Franz Schulze : Made in Chicago - A Revisionary View

Franz Schulze (1927-2019)
Made in Chicago, A Revisionary View

 'Art In America',  March 1983

Seymour Rosofsky, "Housecake", 1975

In the decade following World War II, the best of Chicago painting and sculpture tended toward expressionist and surrealist idioms in which the figural image played a central role. New York style abstraction never drew much of a lakefront crowd. Among the first writers to discern this collective Chicago identity were Peter Selz and Patrick T. Malone, who, in 1955, offered an explanation of its motives and named Leon Golub, Cosmo Campoli, George Cohen, Joseph Goto and Ray Fink among its principal representatives.  (“Is there a new Chicago School, Art News, October 1955, )


Golub, Campoli, and Cohen appeared in the 2016 Monster Roster exhibition at the Smart Museum.
Goto's  welded constructions were too far from figurative to join them. Fink soon moved to Arizona and spent most of his career teaching there.
Abstract Expressionism, said Selz and Malone, dealt with "the recording of the artist's process of working [and his] ineffable sensations," whereas the Chicagoans preferred "to clarify and intensify ... emotions about life and its meaning" and could find no better means to that end than the idiosyncratic image, variously mythic, solemn, brutal or fey, and not infrequently clumsy in its urgency. Thus, from another vantage point, as Irving Sandler wrote in his book The New York School, "The Chicagoans' approach was alien to most New Yorkers, and so was their indifference to aesthetic quality." (The New York School, The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties”, 1978)



New York School artists focus on themselves; Chicagoans depict how they feel about the surrounding world.  Would that be more precise?

(this image accompanied the essay)

Robert Barnes, "Lido", 1982

There was surely no lack of "aesthetic quality"-which I take to mean something roughly akin to formal authority- in the lyrical surrealism of Irving Petlin and Robert Barnes or in the fantastic constructions of H. C. Westermann, all of whom matured in Chicago somewhat later, in the middle to late 1950s, and a few Chicago artists of that period (e.g., Golub, Westermann) did succeed in attracting national attention, though usually after leaving town. Nevertheless, Chicago art failed throughout the '60s to establish any substantial or widespread reputation for itself as a movemento of consequence. New York, it would appear, maintained not only a devotion to the formal element in art, but a coolness toward the saturated imagery which appeared in the work of Chicago artists over several generations. Indeed, the Pop-influenced figurists whose raunchy vernacular captured Chicago's imagination in a series of group shows at the South Side Hyde Park Art Center in the late '60s.  Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum and Roger Brown best known among the individuals, the Hairy Who among the combos-at first made a conscious point of relishing the neglect they perceived as being emitted in waves from Manhattan.



The Art Institute has also been less than enthusiastic towards saturated imagery - right up through it’s current director whose list of important local artists does not include any imagists. (Crain’s Chicago Business, 2016)

It's rather outdated, perhaps intentionally,  to make “formal authority” the equivalent of “high aesthetic quality”.  What about contemporary landscapes? No matter how beautifully they’ve been painted, the authority of their form will be not be acknowledged within an art world that prioritizes the conceptual.




Repeat: at first. Autres temps, autres moeurs. Chicago has persisted in its figurative ways, even down to the present day with the recent emergence of a group of conscious primitivists and punksters (e.g., Hollis Sigler, Joseph Hilton, Will Northerner, Neraldo de la Paz). But the world in general and New York in particular have undergone a considerable change of heart and mind about Chicago. They are now unprecedentedly cognizant of Chicago as a place where art is made, and often sympathetic to its tilt of mind. "Aesthetic quality" evidently has been redefined. Peter Schjeldahl, writing early in 1981, coined the term "Chicagoization" to suggest the growth, even in Manhattan, of a taste that seemed most readily associated with Chicago.3 (Village Voice, Jan 21, 1981)

