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Tony Vevers, 81
Prominent artist & longtime Provincetown resident
Tony Vevers, 81, of Provincetown, passed away peacefully on Sunday, March 2 surrounded by family and friends.
Professor of art and art history at Purdue University in Indiana and a highly respected and well-loved artist with deep roots in Provincetown, Tony Vevers’ contributions to the art world and to the arts in his adopted home of Provincetown are legendary. His figurative and landscape paintings from the 1950s and ’60s have a simplicity and purity that marry narrative and formal eloquence. In the 1970s he began working with rope and sand, creating poetic canvases of mysterious beauty.
Born in London in 1926, Tony and his sister were evacuated to the U.S. in 1940 to escape the Blitz during WW II. By 1944 Tony was serving in the Army, in Germany, and had achieved the rank of staff sergeant when he was honorably discharged. After leaving the Army in 1946, Tony entered Yale University on the G.I. Bill where he studied art, graduating in 1950.
In the early 1950s he traveled to Italy to study art, and later lived in New York where he met many of the first-generation abstract expressionist painters. In 1953 he met and married the artist Elspeth Halvorsen. By 1954 Tony and Elspeth had established themselves in Provincetown, and their two daughters were born over the next three years.
Although Vevers taught at Purdue University from 1964 to 1988, it was the summers in Provincetown that fed his creative spirit. His astute insights into modernism, as it spread from New York and into Provincetown, were fueled by his connection with virtually every artist who had been part of that era — including Edwin Dickinson, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Jack Tworkov and Robert Motherwell. As Chris McCarthy, director of the Provincetown Art Association, stated, “It is hard to imagine anyone who has had a more consistent hand in the life of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum over the past four decades. Tony’s insights and contributions to writing the history of art in Provincetown are unparalleled.”
Tony exhibited his work in over 100 solo and group shows in New York, Boston, Provincetown and throughout the U.S. In 1977 he became one of the founding members and president of Provincetown’s legendary Long Point Gallery. His work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Walter Chrysler Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the University of Massachusetts and many others. He received awards from the National Council on the Arts and the Walter Gutman Foundation. He served as an advisor to the Fine Arts Work Center and as a trustee and curator of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
Much loved by everyone who knew him, Tony brought a quiet grace and dignity to his every encounter.
He is survived by his wife, Elspeth; daughters Stephanie, of New York, and Tabitha, of Cambridge and Wellfleet; sister Pamela Sherin, of New Jersey; and his nephews, Anthony Sherin, of New York, and Jonathan Sherin, of California.
In lieu of flowers the family requests that donations be made to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 460 Commercial St., Provincetown, MA 02657. A memorial service is planned for early summer at the museum.
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Margaret E. Thomas, 93
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Mar 6th, 2008