Saul Chase

Chase graduated from City College of New York, where he also received his M.A. degree. He taught for six years in vocational schools before he had his first solo show at A. C. A. Galleries in 1973. A realist with a predilection for geometric abstraction, Chase works loosely from photographs, but dissects and reconstructs the buildings, store fronts, streets, bridges, and skies captured by his camera. Chase's urban landscapes are devoid of people and action and possess a precise linearity and atmospheric clarity that derive from the rectilinear planes and surfaces of his subjects. A great admirer of J. M. W. Turner, Chase describes his scenes as memories of visual events and says his goal in painting is ambiguity: "the multiple levels that paint can achieve."

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)