The Last Wave: Figurative Painting in Chicago at the End of the 20th Century

What Came After: Figurative Painting in Chicago 1978 – 1998 at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL September 14, 2019 – January 12, 2020

My catalogue essay from What Came After: Figurative Painting in Chicago 1978 – 1998, organized by Phyllis Bramson. At the Elmhurst Art Museum, September 14, 2019 – January 12, 2020:

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L.P. Hartley

This exhibition features 15 artists who came to attention in Chicago over 40 years ago and, if we are to understand them properly, we must first lay out both the place and times in which they emerged. Even for those of us who lived it, it is hard to remember now how very different Chicago was in the late 1970s – less tall and shiny downtown, more a grid of gritty, heavily segregated neighborhoods. The buoyant optimism that had defined most of the 1960s had become undone by the end of the decade through a series of horrible events – the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Ke

nnedy, the 1968 Democratic Convention and police riots, the Chicago 7 trial, and then Watergate – that had left a darkened culture in their wake. It is not surprising, therefore, that the artists who developed during this time, and who are the focus of this exhibition, often display imagery significantly more fraught than the artists who came before.

And while we acknowledge and reference the Chicago artists whom the artists in this exhibition “came after”, it is also important to our understanding to remember how exceedingly localized culture was at this time. Artists developed their ideas submerged in a dialogue with the artists and artwork they could actually see. For although this was to irrevocably change during the time period covered by this exhibition, at the time the artists in What Came After: Figurative Painting in Chicago 1978-1998 were emerging, art magazines and globe trotting collectors had not yet made art an international commodity. More significantly, the Internet, which for good or bad eventually destroyed all sense of locality by the new millennium, was in 1978 still only an idea circulating among a roomful of people at DARPA . In short, while we were at the cusp of the world we live in today, art movements in the 1970s were still for the most part generated locally, and people would often refer to them in that way: the San Francisco Bay Area artists, the London School, the New York School, and of course, the Chicago School, which thanks to art critic Franz Schultz’s 1972 book Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945, is known by many today as Chicago Imagism.

What Came After: Figurative Painting in Chicago 1978 – 1998 at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL September 14, 2019 – January 12, 2020

Aesthetically, and despite its being well documented, many people can still find Chicago Imagism to be a vague concept. This might be because our attention is drawn to the eccentricities of the individual artists rather than the underlying ideas informing their work. Or perhaps it is because we mistakenly take one of the smaller groups, such as the Hairy Who, to represent the entirety rather than seeing the larger picture. Or maybe it is simply because the Chicago School’s strong emphasis on developing a unique personal imagery interferes with our standard notions of identifying groups. Whatever the reasons, the general lack of clarity concerning the underlying philosophy requires that we take a moment to understand what ideas the artists in this current show share among themselves as well as the Chicago artists they followed.

Let’s start with two big and intertwined ideas of the Chicago School: art should be accessible and have something to say to everyday people and that, true to the American ideal, stories about the lives of these people are worth telling. This is an anti-elitist narrative, one interested in the travails and inner life of individuals. What follows from this is a general avoidance of pure abstraction in favor of more accessible representational images, most often figures. That the identifiable images created are nonetheless abstracted, often heavily so, reflects these artists’ view of the artwork as a form of psychological portraiture, reflecting on both the subject and the maker. This, in turn, leads to a belief that development of a unique vision is critical. Drawing, with its intimacy, directness, and approachability, is understood to be the simplest way to realize the artist’s personal vision. The combination of these ideas – accessibility, psychology, individuality, and intimacy – is the bright thread weaving through the works of the post-WWII Chicago School. This includes, among others, the first generation, known as the Monster Roster, comprised of the artists H.C. Westermann, Leon Golub, June Leaf, Evelyn Statsinger, Nancy Spero, Irving Petlin, Cosmo Campoli, Dominick Di Meo, Don Baum, and Seymour Rosfsky. It includes the second-generation artists of the sixties who, organized into shows by Don Baum at the Hyde Park Art Center, comprised of the artists Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Jim Falconer, Suellen Rocca, Karl Wirsum, Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg, Barbara Rossi, Phil Hanson, Ed Flood, Ray Yoshida, Sarah Canright, and more. And it includes the artists in What Came After, whom despite their differences are, like their predecessors, involved in the same Chicago School conversation.

So even as we appreciate that the artists in What Came After’ are individuals on their own path, we can also be cognizant of this larger dialogue in which they are all participants.

