Mary Porterfield at Hofheimer Gallery

Mary Porterfield at Hofheimer Gallery

Mortality is a subject which most of us would prefer to ignore. In our time more effort goes towards delaying the inevitable rather than imagining an afterlife above or below. Eventually technology will probably halt the process of aging - but until then, we can expect the relentless physical and mental deterioration of ourselves and everyone we love. It’s a friggin nightmare. Professional caretakers and those with aging parents, however, have to face it every day. Mary Porterfield is both and she can effectively share her feelings since she is also a well trained figurative artist.

Most of the pieces in this exhibit feature a very old woman who seems off-balance, both physically and mentally. When she's not falling, she’s crawling across the floor. When she stares back at us, or at herself in the mirror, she appears to have difficulty with comprehension and recognition. She’s not really sure who she is or where she’s going.

The drama is enhanced by the severity of Porterfield’s figure drawing. Volumes are often built with intersecting planes, as if they were carved with a sharp chisel. She makes it even more grim and urgent by restricting herself to just one grayish color. Unlike the Charles White monochromes seen last year at the Art Institute of Chicago, however, Porterfield does not give us dark areas that feel rich or light areas that feel brilliant. She wants to share pain and despair, not pleasure. And to increase a sense of disorientation, she paints on translucent layers of glassine where one ghost-like picture plane dissolves into another. Which is real and which is a dream ? The viewer is just as puzzled as the senescent subject.

It’s her strong, overall shapes that sometimes keep these pieces from being totally depressing. They recall the large, powerful volumes seen in monochromatic reproductions of a late Medieval painter like Giotto. The only pieces that maintain formal strength throughout are Porterfield’s depictions of hands. They may be boney and arthritic, but they still express ability and strength of purpose.

By contrast, the largest piece in the exhibit, the eight-foot long “Act 1- the Indecision”, is mostly just confusing.. The narrative of devoted caregiving is explained by signage posted to the right — but it still leaves me puzzled. Why are there so many skeletons of gigantic birds walking about? It feels more absurd than tragic. The artist is apparently ambivalent about the self sacrifice of those who care for the hopeless - just as I am ambivalent about her art in this show. It addresses something fundamental to the human condition with monochromatic graphics similar to the art of German expressionists like Käthe Kollwitz. Unlike their pieces, however, I’m not left feeling thrilled and uplifted by the experience of human dignity under duress, I’m just left feeling dismayed. And I can read the daily news if I want that.

Manet and Modern Beauty : Art Institute of Chicago

Spring

As Gloria Groom, chair of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, recently told New City Art : “Toward the end of his life, when Manet was contemplating where his major works might be seen together, he said to his friend [French journalist] Antonin Proust, ‘I must be seen whole.’

And who would not want to see a retrospective of Manet’s major works, going all the way back to the “Absinthe Drinker” (1859) . According to one leading professor of modern art theory, Thierry de Duve: “Manet is where the adventure of modern art takes off”

Regretfully, this exhibition is nothing like that -- not even for the major works of Manet’s last ten years. It includes three pieces that were submitted to the salon: “Boating” (1874) , “The Conservatory” (1879), and “Spring”(1882). Mostly, however, it includes sketches, ephemera, and unfinished projects - many found in his studio at the time of his death. There are a few charming portraits and many pleasant florals. These are, however, the kind of things that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of sensitive, well-trained, observational artists have been producing ever since the Renaissance, right up through today. Do they really reveal anything of importance about this artist or his contribution to art history?

The most glaring absence is “The Bar at the Folies-Bergere”, the artist’s final salute to the thrilling demi-monde that had been so important to his life (and brought about his early death). Submitted to the 1882 salon along with “Spring”, its presence might have made that portrait of a young actress feel more like a meditation on mortality rather than a celebration of modern life and beauty. It’s not just the somber expression on the woman’s face that might lead us in that direction - it’s also the tight triangular compositional elements that box the lady in, and the long jagged slash of thick black paint that stretches across her throat. (to experience that thick blackness, the painting must be seen in person). The final painting in the exhibition, “House at Rueil”, done the same year, is also foreboding, as a heavy, great tree splits the canvas in two and obliterates the charming sunlit portico behind it with a chilling sense of finality.