Joseph Hilton

Hollis Sigler

Will Northerner

Neraldo de la Paz

It is easy enough to trace some if not all of the reasons for this shift of national temper. Figurative art as a whole made a post-Abstract-Expressionist comeback with Pop Art, and it has managed to maintain a high profile • through Realism, Photo Realism, NeoExpressionism and successive smaller emanations in between. Some of these, like comic strip art, graffiti, "metro art" and "bad painting," are especially close to the flip, anti-intellectual mindset of the last Chicago generation. The Hairy •who and their followers are, after all, nothing if not given to hard urban imagery and the sly, disabused wit of the streets. It is enough to think of Ed Paschke's eyeball-rattling geeks, drag queens and tv ghosts, or the pimply little bacterial people in Jim Nutt's drawings who spend most of their time humping each other or thinking about it, or Roger Brown's billowy landscapes in which bungalows shaped like artgum erasers are juxtaposed with roller coasters and highways and cloud formations that undulate like hair in a Clairol ad.

Roger Brown

This is the stuff that has finally won over New York, or so we understand out here in Chicago, where, when we see four-color reproductions of Chicago art on the covers of major magazines, we blink, especially if we think back to the days when those journals tucked tout Chicago securely in the back of every issue, or every other issue, in the little corner reserved for the colonials and other inconsequential types.


 But if New York likes latter-day Chicago art, you should see Chicago. The collectors here trip over each other to buy Paschke, Nutt, Brown and the other Imagists, as they are collectively called,4 and the buyers, aspiring to become collectors, are only a half-step behind. For a time in the mid-'70s it appeared that a group of strong-minded abstractionists (including Vera Klement, Tony Giliberto, Andrea Blum and Roland Ginzel) was congealing in Chicago and ready to challenge the Imagists for local leadership. Inspired by the recollection that Laszlo MoholyNagy had revived the Bauhaus in Chicago in the late '30s, they claimed the existence of, and their own allegiance to, "The Other Tradition."

Vera Klement, 1977

Tony Giliberto

Andrea Blum

Roland Ginzel

 Their effort apparently has failed, partly perhaps because the Moholy "tradition" in Chicago is historically more alive in photography and in industrial and graphic design than in painting and sculpture, partly because Chicago abstraction, regarded collectively, has always somehow looked less persuasive than the Real Thing, namely what you see in New York.


I guess Schulze did not mention Miyoko Ito because she had recently died - though I wonder why he didn't mention William Conger or Thomas  Kapsalis.

Today, there are several very good  local abstract painters who show at Thomas McCormick. Several others, like Bruce Thorn, are occasionally shown elsewhere. But many, like Tony Giliberto mentioned above,  or Molly Zuckerman-Hartung more recently,  end up moving to New York City.

Much of the abstract painting that's shown in Chicago comes from artists located elsewhere.


  Since Imagism is riding such a crest among Chicago's artists, art students, collectors and feature journalists, the question naturally arises: how good is it, especially by comparison with all the previous Chicago art that languished so long in isolation?


And this is why I love the art criticism of Franz  Schulze -- he asks this kind of question.
And below -- he answers it quite well.

Though questions of quality have been more or less suppressed in the currently sanguine atmosphere, there have been times, especially in the past five years, when the gradual change in manners among the latest and most highly publicized generation of Chicagoans, the Hairy Who and friends, has made such issues seem relevant to raise. Most of these painters, particularly Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum and Suellen Rocca, looked crude when they first showed publicly in the '60s, but their work had a strident vigor about it and one felt no need to excuse it on grounds of the rough edge of their youth, since that seemed the very source of their vitality. Over the next few years Nutt advanced beyond the others, until, by the early '70s, his drawing was as razor-sharp as his imagery and, in combination with his meanness and wit, marked him as the most promising of his circle. Ed Paschke and Roger Brown, who also needed time to grow up, took it, developing more compellingly personal styles as they gained in painterly facility.


