Arte Diseño Xicágo at the National Mexican Museum of Art

Enrique Alferez,"Eve" (detail)

The legacy of Mexican art and design in Chicago is primarily political. Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution as well as their own, Mexican painters and printmakers in the early decades of the twentieth century addressed that struggle between basic human needs and the accumulation of enormous wealth that continues today. They portrayed the innocence, endurance, and good intentions of working people, often with an emphasis on community, resistance, and iconic heroes. Outstanding among the printmakers was a collective named the Taller de Grafica Popular, established in Mexico City in 1937. Morris and Alex Topchevsky, Eleanor Coen, Max Kahn, Elizabeth Catlett, Margaret Burroughs, Charles White, Mariana Yampolsky, and Misch Kohn were all artists who traveled from Chicago to Mexico to work with the TGP.

Mariana Yampolsky

Especially powerful are the prints of Charles White now on display in a special exhibit at the Art Institute. In this exhibit, it’s the vibrant linocut depictions of ordinary Mexican rural life by Mariana Yampolsky that stand out. Also remarkable is the dream-like depiction of cotton pickers in a linocut by Margaret Burroughs, who is perhaps better known for founding the DuSable Museum of African American History in her own living room. Right next to her oil portrait of Harriet Tubman hangs Elizabeth Catlett’s linocut portrait of the same national hero. That’s just one of many fascinating juxtapositions scattered throughout this exhibit.

Margaret Burroughs, "Cotton Pickers"

Not all of the Chicago area artist-/activists honed their visual skills in Mexico. Inspired by Jose Guadalupe Posada, an earlier political cartoonist, the work of Carlos Cortez delivers its message with simplicity, commitment, and vigor. Maria Varela was a civil rights activist who taught herself photography to promote voter registration in the American South. As it turned out, her feel for visual narrative and design could tell quite a story, even if the subject was only a pair of human hands.

Not all of the art in this show is overtly political, either. There are a few coffee tables and a portrait of the first Mayor Daley executed in mosaic by Genaro Alvarez, a modernist designer based in Mexico City. There are also some very lively small beasts and monsters created by Maria Enriquez. Her youngest son, Mario Castillo, is credited with painting the first of the many Chicano murals that would proliferate throughout Latino neighborhoods across the country. Curiously enough, the theme of that work, ’Metafisica’, as well as his work that followed, is more about self- realization and historic native cosmology than any political movement or discourse.

H.C. Westermann, "Portrait of Luis Ortiz"

And then there’s the Ortiz family, The father, Luis Ortiz, created a bold kind of abstract painting that feels as strange as Surrealism. Apparently his own physical presence also made quite an impression on other artists. The show includes several portraits of him, including one by H.C. Westermann, who shared his background as both acrobat and veteran of World War II. His son, Errol Ortiz, was among the first Chicago Imagists in the 1960’s. His geometric human figures, while not electrically charged like those by Karl Wirsum, feel more ancient and profound.

Many of the artists in this show will be familiar to those who follow our local art scenes. Yet surprisingly enough, the exhibit gives the most floor space to the one artist whom probably nobody has ever heard of: Enrique Alferez (1901 – 1999), a figurative sculptor who spent most of his long career making public sculpture in New Orleans. His life story is as amazing as his work. Born into a traditional sculptor’s family in Zacatecas, he ran away from home at the age of twelve and spent the next ten years in the army of Pancho Villa. Eventually escaping across the border into Texas, his path crossed that of Chicago’s great Beaux Arts sculptor, Lorado Taft, who was lecturing in El Paso. Following Taft back to Chicago, he would attend the Art Institute and live among the apprentices in Taft’s studio.

Enrique Alferez, "Adam" (detail)

Most of the Alferez work in this show comes from the last decades of his life. He was a storyteller like Taft and less interested in formal power than his more celebrated Mexican contemporary, Francisco Zuniga. But his Adam and Eve diptych is still quite an achievement —– and not just because he carved these two multi-figured, eight foot mahogany panels when he was nearly ninety years old. You could not ask for a more thoughtful and skillful handling of the most profound theme in European iconography. Responding to the history of the twentieth century, which almost exactly coincided with his own lifespan, Alferez has shown Woman rising upward while Man, going nowhere, covers his face in shame.

Modern classical figurative sculpture has been so thoroughly banished into the dustbin of history, it’s as if such recent examples could not possibly exist. Sometimes it is worth less than the cost of its materials. But living outside the mainstream of contemporary art, the National Museum of Mexican Art continues to show many kinds of recent art that visitors to other museums will never see. It’s leadership holds firm to those same social ideals that drove the Mexican muralists and printmakers in the early twentieth century. They show art that best addresses the human condition as they see it.. Artworld prestige and auction value are not especially relevant.

Richard Schmid Legacy at the Palette and Chisel Academy

Richard Schmid, "Nancy and  Rose at the Met"

If John Singer Sargent had just painted the popular Spanish dancer, Carmen Dauset, in 2018 it’s not likely it would be shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, as it was in the same year it was painted, 1890. It’s way too outdated. But is it really? Aren’t contemporary viewers still thrilled by this poised young woman with the arched eyebrows, ruby red lips, and ornate, billowing gold and silver skirt? Isn’t that why the Art Institute is showing posters of this painting all over the city to attract visitors to the special Sargent exhibit now on view? Many professional artists continue to produce similarly attractive, upbeat works with more or less success. Why won’t major American museums – even the ones that claim to be encyclopedic-- ever select the very best contemporary examples of this genre for display? Perhaps the dichotomy between avant garde and kitsch has not yet been retired. We can just note that this kind of painting has its own collectors, galleries, and pantheon of celebrated practitioners, including Chicago born artist and teacher, Richard Schmid. (b. 1934). His pieces now sell into the low six figures.

