Philip Pavia

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."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. 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. 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." == The Club ==

Called an "outspoken avant-garde thinker" by the Boston Globe, Pavia founded The Club in 1948, envisioning regular debate among artists, writers and thinkers about issues in art during twice-weekly lectures, members-only panel conversations and other events. Established shortly after the war, The Club was, in part, a response by American artists intimidated by the modernists who had taken refuge in New York after the war: "[T]here were geniuses walking in the streets, you know. About 30 of them," Pavia told the New York Times in 2002. "The Club was a schoolhouse of sorts," writes Devin M. Brown, reviewing Pavia's Club archives, "but it was also a theater, a gallery space, and a dancehall.... [T]he collection demonstrates how various media constantly overlapped whether simply through discussion or in performance. Concerts, dances, and theatrical pieces were all hosted there. Poets, composers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and critics all rubbed elbows and argued with each other about aesthetics at The Club’s many panel discussions...." Over time, Pollock rejected surrealism and Jungian imagery, then de Kooning followed suit. Debate topics spanned both art and philosophy, and frequently included "non-members like Hannah Arendt, Joseph Campbell and John Cage," while bringing together abstractionists and expressionists, which helped lend currency to the term "abstract-expressionism." Artists like Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Landes Lewitin, Aristodimos Kaldis, and Leo Castelli would attend meetings too. Devin M. Brown also cites Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, when recalling Pavia's observation, “If it wasn’t for our persistent gatherings, I am sure we would have all become loners and faded away.” ==It is. A Magazine for Abstract Art==

In 1956, Pavia resigned from The Club and, in the spring of 1958, published the first edition of the short-lived but influential art journal It is. A Magazine for Abstract Art, as another way to exchange ideas in the Arts. The magazine was used as a forum to discuss ideas of the day, and to champion both emerging artists, such as Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and John Chamberlain and already established ones.Numerous high-profile artists supported the project, including Elaine de Kooning who spread word of the publication while serving as a judge on an art show and with local museums in New Mexico. Brooklyn Rail critic Phong Bui described the magazine's influence this way: "Although there were only six issues in its entirety — with a circulation of 2,000 in the first five and 8,000 copies in the last, which was solely devoted to sculpture — It is is considered to be an indispensable document of American art of that period." == Interviews ==

• Bui, Phong. "The Club IT IS: A Conversation with Philip Pavia." Feb-March 2001: The Brooklyn Rail. • Potter, Jeffrey. "Meet Your Neighbor." Springs, NY, 1989. LTV Public Access Archives, East Hampton, New York. (1989, 29 min). • Tatge, Catherine. "Robert Motherwell & The New York School: Storming the Citadel." (1991, 55 min). == Public Collections ==

• Albright-Knox Art Gallery • Hofstra University Museum Outdoor Sculpture Collection • National Academy of Design, The • Metropolitan Museum of Art • Museo dei Bozzetti (Pietrasanta, Italy) • Museo della Scultura Contemporanea Matera (MUSMA, Italy ) • Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. • Whitney Museum of American Art == Awards and honors ==

• Honorary doctorate, Pennsylvania Academy of Painting and Sculpture, 1995 • Selected as one of the Artists of the Millennium for an exhibition at the United Nations, 1999 • Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2000 • Artists Equity Honoree, 2002 • Guggenheim Award for Sculpture, 2004 == Personal life ==

Pavia was married to the painter, art critic and writer Natalie Edgar. The couple had two sons: His elder son Luigi died in 2012. His younger son Paul is also a sculptor. == References ==