 During the later '70s and the early '80s, however, the scale of Nutt's work has diminished, along, evidently, with his ambition and the freshness of his humor. Distended genitals are funny only so long. Roger Brown, meanwhile, has arrived at a form of stylish, almost perfumed pattern painting, and remained there. Paschke today looks like the only painter identified with this group whose work has continued to progress in richness of handling, not to mention intensity of concept, without losing any of its strength. His retrospective at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago last season disclosed a purposeful evolution of style guided by a first-rate critical intelligence. The early works, swaggering and vulgar, had nonetheless been often garrulous, busy, circus-posterish. Paschke proceeded to edit them rigorously in the early '70s, casting out superfluities and ending up with the compacted, belligerently glitzy personnages that finally drew national attention to him. His latest paintings, reminiscent of television images, are more elegantly low-key, but no less serious, thoughtful, even powerful.


All of the above seems quite perceptive.





Meanwhile, his colleagues-Gladys Nilsson, Barbara Rossi, Ray Yoshida, Robert Lostutter, Christina Ramberg- have, along with Nutt and Brown, become more technically sophisticated, but their new refinement has also softened the impact of their imagery rather than concentrating its energy or adding to its affective force. Nutt, Brown and Yoshida, especially, have become markedly decorative in manner, tending toward the diagrammatic in drawing, toward a regularity of planar pattern and a meticulousness of line whether in the form of arabesque or zig-zag. These artists, then, are all in all a most graceful bunch. Their work hangs handsomely on the walls of North Shore mansions and Lake Shore Drive apartments, which fact makes their present popularity understandable. Their art is basically easy on the eyes, and they have retained just enough of their original tongue-in-cheek, occasionally coarse, funky vernacular to persuade most local collectors that the tough-guy look, so precious to the Chicago tradition in all things, endures among them.

 In lieu of a grappling match with reality, younger Chicago artists have labored to define individual "looks" and have pursued formal polish, with the result that theirs is primarily a mannerist art. 


A rather withering critique



 But does it? The sinister lingerie, the leather jackets, all the intentionally snide little sexual innuendos have gained not so much in imagistic strength as in suavity, in demureness, as the artists have become more and more facile. It turns out, then, that the most accomplished of the latter-day Imagists are not so much like as unlike the best of the earlier Chicago generations. That spoils the theories of a number of critics, myself included, who for a long time believed in a lineal descent from the immediate postwar Chicago generation to that of the present day, and who perceived in both an identifiable strain of art based on the figure as powerful metaphor. The Hairy Who did seem to look like the sons of their fathers for a while. They no longer do.


Even more withering.

 If that change has gradually been growing apparent over the last few seasons, the situation was singularly clarified last fall when two solo exhibitions opened almost simultaneously in Chicago. One was a showing of Leon Golub, his first local appearance in years, at the Young-Hoffman Gallery. The second, at Jan Cicero, featured Theodore Halkin, Golub’s contemporary, who never left Chicago but has also been seen here hardly at all lately. Golub offered some of the same works he had shown with such success at Susan Caldwell in SoHo in 1981: huge canvases of super-lifesize mercenary soldiers engaged in acts of brutality that were all the more numbing because of the implacably stoic mood of the narratives and the dry precision with which Golub executed them. Halkin was represented by a group of drawings and paintings, likewise realistic but temperamentally far more lyrical, of the commonest table still lifes and backyard garden scenes.

Leon Golub, Interrogation III, 1981

Ted Halkin, "Garden Shed", 1982

Different as they were, the two shows made a stunning impact in tandem. Halkin had never demonstrated such simple devotion to the seen world, or carried it off with such manifest authority. Golub's works were so grimly unremitting that some viewers admitted they could not, as one put it, "deal with them"-that they could not face --images so withering. Notwithstanding, Golub's paintings were the most powerful he had shown here since the Gigantomachies of the turn of the '70s, perhaps even since the eroded colossi of the early '60s.


I saw some of those Interrogation paintings in Golub's big show at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2003.  They felt pretty raw -- lots of anger and dismay about the world.  Was that feeling really shared by those who could afford to buy them?

The Halkin garden painting, shown above, really is unique for that artist -- at least on the internet.  Most available Halkin images are quite distant from pleasant florals.  I'm surprised that Schulze made so much of them. After all, there are quite a few local painters who work in that genre -- and  Schulze does not mention them in this survey of Chicago art at all.




