Leah Ke Yi Zheng never intended to be an artist. Growing up in China, she studied with a traditional painter, who taught her calligraphy and how to copy the old masters. But when it came time to choose a career, she decided to become a judge. Although unfamiliar with United States history and the American legal code, she took her LSAT in Hong Kong and enrolled in law school in Indiana. Disenchanted, she dropped out during her second year, and her mother urged her to pursue a business degree.
“I locked myself away for three days, smoking and drinking,” Zheng said. “I told myself: ‘Either I will die, or I’ll make a choice I can commit to.’” She applied to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago shortly after.
That decision is paying off. In January, Zheng opened her second solo exhibition with Mendes Wood DM in New York, and she’s preparing upcoming shows in Vienna and at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, where she now lives. On the day I visited the studio she shares with her partner on the city’s industrial Near West Side, she was fussing with a small-scale model of the Vienna gallery, trying to envision the exhibition’s flow. Marbles were piled on the floor, evidence of her young son. Almost everywhere I looked were artists’ monographs and heavy reads by Barthes, Foucault, and Dostoyevsky.
While law and art may seem incompatible, the impulses behind both coalesce in Zheng’s works, in which rational, even schematic, compositions coexist with more instinctive gestures. Untitled (fusée in its flesh), a 2023 painting made as part of a series of machine works begun three years earlier, sets disembodied cylinders and gears against an abstracted backdrop, bisected by bands of color that might be mechanical themselves. Many of the machines Zheng depicts are fusees—the pulleys in antique watches and clocks—while others are fictional devices of obscure purpose. In No.45 (2024), from another major series inspired by the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, horizontal bars form visual interludes that are at once exacting and ineffable.
“Life is so full of data and information today,” Zheng said. “The spiritual capacity I explore interrupts that data-and-information loop.” One technique for interrupting the loop is to confound viewers about the very nature of painting. Zheng uses Chinese silks instead of canvases, attached to custom stretchers made of mahogany, cherry, and other varieties of wood. Nearly all her paintings are irregularly shaped. She describes her works as “uncanny things” that pervert our notion of a painting’s two-dimensionality. The transparency of silk makes front and back, surface and depth simultaneous in Zheng’s work, especially when hung in front of a light source, which lends the paintings a diffuse iridescence that can mimic watercolor.
“Traditional Chinese painting was a dead end,” Zheng said. “My work seeks to reinvent or edit it,” partly by combining ancient materials with the formal provocations of the Western avant-garde.
Risk—conceptual and physical—underpins her approach. Silk is an unforgiving medium, any accident turning permanent. But Zheng is unflustered. “There are no mistakes,” she said. “Every mark is truthful. Every mark is authentic.”
A few months before she died in July 1977, the Chicago painter Gertrude Abercrombie—by then largely housebound and plagued by the arthritis that had forced her to stop painting years earlier—gave an interview to local broadcaster Studs Terkel. “Everything is autobiographical in a sense but kind of dreamy. It’s way off in the skies,” the artist said, alluding to her methods as an engineer of uncanny nocturnes.
It’s true that Abercrombie didn’t camouflage the personal traces in her work. The bleached ruins of a slaughterhouse in Aledo, Illinois, her childhood hometown, are the subject of a painting from 1937. The eerie suitors and tense courtships throughout her art are allegories for her own jinxed marriages. And then there are the cats—dozens of them, prowling or stoic doppelgangers of the real-life felines who roamed Abercrombie’s Hyde Park Victorian.
Still, autobiography can’t account for the pervasive unreality of Abercrombie’s work in “The Whole World Is a Mystery,” a mesmerizing if prudishly designed retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh that gathers more than 80 Abercrombie paintings in the largest exhibition for the artist to date. Nor can it account for the vignettes that unfold as if by some narcotized logic. Her motifs—flags, dominoes, seashells, snails, moons, eggs, owls—only heighten the otherworldliness. In painting after painting, figures (mostly women, mostly solitary) seem bewitched as they trek across stark Midwestern landscapes, tarrying on some inscrutable errand. When Abercrombie does offer up interiors, they’re sparsely furnished and dingy, like rooms in a flophouse. Letters are sometimes depicted slipped under doors, bearing who knows what ominous or tragic summons. Paintings-within-paintings hang on her walls in a trippy hall-of-mirrors.
