Page 36 - Studio International - November 1973

These strategies may also find their response in urban renewal (to contain the ghetto) on the regionalist art which is strong on ecology,
Sib Paulo. other. the Chicago works are piquantly redolent of the
Perhaps, the most significant aspect of the What gives current Chicago art its particular great indoors. From the blatant sexuality of
Sao Paulo choice, however, is the fresh evidence flavour is its mix of naive, low-pop and Nutt's and Wirsum's figures to the restrained
it affords of a new temper affecting artists, ethnological art sources for imagery and style. suggestiveness of Christina Ramberg's
museums and schools as well as the NCFA. This connoisseurship of the vernacular is the close-ups of corsets; from the openly (if sadly)
Hilton Kramer and other critics have twelve artists' most important common provocative Paschke strippers to the covertly
commented at length on the growing characteristic. Their personal collections Freudian Disasters of Roger Brown, a basic
decentralization and democratization of the include such diverse items as children's premise for the mix of images in the majority
national art scene but an attendant phenomenon; illustrations tatto designs; pin-ball machines of these works is the primacy of the sexual
has almost escaped notice — a recrudescence of comic books; picture postcards; ads of imagination.
the New York-baiting, regionalist nostalgia of treatments for haemorrhoids, varicose veins and There is nothing obviously regional about
the thirties. Like the earlier regionalism, the unwanted hair; toys; dolls; gameboards; that premise, unless of course one takes the
bete noire of the new movement is the effete and circus, striptease and penny arcade posters; fact that Playboy too originated in the windy
intellectual east with its powerful financial and naive art; and fine examples of African, city as proof positive that Chicago is a hot bed of
institutional interests, i.e. New York. But American Indian and Pre-Columbian art. cultural aphrodisia. (As a matter of interest,
where painters of the thirties fixed upon the Some of these collections become Kerig Pope, one of the artists going to São
homely virtues and honest toil of the American environmental works of art in themselves. In Paulo, is the assistant art director of Playboy
farmer and working man as their subject, the `Fantastic Images, Chicago Art Since 1945' and the magazine regularly draws on this group
new regionalists tend to fasten on vanishing (the most authoritative book on Chicago art for illustrations.) In turning to fantasy, however,
species — victims of the post-industrial world, after World War Two) the author, Franz the artists draw on a long history of Chicago
whether urban artifacts, flora or fauna. Schulze, states that Karl Wirsum's magnum attachment to Surrealism. Ever since the war
In the case of Chicago it is the urban opus may have been his house in Chicago, Chicago patrons and artists have displayed a
sub-cultures of the first half of the twentieth `an environment affectionately heaped with decided partiality for painters such as Matta,
century and their living remnants that have memorabilia of 1930s lower class America.' Bacon, Tanguy, Ernst, Klee, Giacometti and
attracted the artists' attention. If you have ever Out of sensitivity to the formal and informal particularly Dubuffet. When the latter came
lived in an unrenewed section of a large city — a values of these 'trash treasures' came a coherent here in 1951 for the opening of his exhibition
neighbourhood of homes sporting bay windows regional style which lies somewhere in the at the Art Institute and delivered his lecture
with ornamental shades partially obscuring overlap between the primitive, the naive and `Anticultural Positions' to a small but
enormous lamps; of old dime stores, cigar stores, popular kitsch. Despite its gritty humour it enthusiastic audience, the ground had already
lingerie shops, B-movie houses and girlie expresses an attachment to a vanishing way of been well prepared to receive his brand of
shows — then you may have some concept of the life. post-war Surrealism: art brut.
urban nostalgia animating the Chicago artists Almost as important as urban nostalgia in One can see the influence of Dubuffet's work
going to Sao Paulo. Nostalgia — because such determining the character of the works going on three generations of Chicago painters from
neighbourhoods in Chicago are fast falling to Sao Paulo is the element of fantasy, the encrusted agonized figures of Leon Golub
victim to the squeeze between the expanding particularly fantasy which revolves around to the amoeboid fantasies of Gladys Nilsson.
black ghetto on the one hand and high class sexual themes. In contrast to California But it was his philosophy which most stirred

(Right)
Ed Paschke
Lucy 1973

(Far right)
Ray Yoshida
Analogies no 3 1973
Watercolour and collage
on paper
77.5 x 56.5 cm
Lent by Mr A. Bildner

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