“Boating” and “The Conservatory” are the pieces in this show that are really worth the price of admission.  Many artists can make quick, charming, mimetic sketches - and many such pieces in this show really aren’t that good - which is only to be expected with an artist who dares to experiment. But to give large figurative paintings such as these a sense of thrill, immediacy, luminosity, and social reality —- as if they had captured all the life in a moment in time — that is truly remarkable. There’s nothing uniquely  modern about that - but it remains quite an achievement.

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Though not as important as the painting,  it's hard to totally ignore exhibition signage, both online and attached to gallery walls. Apparently as an encore to a successful 2013 exhibition, "Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity”, curatorial staff has suggested that the paintings in this show offer a “radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity.” Perhaps that might apply to the choice of garment as in the “Young woman in riding costume” (1882). But in that painting, as elsewhere, the fashionable details have been ignored by the loose technique. The signage also tells us: “he simultaneously approached smaller works more fluidly and spontaneously, taking up pastel and watercolor “- as if all his earlier work felt less spontaneous and never involved watercolors --  "unapologetically embracing beauty and visual pleasure” — though many of these smaller works, especially the still lifes of fruit, feel as uncomfortable as the ailing artist must have often felt himself.

The Art Institute is apparently  mostly concerned with building Manet as a brand ("The painter of modernity") to attract more visitors.   One should listen carefully to a good teacher - but might well ignore good pitchmen. They are not pursuing the truth.

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It's been a few years since the Chicago dailies had anything like a dedicated art critic (when was Alan Artner fired ?) --  so what passes for art journalism in the Chicago Tribune today is Steve Johnson's interview with Gloria Groom

In that interview she doubles down on "Spring" as an embodiment of Modern Beauty - then and now. "It was beautifully painted. It was like a fashion plate. Everything about it was understandable, legible, done.”

She goes even further to assert that "toward the end of a shortened life, Manet  was speaking eloquently in a new language. It took feminist art historians working in universities in the last couple of decades to start the reconsideration and their work informs this exhibition."

"The oils, pastels and watercolors gathered here seem, tantalizingly, to articulate a never fully realized alternative vision for the future of modern painting -- Fresh, intimate, and unapologetically pretty, Manet’s late works demonstrate his fierce embrace of beauty and pleasure in the teeth of acute physical suffering.”

I would like to read what a feminist art historian has to say about a male artist who painted women as well as buying their sexual services -- but that's probably not relevant to the general public  to whom this show was targeted.

As we are later told, "Groom gave a long look, then a smile. When you’re in the European painting business, apparently, public confusion between Claude-with-an-O and Edouard-with-an-A is like an oft-told joke."

Perhaps attendance statistics will ultimately prove that this art-business event was a success.

But as an art-culture event, it seems like a poor use of the museum's cultural authority, gallery space and curatorial time.  It's greatest contributions  were bringing over "The Conservatory" from Germany and the consequent substitution of Caillbotte's "Floor Scrapers" for his "Rainy Day in Paris".

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This show was also reviewed by Jason Farago in the New York Times.

I felt the absence of "Bar at the Follies Bergere" - while Farago added two  more:

The glaring absences in this exhibition — even more than the “Bar” — are Manet’s 1881 portrait of the exiled Communard Henri Rochefort, as well as his two late great seascapes, both titled “Rochefort’s Escape” and painted in 1880-81. As Mr. Allan writes in the catalog, Manet’s last years coincided with “an epochal political shift leftward” in France, and these maritime paintings with a political prisoner form the last act in Manet’s long interweaving of historical painterly styles and current events.


We were both disappointed by the shows centerpiece, "Jeanne (Spring)".

I  thought it was more about death than beauty  -- while Farago wrote:

" May the gods of French painting forgive me, but “Jeanne” is a banal and overly refined picture, and its marriage of fashion and foliage tips exhibits a vulgarity wholly unlike the cool, careful “In the Conservatory.” "


But then - thanks to feminist scholarship - he walks it back:


Why do I value this early Manet so much more? It is only because I think art has a higher vocation than delivering joy? Or is it because, poor modern boy that I am, I have been trained by more than a century of artists and writers to be suspicious of beauty — that ruse, that luxury, that feminine thing? The received history of modern Western painting, over which Manet looms like our great bourgeois Allfather, can feel like a succession of attacks on beauty by generations of arrogant men, each more certain than the last that their art would at last redeem an ugly society. But Manet knew that there is as much rebellion and insight in a dress, a bouquet or even a pile of strawberries if he could see past their surfaces to the richness within. That is another path to modernity, grounded in what his dear friend Baudelaire, in “The Painting of Modern Life,” called “beauty, fashion and happiness.”