The Schmid paintings in this show are not among his very best – but they do display some of his characteristic qualities. There is a precision in the layered application of brush strokes and a control of pictorial space with edges sharp or soft. There is a calligraphic intensity to the designs, and his brush always seems to have carried just the right amount of paint. His work has breezy lightness and charm rather than the power and glory of earlier masters – but isn’t that more appropriate for our less heroic age? In contrast to the slow, meticulous French atelier approach that has had such a resurgence over the past thirty years, Schmid cultivates spontaneity. As in Chinese brush painting, a rapid, alla prima execution demands a thoroughly developed, methodical process - a process which the artist has presented in over a dozen books and videos published over the past four decades. Wherever he has lived around the country, he has attracted and instructed groups of devoted students.

This exhibit also includes the current work of six of the painters who studied with him in Chicago thirty years ago. All of them have gone in their own, sometimes quite different directions. As once featured in the National Portrait Gallery, Rose Frantzen has specialized in portraits of her neighbors in Maquoketa, Iowa. In this show she offers a wall-sized critique of modern urban life from a rural, yet not conservative, point of view. Why are Christian folks carrying guns in the street and why are black people so often their targets? Scott Burdick and Susan Lyon travel together around the world, giving painting workshops and depicting local color. They both seem to prefer the brash discordance and thick paint of Russian masters like Philip Malyavin.

Romel De La Torre’s tropical sensuality seems to come from an entirely different world of sensibility - yet his portraits follow Schmid’s practice of placing a precisely drawn face against a tempestuous background of expressive brush strokes. Likewise the portraits of Clayton Beck - though the facial expressions that Beck depicts do not flatter the model. He’s more of a realist than any of the other former students. His nudes have have a brute fleshiness much closer to Thomas Eakins than William Bouguereau.

How do these twenty-first century figurative painters compare with Sargent, Zorn, Chase, and the other painters of the Gilded Age now showing at the Art Institute? It does seem that the pieces on display compare better with the magazine illustrators of that earlier era - appealing to a general audience rather than meeting the aesthetic demands of those familiar with great painting. Such a comparison is not really fair, however, since the Art Institute can pick and choose pieces from museums around the country, including its own extensive collection, -- while the small art club that has assembled this show can only exhibit whatever each artist was willing to send. If you look online, for example, you will find several powerful portraits by Nancy Guzik that offer much more than the painfully sentimental depiction of a child that was sent to Chicago.

The exceptional pieces in this show are the small nudes executed by Clayton Beck and Romel De La Torre. They may exemplify the conventional male gaze - but heterosexual male eyes will probably always be fascinated by nubile flesh, and these artists have transformed that desire into fully realized arrangements of line and color.

Pictures from the exhibition have been posted here 

Jan Matulka at Thomas McCormick

untitled, 1940's

“By the mid-1940s Jan Matulka was no longer considered an important figure in the art world. His work thereafter decreased in quality.” ..Los Angeles County Museum of Art

One cannot argue with that first sentence since Matulka  had no exhibitions of current work after 1943. Moreover, hardly anything he made after 1940 has entered the collections of art museums.

But did his work really decrease in quality ?

Purist Composition, 1923

Only one piece in this exhibit predates 1940, a gouache on paper titled “Purist Composition” (1923). During that period, Jan Matulka (1890-1970) maintained a studio in Paris where he followed the latest trends in Modernism. Purism, as conceived by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, was an architectonic variant of Cubism— suitable for making an interior space feel open, bright, and cheerful. That wasn’t the only kind of Modernism that Matulka practiced – but it does seem to lead directly into the kind of painting he would do twenty years later -- with some important differences. The shapes in his “Purist Composition” are as tightly held together as the visual features of a building. The edges are as sharp as paper cut by scissors. In the paintings from the 1940’s, however, the edges have grown soft and blurry, while the shapes have begun to wantonly float away, – as if there were no longer the energy or will to bind them together. It’s a kind of disintegration, but neither tragic, unhappy, or chaotic.. The shapes still have the memory of having been together. The composition is not yet lost, – it has just begun to wander. The effect is a delightful release of tension that seems untethered to any time or place. These paintings could just as easily been done yesterday as in New York during the forties. They are markedly different from the artist’s earlier work, as well as from the angst and heroics of the kind of abstract painting that was beginning to conquer the American art world. Acknowledging such anomalies, the McCormick gallery has called this body of work “the Mystery Paintings”.

As Hilton Kramer wrote in 1970, “Mr. Matulka is not the sort of painter who established an original idiom of his own. He looked to his contemporaries and his tradition—the modern tradition— — for his models.” But the Mystery Paintings would seem to contradict that. They may echo the compositions of Cubism and Surrealism from earlier decades, and they strongly .assert that rectangular picture window that characterizes five hundred years of the European tradition. Yet they also appear to be more about the secret life of colors than anything else. These were color field paintings more than ten years before Clement Greenberg used that phrase.

Each painting feels like a separate journey to a destination unknown. Usually they are playful, energetic, and surprising. Some colorful rhapsodies may verge on the psychedelic, though mostly they are as quiet and tasteful as the Upper East Side neighborhood where the artist then lived. Do they belong in the Museum of Modern Art? Probably not. But they certainly can sustain repeated viewing - while a few might even belong in museums that take a less doctrinaire look at the history of twentieth century painting.