“The Whole World Is a Mystery” (on view at the Carnegie through June 1, before it travels to the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and then the Milwaukee Art Museum) expands on an acclaimed 2018 exhibition at Karma in New York—and, like that show, is accompanied by a sumptuous bells-and-whistle catalog. The new retrospective is divided into seven chapters that showcase different thematic or formal aspects of Abercrombie’s career, including the miniatures and still lifes that are often overlooked. This show should finally set the record straight: here is an American visionary whose obsessive paintings are at once stylized and crudely instinctive, achieving a kind of cryptic simplicity that might be called folk surrealism.
Wall text at the Carnegie notes that Abercrombie “has been historically marginalized due to who she was and how she lived and worked.” How she lived was as the self-declared “Queen of Bohemia” whose home was a crash pad for touring jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday, and whose coterie included queer men like novelist James Purdy and artist Karl Priebe. Such mixed company was unusual in midcentury America—as was Abercrombie’s aversion to homemaking and mothering. Later, her alcoholism contributed to the physical and mental deterioration that made her largely reclusive. Although she had exhibitions in Chicago and New York during her lifetime, she has remained a cult figure until the past few years, after the Karma show introduced her to new audiences. While it’s hard to say how much her eccentric lifestyle impeded her legacy, the fact that she was a woman—from the Midwest, no less—did her few favors.
Critics have described Abercrombie, never satisfactorily, as a surrealist or a magic realist. Her surrealism isn’t the capital-S import from Europe. Despite hints of Giorgio de Chirico in some of her architectural accents or Yves Tanguy in her sedimented skies, or—most especially—her visual rapport with René Magritte (whom she called her “spiritual daddy”), Abercrombie’s work is terser, with an explicitly feminine viewpoint and an almost pragmatic sensibility. There are no melting clocks in her paintings, no biomorphic creatures. She rarely even violates the laws of psychics. When her paintings are forthrightly fabulist—as in A Game of Kings (1947), which features two lions playing chess—they come off as a little hokey.
Abercrombie’s finest paintings aren’t surreal at all, at least not in the typical sense. They’re just atmospheric to the point of unnaturalness, with quirks that recall regionalism or WPA-era art. (Abercrombie herself was an artist for the Works Progress Administration.) In Self-Portrait, the Striped Blouse (1940), one of her many hypnotic self-portraits, what draws the eye as much as the sitter’s prison-striped shirt is the deranged tree and bruised cloud outside the window. Here, internal and exterior states converge. Charlie Parker’s Favorite Painting (1946) indicates Abercrombie’s engagement with social issues: a yellow noose, nearly fluorescent against a dishwater sky, dangles from a barren tree—an oblique lament from the doggedly antiracist Abercrombie. In other works, such as Winding Road (1937) and Figure in a Landscape (1939), women trudge through empty countryside, stalked by freak clouds or stunted trees. (Those weird trees were once common among a certain cadre of now forgotten painters like Buell Whitehead and Karl Fortress.)
Such mis-en-scènes mark Abercrombie as a landscape painter, although of the psychogeographic variety in which a horizon is as sinister as a knife. Take for example White House (1945), in which the namesake dwelling sits at the end of a long lane leading toward portentous hills. The scene gets more unsettling the farther it recedes. Elsewhere, Abercrombie’s pastorals are almost like burlesques of plein air painting. In Out in the Country (1939), a woman lounges in a farmyard, seemingly relaxed, but a brood of trees and distant humped hills like burial mounds spoil the bucolic mood. Similarly, The Church (1938) looks benign enough: a well-coiffed woman, seen from behind, ambles toward a little country chapel way down a dirt road. But look closer and you realize that all of the trees are dead and leafless, some blackened as if by blight or fire. A few clouds overhead are smudged black too, and the whole style of the painting has a vulgarity verging on cartoonish.