So now he no longer finds "Jeanne" to be "banal", "overly refined", and "vulgar -- just because some feminist scholars disagree?

Perhaps he needs to grow a new pair!

More seriously, we might realize that he is still offering that first opinion along with his second, and that neither is really his own  response to what he saw.  They are more like his idea of what sophisticated responses should be -- from the twentieth and then the twenty-first centuries.

In our time, art critics are not expected to make their own aesthetic judgments.

Finally, we have Stephen Eisenman in 'Art in America' querying whether Manet should be considered Modern at all - and offering the following by way of comparison with "Jeanne":

Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Jules Bastien-LePage, 1879

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Jeanne (Spring), from 1882, acclaimed by one critic at that year’s Salon as “an absolute masterpiece, the Mona Lisa of the master.” Like In the Conservatory, it is painstakingly rendered and pays great attention to the subject’s face, figure, and fashionable accoutrements. Critics inventoried the “pompadour dress,” “cabriolet hat,” “twenty-five button suede gloves,” and “café-au-lait parasol.” But unlike its Salon companion, The Bar at the Folies-Bergère (notably absent here), it provides no visual ambiguities, no frisson of degeneracy, and no challenge to the masculine, spectatorial gaze. It is every bit a salon picture, the equal of works by Alfred Stevens, James Tissot, and Jules Bastien-Lepage. (This last artist’s Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, for example, shown in the Salon of 1879,


I would agree that  "Jeanne" offers  no visual ambiguities, no frisson of degeneracy, and no challenge to the masculine, spectatorial gaze  --- but it does seem much more committed to form than the inventory of distinctive costume and facial features compiled by Bastien-LePage.

Were Modern painters more committed to form than their contemporaries in the Salon ?  I would say so --- but it's problematic to identify them  as "modern" since so many of their predecessors were no less committed to form than they were -- going all the way back to early cave painting, and all the way up to Ingres and Delacroix.

It's only since the late 19th century that sensitivity and commitment  to form became the topic of a conversation that needed the term "formalism".  It has been marginalized by the ascendance of  conceptual art and a university based art history based on ideas rather than visual experience.  Eisenman's concluding paragraph  serves well as an example:



Was Manet ever truly modern? Judging from the current exhibition, the answer is no. Or he was modern only when he was the least modern in the Greenbergian sense—when he embraced challenging, and even rebarbative, contemporary or historical subjects: ragpickers, prostitutes, drunks, female bartenders, and debauched picnics. Without that content, the result is a shallow formalism that is indistinguishable from fashion. 

Amy Sillman at Arts Club of Chicago

S1

Amy Sillman through August 3 - Arts Club of Chicago

As the title might suggest, “The Nervous System”  is an exhibition of art for those who think of human consciousness as biochemical rather than spiritual. It  reflects the trends, attitudes, and rigor of the contemporary university community. Mostly, the exhibit consists of  variations on a few simple shapes or patterns that have been applied to paper by silkscreen and then enhanced with brushed ink or acrylic paint. There are too many of these large pieces ( up to 60” on a side) to fit on the walls of the gallery, so dozens have been pinned together like laundry on a clothesline that’s been strung diagonally across the main gallery. The arrangement suggests the fresh data and prolific notes of a serious research project

Human heads, arms, legs, and genitals are identifiable among the jumbles of shapes -- not as the eye might see them in pictorial space, but as the mind/body might sense them sprawling out from the abdomen. There is a sameness about them, but a few pieces stand apart. In one, we are shown a network of thin, sinuous, interconnecting lines that resembles a diagram of a nervous system. In another, the page is empty except for what appears to be a crudely drawn human face staring at itself in a mirror. This might suggest that self awareness, no matter how clumsy and fragmentary, is indispensable to human cogitation.   Possibly, every other piece is equally significant- but like most notes from a research project, they may be intelligible only to other specialists in the field.