Hollis Sigler
Comes the Day of Reckoning, 1985
Oil on Canvas with Painted Frame
50 x 62 inches

Hollis Sigler, who came to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago M.F.A. program as a photo-realist, found in the Chicago School the tools to reject that style completely in pursuit of a deceptively primitive technique and dream-like subject matter with a decidedly female perspective. A female perspective, albeit with very different visual vocabularies, informs the works of Phyllis Bramson,

Phyllis Bramson
Acts of Ardor, 1984
Oil on Canvas
60 x 72 inches

whose cast of silent actors and assembled objects appear engaged in some eternal Noh play, and Elenor Spiess-Ferris, whose surreal compositions speak of disappointment and loss.

Eleanor Spiess-Ferris
Plastic Pears, 1984
Oil on Canvas
54 x 72 inches

Continuing in the world of dreams, but from a male perspective, is Tony Phillips, whose soft rendering of figures and landscape belies the anxiety hidden beneath.

Tony Phillips
Through the Looking Glass, 1995
Oil on Canvas
21 x 41 inches

The struggle with anxiety and male isolation plays a large role in Nicolas Africano’s unsettling work, which like much Chicago art from this period is somehow simultaneously raw and elegant.

Nicolas Africano
Myself Was Taken From Me, 1983
Acrylic, Oil, and Magna on Canvas
80 x 56 inches

Robert Lostutter, who merges the intimacy of drawing with a high-temperature painting palette, and addresses themes similar to Africano, subtly references the work of Richard Lindner, whose formal inventiveness and sexual overtness makes him another touchstone for the Chicago School.

Robert Lostutter
Starlings in Late Afternoon, 1986
Watercolor on Paper
20 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches

Indeed, one can again see hints of Lindner, along with an architectonic approach to composition that brings to mind second generation Imagist Roger Brown, in the more geometrically abstract work of Richard Hull, who makes use of a wax ground to highlight the touch granted by drawing in his own paintings.

Richard Hull
Ding Dong, 1982
Oil and Wax Ground on Canvas
72 x 60 inches

Incorporating the psychology afforded by formal abstraction is a major component of Hull’s work, as it is to differing degrees in the paintings of David Sharpe, who manages to pay homage to both Miró and Giotto in his playful yet mysterious tableaux.

David Sharpe
The Bath, 1981
Oil on Canvas
72 x 66 inches

Increasing the role of abstract imagery in their works, but without abandoning the figure, we find Paul Lamantia’s hallucinatory scenes of wanton abandon writ large,

Paul Lamantia
False Prophets, 1991
Oil on Canvas
60 1/2 x 70 1/4 inches

and Jim Lutes’ hapless down-and-out protagonists struggling to maintain their own existence.

Jim Lutes
Desert Boy, 1995
Egg Tempera on Canvas
37 x 49 inches

The figure is nearly, but not quite, lost altogether in the overall nether space abstractions of Susanne Doremus, who makes discreet use of hand-cut linoleum stamps for paint application to increase the viewer’s awareness of the artist’s touch,

Susanne Doremus
Landscape with Fern, 1983
Oil, Graphite, Oil Stick on Canvas
55 x 68 inches

while Michiko Ititani places her figures, colossi in battle against themselves, in an atomized realm that seems to be more phantom-zone than landscape.

Michiko Itatani
Untitled from High-point Contact A-2, 1991
Oil on Canvas
100 x 78 inches

The figure remains, but the integrity of the body is called into question in the hybrid painting/collages of Mary Lou Zelazny, where the identity of the characters depicted is defined as much by their materialistic desires as it is by their shadowy visages.

Mary Lou Zelazny
The Slumber Party, 1991
Acrylic, Oil, Collage on Canvas
55 1/2 x 89 inches

Fragmentation is also a subtext, along with allusions to facades and hidden identities, in the mute partial portraits of Ken Warneke.

Ken Warneke
Untitled (P.R. II), 1996
Oil and Acrylic on Plywood
18 x 18 inches

Going a step further, seeming to dissolve in toto the distinction between personhood and object, Margaret Wharton completely dismembers wooden chairs only to reassemble them into fanciful personages that, while evoking a clear psychic identity, never leave their previous utilitarian identity fully behind.

Margaret Wharton
General Nonsense, 1981
Mixed-Media
approx. 60 x 24 x 8 inches

To a lesser or greater extent, then, the 15 individuals in this exhibition represent a cross-section of the large group of artists working in Chicago to incorporate and synthesize the ideas of the Chicago School, or break free from its perceived constraints, even as the very idea of local movements was, with the approaching new century, coming to an end. That all of the works in What Came After: Figurative Painting in Chicago 1978-1998 appear as vital and rewarding today as they did when they were made tells us something about the strength of art. That the time they were made, although well within the lifetime of many of us, now appears so very distant tells us something about ourselves.

Deven Golden
2019