At the Carnegie, gauzy floor-to-ceiling curtains demarcate the show, evoking the permeable thresholds in Abercrombie’s work. In Letter from Karl (1940), The Past and the Present (c. 1945), and Cats, Screen, and Ghost (1950), for example, small paintings-within-paintings capture nature scenes, blurring the boundaries between what’s indoors and out. And doors just as often serve as walls, as in the series Abercrombie began in 1955, inspired by the salvaged doors from demolition jobs in her Chicago neighborhood. Wall text tells us that these jobs were part of the city’s vast urban renewal program that displaced Black residents; the doors were repurposed as walls around construction sites. The colors in this series—seafoam, cherry, ultramarine—are almost explosive in contrast to the earthy palettes elsewhere.
The door series emphasizes one weakness of the show: its unadventurous hang. Paintings beetle around the room, one by one, hung at standard height—a horizontal plumbline perhaps meant to mimic the flatland of Abercrombie’s art but which overstates certain repetitions. There are few double hangs, and no salon-style walls. The door series, in particular, comes off as belabored because of its rote presentation. Here, variation becomes wallpaper. The layout is a missed opportunity, as one of the pleasures of Abercrombie is to witness the interplay between her narratives and tropes rather than consider them in isolation.
Yet, an artist like Abercrombie comes along rarely, and a show like this more rarely still. Her exquisite miniatures and still lifes alone are worth the journey. Taken together, these paintings are an offshoot of modernism that was perhaps only possible in a place like Chicago—an inland jewel that was neither coast nor prairie, frontier nor empire, but something stranger, lonelier.
Andrea Carlson’s fascination with landscapes began with a painting her parents hung in her bedroom when she was a child. She describes it as “cheesy” and “syrupy,” the kind of deer-gazing-at-mountains scene that numbs the eye. But the painting’s atmosphere—its intimation of something ineffable just over the hill—would lull her into a meditative state, and she’d fall asleep imagining herself in that unreal valley. “I’m wondering if it was about the infinity line, where information spills out,” she told me, trying to explain the hypnotism of such thrift store schmaltz.
We were sitting in a lounge on the second floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, where “Shimmer on Horizons,” an exhibition of Carlson’s work, is on view through February 2. It’s a modest show—four paintings, plus a video installation and a sculpture—but so visually torrential and conceptually heady you need an entire afternoon just to get your bearings. Carlson’s works are panoramas, comprising individual paper panels that, hung together, sometimes sweep 15 feet across the wall. Although they contain familiar topographical features such as mountains, lakes, and trees, these aren’t your grandmother’s landscapes. Carlson’s images combust with metaphysical abundance. They have a frenetic symmetry. Anywhere your eye roves, there’s some seemingly talismanic allusion, exquisitely stylized: hands, masks, birds, petroglyphs, names, patterns. It’s as if the land itself is polymorphous and geysering a disjointed history. “If you actually entered these landscapes,” Carlson said, “you’d be cut into pieces.”
Her approach is a clean break from the 19th-century tradition of American landscape art, in which de facto propagandists like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole depicted land as radiant and virginal, the birthright of any colonial buccaneer drunk on Manifest Destiny. Their paintings bear little trace of the Indigenous people whose homelands were being stolen, much less evidence of the exploitation and genocide that European settlers wrought.
For Carlson, an Ojibwe artist descended from the Grand Portage Band located in northern Minnesota, there’s something satisfying in the notion of the earth defending itself, of the ground dismembering interlopers or “consuming” them—at least metaphorically. “The museum is a landscape in its own right,” she said. “It’s trying to be neutral, but most museums are not neutral. What if I make a space outside of that space?”
Carlson likens her works to decolonized territories that exist in opposition to the institutions that exhibit them. It’s an auspicious moment to animate that idea. In addition to the show in Chicago, Carlson is featured in the Prospect New Orleans triennial (which opened in early November and closes February 2,) and will be the subject of a major midcareer survey opening at the Denver Art Museum in October. Taking the long view, however, she’s nonplussed by the momentum. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” she said, while meandering through the MCA. “I’m like, where have you been all this time?”