The exhibit also contains five large bluish/grayish oil paintings that seem to view American society from the bottom - suggesting the negative consequences rather than the prosperity and technology associated with Late Capitalism. This is also an ideology likely to be taught in universities. The piece titled “In Illinois” is its most explicit statement as it presents what appears to be homeless people lying in a gutter  (in a decade that has seen exponential growth in high-rise luxury apartments in Chicago)

Finally, there is one piece, titled simply “S1” that appears to be nothing more or less than a very good abstract painting based on portraiture and recalling the dynamics of an early Modernist like Picasso. It feels like a tough, gritty, hard fought triumph over adversity and despair. That’s not much different from several of the works on paper mentioned above, but rather than just suggesting a mental process, it appears to exemplify a mentality that is positive, cogent, resourceful, and effective. It does what all good work does - whether it’s painting or auto repair.

It’s doubtful whether these paintings will be advancing neuroscience or social justice other than to give some encouragement to those who actually are. But as paintings, they are a welcome conflation of visual intensity with emotions associated with dismay, confusion, struggle, resilience, and honesty. They expand the territory between nihilism and ecstasy with neither irony nor nostalgia — and with no specific references to current events however timely the exhibition feels.

Perhaps you could call it a refinement of that new American classicism that began to emerge in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Less personal and less heroic than the New York school, it  also seems less accessible and more elitist as well - something like the free form calligraphy practiced in the last millennium by Mandarin scholars in the Chinese tradition. It’s a nice way to contemplate the intractable difficulties of human existence from a safe, comfortable distance -  which is not to say that the artist ever really feels safe or comfortable.

Herman Aguirre at Zolla Lieberman

This is a disturbing exhibit. The young artist, a recent MFA from the School of the Art Institute, portrays a world of senseless violence. In the tradition of Francisco Goya, he expresses his dismay with stark and brutal frankness. But unlike his courtly predecessor, no frustrated ideals are invoked - no heroic struggle is suggested. This is not a tragedy - it’s a cruel, mind numbing reality that extends beyond the painting’s stretchers and pictorial plane to enter the viewer’s physical world in layers of thick, sculptured paint.

The subject matter can be as disgusting as fresh corpses stretched out beside a field of cabbages. Even when the artist is only depicting a pile of colorful trash, you’re sure it’s the stuff left behind by murder victims - proabably children. Yet still, the painting/sculpting is notably inventive and beautiful. The soggy corpse that is floating in a river is also floating elegantly across the gallery wall. Severed human heads are placed as carefully across a white sheet as Cezanne might have arranged apples and melons. The unthinkable has become normal - the awful has become aesthetic - and it creates a sense of moral urgency. The killing has got to stop.

Also presented is a series of fourteen self portraits in various degrees of brutal distortion. It’s as if the artist's face were some kind of over ripe fruit which has been repeatedly bashed beyond recognition. The results recall the monstrous self portraits of the aging Francis Bacon or Pablo Picasso. Yet there is a peacefulness about them and the gentler soul of a much younger man who is moved by the pain of others rather than himself. He empathizes with the victims of violence back in Mexico, but he grew up in Chicago, more than a thousand miles away. As a secular, contemporary artist he has chosen to represent a serious social issue. His images, however, often feel more spiritual than political. They seem to belong in a shrine rather than on a newspaper’s editorial page. If he ever feels like representing the bloodied martyrs of Christian iconography, that conventionalized  tradition could really use an artist of his freshness and power.

Todros Geller at the Spertus Institute

Poet of Black Thoughts

“Strange Worlds” (1928) was the most unforgettable painting in “They Seek a City: Chicago and the Art of Migration”, an exhibit mounted by the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Beneath an angled steel girder of the Chicago ‘L’, the hustle and bustle of the Loop is contrasted with the piercing red eyes and angular face of a wizened old immigrant from eastern Europe. The spell of the familiar is broken as workaday downtown Chicago is viewed as strange through the eyes of a stranger.

Strange worlds

That remarkable canvas was not permitted to travel the three blocks south on Michigan Avenue to the Spertus Institute,possibly climate control was the issue. Drawing mostly from their own collection, however, curators at the Spertus have assembled a variety of similar work by the same artist, Todros Geller.

