistic) behavior and
outlook…

The human being imbedded in the matrix of modern industrial civilization, still capable of responding to and needing communion with nature…

An interest in intimate and informal moments, private behavior…

The value and nuance of the individual person or object…

A loving and optimistic point of view…

Beauty as an ideal…

Davidson’s work is of exceptional interest, not only because true classical sculptors are so rare, but also because of the range of her subject matter. In addition to traditional portraits, free-standing figures, and figurative bas-reliefs, she sculpts still lifes embodying the objects and drapery usually associated with painting, and most recently flowers. Not since Lucca Della Robbia in thirteenth-century Italy has a sculptor taken this most conventional subject matter and turned it into such a powerful and original statement. Her work projects the spirit of a Chardin in three dimensions.

Deceptively simple arrangements of drapery and fruit, an apple, pear, or banana, which our eyes are accustomed to seeing in color on a two-dimensional surface, take on an uncanny reality in three dimensions. Shown below eye level, they have a special presence that rivets the attention. Some indication of their power is revealed in the reaction to her first piece, which she showed to visitors in her studio when she began making sculpture in 1960. She had worked from a red apple placed on vivid green drapery salvaged from an old skirt, but the modeled still life so attracted people’s attention that they didn’t even see the brightly colored setup.

Drapery is one of the keys to Davidson’s aesthetic because it is simultaneously abstract and representational. The visual identity of folds and creases within the abstraction of the total design highlights the balance of form and content evident in all her work. She says it is a problem she thinks about aften, especially when she arranges and sculpts fabric.

Davidson shapes each piece slowly and methodically, not simply as a response to somewhat intractable materials (Rodin and Degas made rapid sketches in clay), but as an expression of her attitude toward her subjects. Drawings developed in tandem with the sculpture are submitted to the same careful construction. She draws regularly from a model and does still lifes in charcoal and pastel. Strong, luminous forms are constructed from several thin layers of chalk. Many layers are more effective than one thick application.