THERE’S A CERTAIN IRONY in Carlson’s MCA show, at least if you’ve followed recent Chicago art salvos. In 2020 she published an op-ed titled “Where Are the Native Artists at the MCA?” in the local arts blog Sixty Inches from Center. The piece was a scalding rebuke of the museum’s lack of Native representation and a critique of how such institutions shirk accountability. Carlson wrote:
One of the potential outcomes of exposing the MCA’s scant inclusion of Native artworks in their collection is that they will welcome this criticism, and use the ‘underserved communities’ narrative to solicit funds from foundations and donors to expand their collection to include Native-made art. Many institutions can’t ‘fail,’ because even when they do, their failure is rebranded and marketed as a worthy cause. In this way, there are no real consequences.
Has she softened her tone now that her name is on the MCA’s walls? At an artist talk at the museum this past August, Carlson noted that the MCA occupies a patch of earth historically belonging to the Potawatomi, and proposed an idea to curator Iris Colburn: “Give us our land back.” Carlson laughed as she said this—and so did the audience, in the shaky way of witnesses eager to avoid implication in a crime—but the quip had teeth. (It also recalled Carlson’s massive installation along the Chicago River in 2021, in which a five-part banner blared in emergency red letters: you are on potawatomi land.)
As if in deference to the gravitas of her themes, Carlson is rarely acclaimed for her sense of humor. But she has an eye for juxtapositions that provoke a kind of queasy comedy. These often involve unlikely cultural mash-ups, as in her “VORE”series, begun in 2008. Many of these paintings reference cannibals in a nod to 1970s and ’80s exploitation flicks, like Cut and Run, a 1984curiowhose tagline reads “It’s the one story you won’t see on the 6 o’clock news.”
In Perpetual Genre (2024), two boys inspired by a statue from the British Museum’s collection hover below tools used for land surveying. The statue in question is an incomplete 1st- or 2nd-century Roman sculpture of a boy gnawing the arm of his opponent during a game of knucklebones. The piece is informally known as “the cannibal,” and Carlson equates man-eating with colonialism—an analogy reinforced by the painting’s choppy sea, evocative of transatlantic migration. But there’s something overripe about the image, a self-conscious baroqueness that troubles the line between humor and horror.
“The landscapes we all walk are full of irony if you look close enough,” Carlson said. A prime example: Every pad of her preferred paper brand, Arches, is emblazoned with a crest reading 1492—the symbolically freighted year (in America, anyway) the company was founded. “What took all the land away?” Carlson said. “Paper! It’s all abstracted on paper. It’s just how everything is carved up.”
If paper suggests the bureaucratic chicanery of deeds, treaties, and proclamations, it also foregrounds its own perishability. The lights in Carlson’s MCA exhibition are kept dim in an effort to conserve the art, and Carlson mentioned that institutions will loan her works on paper for only three months at a time to mitigate potential damage.
Related to such fragility is what she calls “memory work.” During the Covid pandemic, she lost people close to her and began to incorporate their names into her art, personal tokens whose significance viewers may not register. This practice expanded to include the names of ancestors and other artists who were formative influences, such as the late Ojibwe modernist George Morrison. “I’m starting to realize I have a stage and some power,” Carlson said. “I can do memorialization work, and the museum will take care of it forever—well, until the lava flow takes it out.”
When I remarked that she seemed blasé about posterity, she said, “future generations will make their own work to see and admire. They don’t need mine hanging around. The loss of my art is not that big a deal.”
MEMORY WORK is a subterranean route into Carlson’s private life. She is visibly uncomfortable talking about herself and has a politician’s knack for deflecting. “I feel like sometimes I spend so long in the studio that I get almost socially studio-ized,” she said, noting that she often spends 12 hours a day making art. Gradually, a sparse biography emerged, as if in bullet points. She was born in Nebraska and grew up in Minnesota. She attended the University of Minnesota and then the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. In April 2016, the same week that Prince died, she moved to Chicago.