An ominous feeling pervades most of these pieces, even in the folkloric “Yiddish Motifs”, (1926) a portfolio of seven woodcuts depicting Jewish life in Chicago. These are not the heroic workers or simple, honest peasants of Social Realism. These are Jews, a people who have intermittently but persistently been persecuted worldwide for over two millennia. The themes are ordinary enough, but the designs have a flat, angular dynamic that owes much to the German expressionism of that time. The storefronts on Maxwell Street feel a little too claustrophobic, the horseradish grinder a little too intense, and the Chasidic dance more desperate than joyous. There is nary a whiff of sentimental nostalgia. This is not Marc Chagall.

The exhibit includes many cityscapes of Chicago. They are all dark and foreboding, emphasizing the heavyset clunkiness of typical factories or residential property. It’s a cold, dark, scary world—even the Michigan Avenue bridge which, as seen from below, towers above the viewer like a medieval fortress.

Most dramatic are the pieces that seem to express the threat looming over the Jewish diaspora in the decade preceding the Holocaust. The historical narrative chosen was the story of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth Century self-proclaimed Messiah who converted to Islam when confronted by the Turkish Sultan. Geller depicts him with sympathy rather than contempt. The biblical narrative chosen was the book of Job. Possibly feeling that Job’s suffering was too great to be depicted, Geller focuses our attention on his three philosophical friends who notably fail to empathize with his situation. He depicts them with oversized heads, much like the comic coneheads seen on Saturday Night Live forty years later. More tragic is his woodcut from 1937, “The past shall not be repeated”. Given its own vitrine in the center of the gallery, it depicts a mass execution of Jews being burned at the stake. The design is rent with fire, terror and dismay. It might be considered a psychotic, paranoid vision except that it turned out to be all too prophetic.

The Past Shall Not be Repeated

This is identity-based art, though more as a “hedge against assimilation” for the hundred thousand Yiddish speakers in Chicago rather than to confirm the moral superiority of an elite and compassionate art world. Aesthetics is mostly not given high priority. None of the oil paintings have the mystery, glow, liveliness, and appeal of “Strange Worlds”, which only appears here as a rather mediocre reproduction. “The Poet of Black Thoughts” (1929), however, has a lot to offer. Four elegant blackbirds swirl around the thoughtful face of a sensitive young poet. It may be the earliest example of the kind of self-centered, whimsical, psychological realism that would soon dominate figure painting in Chicago.

The Hairy Who at the Art Institute of Chicago

Why did the Hairy Who shows attract so much attention back in the 1960’s? All six of them have been partially recreated at the Art Institute of Chicago, so now we can see for ourselves. Not only do the large paintings consistently deliver a wallop, but the six participating artists are quite different from each other - beginning with the two painters who hatched the project at the very beginning: Jim Nutt and Art Green.


Jim Nutt paints human figures that are so uncomfortable they seem to be jumping out of their own skins. Brutally distorted, boogers erupt from the nose; elaborate sores blossom from the flesh. As human beings they are horribly and/or humorously afflicted - yet as paintings they are wonderfully crafted with a variety of materials. The colors bold and beautiful, the designs restless and dynamic; the back painted plexiglass illuminating the room with an eerie glow


Art Green paints ideas. If a human body, or anything else, needs representation, it’s notational rather than expressive. The identity of the objects depicted is obvious: a fiery smokestack, a heavy cannon, an ice cream cone, an automobile tire. The juxtapositions, however, are so puzzling, puzzlement itself appears to be the intended meaning. Our manufactured world is a rent with contradictions. The one piece that delivers that message most explicitly is “Consider the Options, Examine the Facts, Apply the Logic” According to the artist, it depicts Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, as he “applied his rational mind to an irrational situation” (the war in Vietnam)


Karl Wirsum, added to group by Don Baum, presents the madcap, boundless energy of a hyperactive ten year old rather than any emotional or philosophical angst. Yet there is nothing careless or juvenile about his work. He has compressed all that high voltage into the strong colors and jagged lines of a graphic design. Most of the characters he presents are fun, wacky, and mysterious rather than afflicted or alienated. The outrageous, nubile women of his “Show Girl” series might be threatening -  but only to a pre-adolescent male.


