Nathan Oliveira
Wings & Windhover
March - May 2020
Named for the series of paintings by Nathan Oliveira that grace its walls, Windhover is a spiritual refuge on the Stanford University campus meant to both inspire and promote personal renewal.
This exhibition features artwork from the collection of Joe Oliveira. The artworks, painted between 1974 and 1996, are the studies for the Windhover series. Rarely exhibited, they provide an intimate glimpse into the deconstruction and abstraction process of one of Palo Alto’s most beloved artists.
“I’ve always thought if I had wings, I could fly. Well, I do have wings in my mind...and these paintings are like a catalyst that can take you wherever you want your mind to fly.”
Nathan Oliveira
About the artist
Nathan Oliveira was born in Oakland, California in 1928 to a family of Portuguese immigrants. He studied painting and printmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, and in the summer of 1950 with Max Beckmann at Mills College. After two years in the U.S. Army as a cartographic draftsman, he began teaching painting at his alma mater and also at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now SFAI).
In 1959 Oliveira was the youngest painter included in the groundbreaking exhibi- tion New Images of Man, which included established artists such as Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, held at MOMA in New York. He held a tenured teaching position at Stanford University from 1964 until he retired in 1995. Notably, Oliveira was a leading member of the Bay Area figurative movement.
During his career, surveys of his work were held at the Art Gallery of the University of California, Los Angeles (1963); Oakland Museum of California (1973); California State University, Long Beach (1980); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1984); California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco (1997); and the San Jose Museum of Art (2002). Oliveira was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and has received many other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, two honorary doctorates, and, in 2000, membership in a distinguished order conferred by the government of Portugal.
Oliveira’s work is collected nationally and is held in the collections of many distin- guished institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Oliveira passed away in 2010 at his home in Palo Alto, California.
In the beginning
Oliveira did not follow a disciplined approach to painting or drawing but explored the spectrum of pure emotion and beauty achieved by gesture. Embedded throughout Oliveira’s artistic output is a probing of relationships between humanity, animals, and place–subjects he continually reworked and reimagined. At the heart of Oliveira’s painting and drawing is a powerful inter- play of representation and abstraction.
Oliveira loved the natural lands of Stanford University. For years he worked in an airy studio that boasted extraordinary vistas, north to San Francisco and south to San Jose.
In the afternoons, he would set out on long walks in the foothills, where he would encounter magnificent birds of prey that make their home at the campus’s edge: hawks, eagles, owls, and kestrels.
Oliveira began to include these birds in his canvases. In 1972, a student’s gift of a stuffed kestrel became a model for a series of drawings and paintings. These works would come in and out of the artist’s studio over the next two decades.
These works are “The Windhover”
Oliveira’s small drawings and paintings of birds morphed over the decades into six monumental oils of wings and curves that measure up to 17 feet across. “Painting actual wings just didn’t do it for me,” Oliveira said about his early efforts. “So I had to go through a period of transition, from wings to abstract images that conveyed the idea of wings without getting all trapped up in feathers. It’s really about the imagination and the inner spirit of flight...the curves represent the curvature of our planet, suggesting that we’re all on this great ball together.”
During a chance encounter with the Irish poet Desmond Egan, Oliveira invited him to his studio to see the paintings. Egan was struck by the works' restorative power. When Oliveira told him they were still unnamed, Egan spontaneously recited the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The vast, glorious wings, Egan said, had summoned the lines. That was it. “These works are ‘The Windhover,’” Oliveira said.
Oliveira kept the giant canvases in his home studio. As he endured turbulence—losing his beloved wife to cancer, and his own health fading—these works centered and comforted him. The artist was still at work on these canvases at the end of his life.