Aside from occasional teaching gigs, making art is all she’s ever done. (A brief stint at Walmart ended with her being fired, though she claims not to remember why. “The lady said, ‘You’ll never work for a Walmart again,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s the point! I also would like that for me.’”) Last year, Carlson bought her late grandmother’s house and moved back to Minnesota. She converted the garage on a hill behind the house into a studio. “You can see [Lake Superior] from our house,” she said. “There’s something about the energy off of that horizon—you always know where it is. You can always feel the moods, the weather that comes off of the lake. It’s very specific. It’s something I want my work to have, too.”
Horizons suggest the unencumbered immensity of the Midwest. (“The Midwest is so cool. Let Art in America readers know,” Carlson said, joking that she wants a hat inscribed Midwest Princess.) But Carlson’s neck of the literal woods in Minnesota is also a shoreline. It’s a transitional space, neither entirely land nor entirely water. Carlson sees such in-between places as the psychic origin of all poetry and music.
In “Shimmer on Horizons” (the show’s name inspired by a 1995 song by the alternative band Throwing Muses), the horizon line in her works is constant, a paradox hinting at both futurity and closure. Above and below are layers of landscape that simultaneously double as strata of time.
Ink Babel (2014), a large-scale work in the MCA’s collection (though not included in the show), is a monochromatic grid of 60 panels that function like filmstrips. It’s a work of discombobulating scale and density, and it exemplifies a hallmark of Carlson’s technique: the desire to overwhelm. “That was definitely an intent,” she said. “You’re in its landscape.”
These are landscapes without the operatic vistas and ostensibly untrammeled serenity of Bierstadt. You can’t project yourself into Carlson’s spaces; they’re conquest-proof. Symbols and objects hover in a frozen maelstrom that seems to emanate from the center of the picture—an almost synesthetic overkill that Carlson calls “hallucinat[ing] on the surfaces of paper.”
Relationships between objects are often obscure, dissonant. In Perpetual Care (2024), Carlson re-created a horse that her great-grand-aunt drew decades ago. In Ancestor and Descendant (2023), she drew black ash baskets based on those made by the contemporary Native artist Kelly Church (Potawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe). You wouldn’t necessarily know the provenance of such references without Carlson’s guidance, but she isn’t concerned about legibility. In fact, she worries that too many annotations could become a “codex of meaning.”
“Refusal is beautiful witchcraft,” she said, describing a tenet of her aesthetic strategy. In this case, refusal means denying an obvious point of entry into her images. When you first behold one of Carlson’s works, there is an initial disorientation akin to vertigo. It’s like opening a door to careening floodwaters. Once your eye alights on specific motifs, further refusal is enforced by not being able to take in an entire work at once because of its expansiveness. And there’s the ultimate refusal of fixed meaning. The works change depending on how you approach them, from what angle or in what state of mind. They are windows onto landscapes that are seismic and haunted, at once tumultuous and static, bent into prisms yet flatly declarative.
Carlson is sometimes grouped with artists affiliated with Indigenous Futurisms, a term the Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon coined in 2003 to denote artists whose work offers a Native perspective on the future. Inspired by technology and science fiction, artists such as Cannupa Hanska Luger, Star WallowingBull, and Skawennati create alternative cosmologies in which Indigenous people were never colonized. Carlson’s work is adjacent to this movement but is also decidedly introspective and explicitly enmeshed in history. She has recently started thinking about “deep time,” as made manifest in objects like fossilized trilobites. The concept of the earth as archivist resonates through the work she’s making now.
“Images survive us,” Carlson said. “They sometimes get past us. They also get destroyed.” On the state of such things, she added, “it’s very vulnerable, as it should be.” By way of example, she cited her ancestor’s drawing of a horse—a relic of another time now preserved on paper for whatever passes for eternity these days. “We don’t get to necessarily select the winners and losers,” Carlson said. “Who gets to decide who becomes a fossil?”
She paused for a moment, then smiled. “Wouldn’t it be cool to be a fossil, though? It could happen to any of us.”