Jim Falconer is closer than any of the others to canonical modern art instead of various kinds of popular, commercial graphics. His impressive “Can in Sky” recalls the dynamic, loosely figurative surrealism of Arshile Gorky. It was not included in any of the Harry Who exhibitions, however, which featured his more cartoonish creations. It’s not surprising that he chose to opt out of the last Hairy Who show at the Hyde Park Art Center, or that his most recent Chicago show was utterly non figurative. Joining the Hairy Who was just something he did in his mid twenties – it did not establish the direction of his career.


All these artists grew up in the 1950’s, a time when gender differences were more sharply drawn in America than they are today. Girls played with things that were soft and cuddly; boys played with things that were threatening or creepy. Boys were expected to grow up to make, fix, or sell stuff - girls would grow up to be consumers.  Boys were exclusively focused on themselves - girls were more sensitive to human interactions. Both the form and content of the work done by the two women in the group differ from their male counterparts in a similar way.


Suellen Rocca is more puzzled than anxious about gender identity. Her contour lines are wavy and comforting rather than tight and threatening. Her graphics relate more to mail order catalogs rather than cartoons or comic books. Her work invites calm, meticulous study rather than forcing an emotional reaction.


Gladys Nilsson is more concerned with social interaction.   Don’t girls develop social skills before boys do? Her watercolors resemble the graphic styles of those children’s books that present a gentle, humorous world that may be strange but is never really threatening. Her silly characters appear to be stoned if not tripping as they float across the page like brightly colored balloons.


Compared with the most renowned exhibition ever organized by American artists, New York City’s 9th Street Art Exhibition of 1951, the Hairy Who shows were rather modest. The number of artists involved was six instead of sixty, and their careers had yet to emerge. They were hardly announcing the arrival of a new avant garde to accompany a new social order, spiritual awakening, or understanding of the human condition. Instead, like the popular music of the time, they announced the arrival, and discontent, of a new generation. They were born in the same years as Bob Dylan (1941), Jerry Garcia (1942), Jim Morrison (1943). Jimi Hendrix (1942) and David Crosby (1941). Propelled by commercialization, this was a generation that would arrive with much greater fanfare than any that had preceded it.


Artworld fashions come and go. The artists and collectors of New York would soon move beyond the the abstract expression that was trending in 1951. But adolescents in the modern world will always rebel against the responsibilities of adult life and the injustice, irrationality and glaring stupidity of convention.  And so, fifty years later, the brash defiance of the Hairy Who continues to resonate. A remarkable variety of Chicago’s most talented artists also respond to the world with youthful dismay and sometimes accompany the display of their work with mass produced paraphernalia - offered not with irony but with sincere admiration. Think of Tony Fitzpatrick and his collection of bird figurines, Marcos Raya with his Mexican plastic skeletons, Phyllis Bramson with her porcelain romantic couples, and David Leggett with a vitrine full of children’s toys relatable to racial identity.

One might note that like the artists listed above, the Hairy Who's art demonstrated many of the traditional skills of making visual art - especially contour line drawing.  But unlike them, the Hairy Who demonstrated little or no concern for social justice.

As Richard Vine noted in his review of “Art in Chicago since 1945”, this work has the “in-your-face quality that once made art in Chicago intellectually mordant-and outrageously fun.” And just like the 1997 show he saw at the MCA, this show at the Art Institute creates a “tension between the often irreverent, high-energy works on display and the institutional sterility of their setting.”


But when will we get a uniquely Chicago kind of art that can seriously exemplify any kind of social or spiritual ideals? Will we always be the smart alecks who sit in the back of the classroom and draw clever/cruel caricatures of the teacher? When will Chicago art ever grow up ?

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Suellen Rocca,"Game"

Karl Wirsum

Jim Falconer, "Can in Sky"

Art Green,
 “Consider the Options, Examine the Facts, Apply the Logic”

Phyllis Nilsson, "Physically Outphyted"

Jim Nutt, "Miss E. Knows"

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Chris Reeves reviews the show in  New City, and concludes:

 However, the work in this show speaks to a 1960s custom that gets too short a shrift in contemporary art-historical conversation: the notion of riskiness, of attempting something so wild and hairy (excuse the pun) that it almost doesn’t make any sense. That these works in smaller spaces on two floors can be more uncomfortable, hilarious, daring and baffling than the entirety of an international art showcase that takes up the whole of Navy Pier is a testament not only to the spirit of the 1960s, but what’s missing in contemporary art today.