The Golub-Halkin exhibitions abruptly brought into focus, on Chicago ground, the work of two or three Chicago generations who had been part of the pre-Hairy Who scene. It was recalled that one of Young-Hoffman's best exhibitions of.the 1981-82 season was that of June Leaf, another Chicagoan of the '50s, now living in Nova Scotia, whose gift for visionary images rendered in a jarring expressionist technique seemed to have only gained in force as it evolved over the years. In this context, one noted that the last two shows of Ellen Lanyon at Richard Gray had revealed a notably enriched palette and a surer command of drawing, both articulating more convincingly than ever the world of magical symbols that has preoccupied her over the past decade. Knowledge of Irving Petlin's impressive performance at the 1982 Venice Biennale was also fresh, and catalogues of his recent Marlborough shows on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to demonstrate that the hushed, surreal landscapes he has dwelled on in recent years were painted with as much sensitivity as ever, yet more muscle. Meantime, Seymour Rosofsky's death in 1981 had prompted his friends to rummage through his studio, where his last works also suggested a sustained vitality of paint and narrative invention.

Petlin and Leaf have pretty much disappeared from Chicago exhibitions, while Lanyon and Rosofsky have been more widely shown.

I reviewed Lanyon here

and Rosofsky here

June Leaf, "Wind Machine", 1980

Ellen Lanyon, "Allegorical Transition", 1982

 While all of these artists have undergone marked shifts of style since their youthful years in the '40s and '50s, their fundamental attitudes toward the expressive act have remained intact. Each has always taken experience, whether personal or mythic, as the primary energizing factor of his art, and then sought to transform it metaphorically into painting or sculpture. Thus, while Leon Golub's concentration in his latest work on universal issues of morality and politics is virtually opposite from Ted Halkin's preference for specific encounters drawn from his prosaic daily life, both confront their individual realms of experience directly as they make their art.


 This does not seem to be the case with the younger Chicago group, who intentionally maintain a distance from experience in fashioning their works, separating themselves from it by a layer, if not to say a shield, of irony. It is the ironic commentary on experience (not necessarily their own) that they paint; hence the cool, detached mood of their work, the sense of an invulnerability of feeling that they paint. Moreover, in lieu of a grappling match with felt experience, they have labored to define and distinguish their individual "looks," their personas, a process which also accounts for their increasing pursuit of formal polish. Theirs is primarily a mannerist art; expressionism and surrealism are secondary, more like the cut of a suit than the material it is made of. Both points of view, that of the new Chicago and that of the old, can be seen to stand for the values of the worlds the two generations grew up in. Golub, Halkin and their contemporaries matured during World War II, which means they knew Hiroshima and Auschwitz and felt, even if indirectly, the existential horror summoned up by those names. Nutt, Paschke, Brown et al. were products of the Vietnam years, when that horror was in no way diminished and was in fact complicated by a dense mesh of moral perplexities. But during the latter period collective psychic defenses were raised against both the burden of experience and the necessity to form a world view that might cope with it. One consequence was that irony assumed a major place in the artist's scheme of expressive values.


That unchanging refinement of an ironic "individual look" would also seem to apply, more or less,  to Gladys Nilsson, Karl Wirsum, Phyllis Bramson, Richard Hull, Paul Lamantia, and Robert Lostutter





 Pity the artist. At any rate, pity the Chicago Imagist artist of the last generation, whose early promise has, in too many cases, been thwarted by some inability to grow beyond a bumptious but callow first statement to something more existentially importunate than the run-on sniggering salon joke, the stylish, narcissistic pose, the impotent world view.


Whack  ! Whack ! Whack !  There are sharp words to be  published in a national publication -- and even worse, coming from a home-grown art critic.  But 35 years later, the reputation of the leading Imagists has hardly diminished.