A fun thing to do at “Scott Burton: Shape Shift,” a judiciously curated if unavoidably diffuse retrospective of the late artist at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, is to watch people maneuver themselves into Two-Part Chaise (1989), a low granite lounger installed on the concrete outside the museum. It’s one of the few furniture sculptures in the show that visitors are invited to sample, and they do—warily. They size up the chaise’s whipsaw ergonomics and debate whether the lark of reclining there is worth the spectacle of getting into or out of it. Some people straddle it and then abruptly plunge down, equating speed with grace. Others ease into it by slow degrees, as if into a hot bath. Those wearing dresses proceed gingerly, lest they flash a bystander.
Two-Part Chaise is useful for thinking through the tensions in Burton’s work: form versus function, art versus utility, and public versus private behavior. The frisson of his art derives from literalizing these oppositions without seeking to resolve them. As the exhibition title hints, Burton’s primary theme is irreconcilability: of materials, selfhood, communication, and even meaning itself. Burton too was a shapeshifter: an economical post-minimalist who championed expressive representational art, and a gay man whose work encodes queer semiotics even as it operates in plain sight.
He was from the South—born in Alabama in 1939, the only son of a single mother—but spent most of his life in New York, among an avant-garde coterie that included figures as disparate as John Ashbery, Vito Acconci, and Marjorie Strider. Although now best-known as an artist, Burton first made a name for himself as an art critic (and later as an editor at this magazine) in the 1960s. He wrote incisively and rigorously about the aesthetic ferment of his time, indulging an eye that ranged from what he described as the “methodical cerebrations” of Donald Judd and Kenneth Noland to the “heraldic images” of Alex Katz.
In the late ’60s, Burton remade himself into a performance artist whose early works included such capers as drugging himself to sleep during an art opening and promenading naked down a nighttime street in Manhattan. Later works were a kind of ritualized theater. In Individual Behavior Tableaux (1980), a nude actor in platform heels à la David Bowie enacts a choreography of psychosexual poses. In the first version of the lecture-cum-photograph Modern American Artist (1973), Burton sports paint-splotched overalls and a jutting dildo to lampoon the hetero-machismo of contemporaries such as Carl Andre. By the mid-’70s, Burton had turned to producing what he called “sculpture in love with furniture”—in particular, chairs that pervert traditional design or trouble their own functionality. In his final years, he was commissioned to make public artworks, often in the form of inconspicuous granite seating. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1989 at age 50.
Shape Shift presents a representative sampling of Burton’s protean output, distilled into eight themed sections, including an interlude related to “Burton on Brancusi,” a show he curated at MoMA in 1989, and other vignettes that survey thematic dichotomies (public and private, inside and out) that characterize his work. These sections can feel overly compartmentalized at times and don’t proceed chronologically; in the exhibition’s first room, Burton’s earliest sculpture, Bronze Chair (1972, cast 1975), mingles with Healing Chair (ca. 1989), his final work. The former is an unremarkable Queen Anne seat that Burton found in his apartment (abandoned by a previous tenant) and then bronzed; the latter is a terse steel perch based on the Alexander technique, which promoted healing through disciplined posture. For the uninitiated, this disjointed timeline won’t clarify Burton’s development or chart the continuities of his work, but it does frontload the show with some of his most arresting art. Aluminum Chair (1980–81) looks like a sci-fi sidecar, all lacquered metal and knife-blade angles. The anomalous Onyx Table (1978–81), a sturdy marble behemoth lit from within by fluorescent lights, seems to smolder orangely in the middle of the room, its veined surfaces efflorescing in a decent approximation of magma.
The critic Robert Pincus-Witten once remarked that “masochism was the real clue to Burton’s art.” Nowhere is that more apparent than at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. The building, designed in 2001 by Tadao Ando, is a rhythmic hive of glass and concrete that flexes into long concourses of bare white wall. (Next October the show will travel to Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, another aloof Tando structure.) Burton’s inhospitable materials—stainless steel, aluminum, bronze, granite—feel native to such austere spaces. Descend to the comparatively warmer second floor, though, and the works become cheekier, introducing another (often uncelebrated) side of Burton: his sense of humor.