By contrast, I am consistently more baffled by many things at Art Expo. Often I ask: Why are they showing me this? Why should I pay any attention to it?   Most of the pieces in the Hairy Who shows make a lot more sense to me -- but then -- I was also born in the 1940's.

And I would not say that riskiness or wildness are qualities worth pursuing.

Just being fully alive and trying to comprehend and deal with the consequences is wild and risky enough.

Charles White at the Art Institute of Chicago

"Preacher", 1952

This has been a summer of twentieth century American figurative art at the Art Institute of Chicago. John Singer Sargent presented the glamor of wealth, Ivan Albright shared the terror of mortality; but Charles White addressed something much more momentous: the ongoing struggle of America’s racially identified underclass. It’s the catastrophic national disgrace that’s embedded in our nation’s founding documents. After two hundred and fifty years of armed and political struggle, responses to the African-American experience still drive the campaigns and agendas of each and every national administration – as well as American popular music. White’s work has the prophetic gravitas required– especially his stark black and white linocuts. As pictorial space collapses, all energy is pulled into his figures – especially the powerful heads and hands. They are solid and earthbound like nothing else in American art.

Often, his work reached beyond the world of art collectors. The exhibit includes a study for his 1943 mural, “The contribution of the Negro to American Democracy” at Hampton University. It demands  social recognition and respect, while it's angular, imploding planes have all the jagged intensity of Picasso’s analytical cubism. The exhibit also includes his 1956 drawing “Oh Freedom” that was reproduced for a 1960 NAACP rally in Los Angeles that featured both John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It depicts a sturdy young man scattering seeds with an open, confidant gesture. Other than Abraham Lincoln and John Brown, all of the people that White depicts are black -- and all of them are sturdy.

White’s art participated in the consecutive political movements of his lifetime: from Communism to Civil Rights to Black Power. Yet it feels too vulnerable and personal to be just propaganda or political cartoon. As quoted within gallery signage, he once declared “Paint is the only weapon I have to fight what I resent”.

Born just one year after Jacob Lawrence, White is far removed from the ebullient aesthetic of the Harlem renaissance. His work is about struggle, not celebration. Often it is grim and unpleasant to view. When reduced to one shape and one color – like his linocut portraits - the pieces can be quite powerful and enjoyable, with faces honed by suffering.. Otherwise, they often feel confused, distorted, and cluttered. Over the course of his forty year career, however, one might note how his faces become more natural and his designs more lyrical.

It’s quite a journey from “Soldier” (1944) to “Banner for Willy.”(1976). Both work with tragic themes: an African American soldier fighting to preserve an unjust society against an even worse opponent -- followed thirty years later by a eulogy for his murdered uncle. Brutal, angular distortions have been replaced by more natural figuration within an almost beatific design. The artist has moved from black is strong to black is beautiful - especially in the most recent piece in the exhibit, “Sound of Silence” (1978), done one year before his death. A serious, vigorous looking youth seems to be conjuring up his inner spirit that takes the form of a twisting, fulsome conch shell. Nothing is going to stop that young man from leading the kind of life that he wants.

Much of the work in this show might best be called illustration as formal concerns take a back seat to emotional political narrative. One exception would be “Harvest Talk” (1953), the artist’s most explicit homage to the Soviet Social Realist art of that time. Not only do the characters feel as real as a documentary, but they flourish within rather than fight against the pictorial space that envelops them. It seems to sanctify both the men and the work that they are doing. Most postwar American art has been about the self expressive individual - defying social norms with heroic resistance, flagrant irony, or bitter alienation. This piece, however, celebrates humans in community with each other and the planet. It’s such a masterpiece. (though one might note that the Noble Farmer is a trope in Nazi as well as Soviet art)

"Harvest Talk", 1953

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Lee Ann Norman's New City review  also draws attention to "Harvest Talk", and adds some additional biographical information, including the following:



Most (Los Angeles) artists fell into one of two camps: those who valued traditional figuration to convey black pride and those who preferred newer techniques such as performance and abstraction, or assemblage to achieve those means. Eventually, White became influential enough to convince the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to focus on L.A. artists and include contemporary work rather than solely existing to compete with New York’s Metropolitan Museum or Chicago’s Art Institute and their dedication to old European masters. Soon, LACMA became one of the only places black artists living on the West Coast could show their work outside of their own neighborhoods.



