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Jobs, partners, children – the circumstances of life – variously delayed late-blooming artists and writers such as Louise Bourgeois, Henri Rousseau, Betty Woodman, Lee Krasner, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens from the creative blossoming of their later years. In all their cases, life experience enriched later accomplishments. For Frederick Wight (1902-1986), a career as a museum curator and director interrupted his lifelong painting practice. Only after retirement in his seventies, did he have the opportunity fully to develop as an artist. His luminous landscape paintings made from 1974 until his death in 1986 are his true legacy, a body of work that significantly contributes to American and Californian art. Still fresh, powerful, and wildly underrated, Wight’s landscapes are one of the premier achievements of west-coast art of the 1980s. Tapping the heightened perceptual experiences evoked by the west, Wight’s paintings are worthy inheritors of a tradition of hallucinatory American landscape painting by artists such as Agnes Pelton, Marsden Hartley, Raymond Jonson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Above the Mountain (1980), for example, presents the afternoon sun in the high desert as a cosmic pinwheel whose concentric beams twirl through the atmosphere, even sweeping isolate mountain pines into their wake. As they ripple out from the white-hot spindle-hole that commands the desert plain, the grooves of yellow sun turn the cerulean California sky green. The spinning vectors of glaring yellow are spokes for a grand Ferris wheel of blinding light. Despite the drama and forcefulness of his paintings, Wight is still chiefly known as the original driving force of the UCLA Art Gallery – the earlier, scruffier version of the UCLA Hammer Museum, located on the North Campus. Reigning from 1953 to 1973, Wight managed on a shoestring budget to get the institution up and running and to mount international traveling exhibitions, focusing on surveys of artists who had not yet nationally received their due. Wight’s efforts were instrumental in historicizing the careers of an impressive list of artists that includes Charles Sheeler, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Alexander Archipenko, Rudolph Lipschitz, and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. In addition to the stellar exhibitions he curated, Wight was instrumental in the creation of the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden which features works by many twentieth century master sculptors including Moore, Arp, Miro, Matisse, Calder, and David Smith.

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