Child’s Table and Chair (1978) is as advertised: playroom furniture, only here corrupted by a disco sensibility of mirrored desktop and silver chair cushion. (One imagines diminutive lines of cocaine spread across that desktop.) The nearby Five-Part Storage Cubes (1982) is a freestanding hulk of interlocking cubes painted in primary colors. It’s a nod to Constructivism and de Stijl—or, perhaps more covertly, to the Memphis Group. The wittiest piece in the room is Formica Lawn Chair (1979), a riff on the Adirondack chair, covered in pale lemon Formica that sentences the seat to a life indoors. Burton created several variations on the Adirondack, a symbol of leisure shadowed by its association with tuberculosis sanitariums. For those attuned to such discrepancies, Burton’s work code-switches between playfulness and a kind of discomfiting allusiveness. (Such dissonance recurs in the unassuming Cafe Chair, from 1987, whose open steel back is the inverted triangle with which Nazis branded queers.)
The exhibition also features footnotes to Burton’s practice that usually get short shrift. Photographs of everyday furniture from his archive—patio chairs with clamshell backs, rustic wooden settees, cement armchairs—cite the vernacular idiom that he recontextualized. Meanwhile, simply patterned window curtains made during a residency at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia in 1978 show his frugal style adapted for another medium.
But the exhibition also affirms the inevitable limitations of staging a Burton retrospective. His performances and public art can be experienced only via archival documentation (or scale models), while the furniture sculptures are vividly tangible. Even now, some 35 years after Burton’s death, these pieces remain his most potent—more emotionally forthright than his public art, more formally satisfying than his performances. “A piece of furniture … refers to human presence,” Burton once said, and that’s what I saw in St. Louis: objects of singular character.
A curator recently shared with me a digital folder containing scanned slides of Alice Shaddle’s art, a lifetime of sculptures, collages, paintings, and installations, some of them representational, many others almost unclassifiably baroque. As I browsed the works—most constructed from paper, latex, or vinyl—two words kept recurring in the captions: whereabouts unknown. An unnamed 1960s sculpture of an overdressed little girl jutting forward with sinister pomp: whereabouts unknown. Camel (1969), a work that looks less like a desert animal than a two-headed bird in the throes of a delirious molt: whereabouts unknown. Gardener (1974), a sculpture that resembles a carnivorous flower that’s both torpid and overfed: whereabouts unknown.
As much as it applies to particular works in her oeuvre, whereabouts unknown could just as well describe Shaddle’s own legacy when consulting histories of 20th-century Chicago art. But what might explain the near total omission of a figure who created a multitudinous body of work, taught at one of the city’s most revered art spaces for more than a half-century, and died not all that long ago, in 2017, at the age of 88? Shaddle wasn’t included in “Art in Chicago: 1945–1995,” an important survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1996, nor was she mentioned in the catalog. She was consigned to a literal footnote in Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now, an otherwise encyclopedic account of the city’s art scene, published in 2018. And her work is almost never on view at any major hometown museum or gallery that I know of.
Shaddle’s mutability has proved double-edged: it made her singular, but also a bit difficult to categorize. Just when you think she’s a funky heiress to the Arts and Crafts movement, she turns out to be the architect of discreetly lyrical conceptual installations. Or when you reclaim her as a long-lost cousin of Pattern and Decoration, there she is, building boxes whose earthy interior textures are gnarled and elegiac.
That Shaddle was a woman likely did her career no favors. In 1954 she had what, in retrospect, was the professional misfortune to marry the artist and curator Don Baum, who in the 1960s and ’70s was the impresario of a freshly neurotic and caffeinated strain of Chicago art. The young artists who made up the groups known as the Hairy Who and the Imagists, whom Baum hyped in a series of dizzying exhibitions, remain Chicago’s most lionized art exports, and they made Baum’s fortunes as a local heavyweight who long overshadowed his wife. In a 2015 oral history interview with the Smithsonian, critic Dennis Adrian characterized Shaddle as “one of those riley, resentful ladies who—[Baum] got all the attention, which at that time, you know, who’s going to compete with Don?” (The couple divorced in 1970, and, as of this writing, Shaddle merits no mention on Baum’s Wikipedia page, whereas he is mentioned on hers.)