This seems to suggest that White convinced someone at LACMA to show "the newer techniques" of African American expression, as well as the kind of "traditional figuration" that he himself practiced.  I wonder where one might find the source of such information.

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In the exhibition catalog, Kerry James Marshall also discusses the current retrospective while paying homage to his mentor:

"---- Simply emulating his work wasn’t enough for me; I tried to be Charles White in every way I could."

He singles out "Seed of Love" and "Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man" as " the most poignant creations of Charlie’s oeuvre. Put those alongside Francisco de Zurbarán’s Saint Serapion, and Saint Francis of Assisi according to Pope Nicholas V’s Vision"



He also notes that:



By the time I enrolled at Otis as a full-time student in January 1977, a revolution was under way. A catchall department called Intermedia—where conceptual art, video, performance, installation, and land art were routine—was advancing the newest wave of art theory. Those insurgents had just about completed their dismantling of traditional, humanist craft workers. The final stroke was the takedown of a medieval bronze statue in the campus quad of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, dragged down by a rope tied to the bumper of a truck driven by the chairman of that department. When the dust settled, everything I was drawn to Otis and Charles White to learn seemed to crumble as well.


This might suggest that, as far as Kerry James Marshall is concerned, the "traditional humanist craft" as practiced by Charles White could not co-exist with the new techniques introduced into art schools in the 1970's. He further noted that of the four black students then studying with White, he, Kerry James Marshall, was the only one who would have an art career "built primarily on figuration"

And then there's this provocative paragraph:


It was always clear with Charlie that to make good work, one had to know a thing or two about more than how to draw or paint. He had a scholar’s interest in history, which informed the work he made. He often said your work should be about things that mattered but reminded us all to concentrate on making the best drawings we could, adding, “the ideas will take care of themselves.” Similarly, the art historian and theorist Rosalind Krauss, writing about the conceptual photographer Cindy Sherman, critiques the tendency of analysts to privilege meaning in an artist’s work over the mechanisms that structure our comprehension of it: “Sherman’s doll photos are a statement of what it means to refuse to an artist the work that he or she has done—which is always work on the signifier—and to rush headlong to the signified … the constructed meaning, which one then proceeds to consume as myth.”


At this point in time, such a statement might seem reactionary, conservative, and backward.

If, or when, the status of "the newer techniques" falls below that of traditional figuration  -- such a statement may appear prophetic.

Among African-American artists who address African-American identity,  the conceptual/installation/perfomance/assemblage types seem to be the majority among those who show in prominent local venues: William Pope L., Rashid Johnson,  Theaster Gates, David Leggett, and Tony Lewis are names that come to mind -- I'm sure I could recall more if such work interested me enough to go see it.

On the figurative side, the sculptor Preston Jackson is the only Chicago artist, other than Marshall, whom I can recall.  Nina  Chanel Abney, Greg Breda,  and Jennifer Packer have all shown recently in our area, but none live nearby.

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Deanna Isaacs in the Chicago Reader quotes the show's curator, Sara Kelly Oehler, that the artist:

 was dedicated to correcting the record on the African-American experience.

She goes on to note:


His larger-than-life portrayals of African-Americans (both famous and anonymous) radiate substance, presence, and agency. They were deliberate correctives to the rampant misrepresentation of blacks in white-controlled mainstream history and art.

One interesting example might be White's posthumous portraits of Bessie Smith.

Here is a photo - presumably used by the singer and her promoters to promote her career.  She looks sassy and playful -- not  incongruent with a singer best known for "rough", provocative sex songs.

Here is Charles White's linocut portrait of the singer as a soulful, serious, suffering person who, if she sang anything, would be singing prayerful hymns.

Which portrait is an accurate portrayal?  Which is a rampant misrepresentation ?

Like his friend, Harry Belafonte, White would probably have been concerned with the celebration of recreational sex, drugs, and violence promoted by African American performers in the decades after his death.

He might also have been concerned with the aestheticization of failure as embodied by Theaster Gates' sculpture in a  recent show at Richard Gray

In both cases, it might be said that black artists are presenting negative portrayals of  black people for white businessmen to sell.

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Deanna Isaacs also shares an intriguing theory concerning the conch shell that appears in some of White's last paintings.  According to his son, it's a reference to the Caribbean origins of their family.