 On the other hand, there is no need to overdo the sympathy. If the moral challenge of the post-Vietnam period is intricate and difficult, there is no less an imperative to meet it, and surely no reason to adore those who don't. In fact the very latest Imagists, the punksters who have followed the Hairy Who, are, if anything, more glittery-cute than ever, and their promoters are hustling them to the hilt. Meanwhile, one recalls several Chicago artists of previous generations whose gifts and accomplishments were more impressive than those of all but one-Paschke-of the Hairies and neo-Hairies, but who never finished their tasks. Westermann, though covered with laurel, is dead, all too soon. Ditto Rosofsky, minus much of the laurel. Cosmo Campoli, one of the most brilliant and naturally talented sculptors of his generation, has apparently stopped working altogether. A tragic loss, Campoli's career could have been as important to Chicago as the oeuvres of a number of AbstractExpressionist sculptors-for example, Nakian and Lassaw- have been to New York, a comparison that suggests an irony in its own right, namely that the Chicagoans of the '40s and '50s, with their attitudes regarding existentialism, myth and high seriousness, may at last have had more in common with their ancient foes, the New York Abstract Expressionists, than with the Chicago artists of the past 15 years


... and a few more whacks for good measure!

I'm not surprised that Paschke was singled out and placed above the rest of the bunch.  His portraits, both pleasing and threatening,  prophesy an ever more silicone/electronic consciousness.  But I am surprised by the elevation of  Cosmo Campoli whose work, as shown in the recent Monster Roster show at the Smart Museum, appeared horrific in a grim, depressing way.

 Campoli, Jonah and the Whale , 1954, lead

In the pieces pictured in this essay, Campoli is almost as whimsical and upbeat as Nakian.  But these are more like jokes than expressions in form.

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Patrick T . Malone and Peter Selz, " Is There a New Chicago School?" A rt News, Oct. 1955, p. 36. 2. Irving Sandler, The N ew York S chool: The Painters and S culptors of the Fifties, New York, Harper and Row, 1978, p. 136. 3. Peter Schjeldahl, The Village Voice, Jan. 21, 1981. 4. The term " Imagist" was originally intended to refer to all post-World War II generations of Chicago expressionists and surrealists. Lately it has come to be popularly applied only to the artists of the Hairy Who, their contemporaries and their followers. For the sake of convenience the latter usage is followed in these remarks. 5. In spite of this common impression, Chicago has produced some excellent independent abstractionists, including, among recent generations and in addition to those already mentioned here, Martin Puryear, Richard Hunt, Kazys Varnelis, Kes Zapkus and the late Robert Nickle. Author: Franz Schulze teaches art and architectural history at Lake Forest College.

Kes Zapkus, Apotheosis for L.S.,  1988

I've never seen anything by Kazys Varnelis, Kes Zapkus or Robert Nickle.  Judging from the mind blowing piece shown above, I'd really like to see some pieces by Kes Zapkus.  He hasn't been shown in  Chicago since 1976.

******************

Overall, I agree with Schulze's ultimate rejection of  late 20th Century figurative art in Chicago.  Not to deny that it can be eye-catching, fun, and very well made.  But it's more like an adolescent's rebellion against the world than an adult commitment to its destiny. Which is  OK as a dissident perspective -- but rather disappointing and irresponsible as a mainstream - which is what it has become in Chicago.  Richard Vine confirmed that mainstream status ten years later in "Where the Wilds Things Were" , an "Art in America" review of the "Art in Chicago since 1945" exhibit at the MCA in 1995.  He felt that it was more mordant than I do -  yet he was also "touched by a nostalgia for the days when the city's best work was vital and unpredictable rather than safely-and somewhat deadeningly-catalogued"



 Our world needs to be led by smart, sane, compassionate  adults who are idealistic as well as practical -- and  Schulze himself depicted that kind of person in his own portraits of famous architects:

He also visited another frequent theme in European  art:

And he also did a rather revealing self portrait -- as a strong, aloof, and lonely character - possibly all too aware of his own inadequacies:

bearing a rather unfortunate resemblance to this salt-sucking vampire from Star Trek:

I wish that Schulze, who passed away this month at the age of 92, had devoted more of his life to art making. I also wish that he had kept his critical focus on painting instead of biographies of architects.

But still -- I can't think of any more perceptive critic of the Chicago art of his time.