A new exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, where Shaddle taught for decades, aims to reintroduce her to the metropolis where she played a vibrant if still unsung role. The show, which opens March 23, is a welcome antidote to Baum boosterism and the art historical hangover of mythic ’70s Chicago. And under the title “Alice Shaddle: Fuller Circles,” it’s the first invitation to situate Shaddle on the continuum of Chicago modernism. Stylistically and temperamentally, she has long been considered a bit of an outlier, but she was always indebted to the strains of eccentricity and iconoclasm that distinguished the city’s artmaking.
Shaddle was born in the Chicago suburb of Hinsdale in 1928. She was raised as a “farm girl,” and her sensitivity to nature and seasonal rhythms is evident in many of her later cut-paper collages. Sore Tooth: Fall in the Woods (2001) conjures, with almost pointillist intensity, a smolder of autumnal foliage amid shaggy green undergrowth. Laughing Granny Hill (2001) presents a similar overstory of ruddy fall plumage that camouflages a wizened profile, a treatment of landscape as portraiture that Shaddle repeated elsewhere in her work. She earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. Three years later, she and Baum bought the George Blossom House, a stout Colonial Revival mansion that Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1892—one of the so-called “bootleg houses” conceived in violation of Wright’s contract with fellow architect Louis Sullivan—in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood. The intricate patterns in the home’s stained glass windows inspired Shaddle, as is apparent in some of her later installations.
By the late 1950s she was teaching painting and drawing to children at the nearby Hyde Park Art Center, a small but mighty outpost that critic Franz Schulze described as “a slightly tattered, not-for-profit, store-front gallery a few blocks from the University of Chicago, or more than six miles from the main downtown gallery district.” (Baum was the Center’s exhibitions director.) Shaddle’s drawings and paintings from that period are technically adept but largely generic: flowers, still lifes, figure studies in charcoal, drab abstractions. There were, however, occasional quirky salvos that hinted at her wit and the formal virtuosity that defines her sculpture. A trio of works titled “Hollywood Image” (1962–63) features luscious eddies and hemorrhages of paint over which Shaddle collaged black-and-white images of starlets. In Hollywood Image No 2, an actress’s face—repeated at least a half-dozen times—tumbles into a maelstrom of ringleted hairstyles, some of which are fragmented or partially erased. In Hollywood Image No 3, a vision of Marilyn Monroe abruptly surfaces from the surrounding squall of paint, a kind of apparition that seduces the eye to an erogenous upper corner.
These and other early works heralded Shaddle’s sculptures, in which figuration and abstraction reach a slippery truce. Many of the sculptures, made from papier-mâché and Liquitex® adhesive, are as much about their own materiality as whatever they purport to represent. They are variously ruched and feathered, crimped and tucked, finessed into seemingly windswept geometries that look floral, flamelike, or manhandled depending on the angle. You puzzle over a sculpture’s tousled design, the riddle of its equilibrium, before you begin to wonder what it’s about.
In works such as Birthday Cake (1964), which portrays a pink confection with a missing slice and a fork on a plate, imagery from Shaddle’s underlying source material (a woman’s toothy face, a nativity scene, and carnal tableaux) peeks out from the swaddle, offering notquite- subliminal messaging that feels as privately symbolic as it does narratively complicit. Intentionally or not, such sculptures subvert conventionally domestic subjects—cakes, houseplants, flowers—by rendering them at such a scale and with such tactility that they verge on perverse. (A 1967 sculpture, Cake Stand with Soft Dessert, offers fleshy mousse congealed atop a rococo base.)
Shaddle’s relationship to feminism, at least in her work, was subtle. In 1973 she was a founding member of Artemisia Gallery, a feminist co-op modeled on similar spaces in New York City (AIR Gallery) and Los Angeles (Womanspace). ARC Gallery, another such collective, opened that same year in Chicago. Both galleries were across the street from the Museum of Contemporary Art, which enabled them to stage counterprogramming that was inherently radical given such proximity to an institution with that degree of sway. For many female artists it was a moment of disavowal and critique, but the installations Shaddle created for Artemisia weren’t activist in tone. In Under the Snow (1978), she arranged 25 vellum circles on the floor in the shape of a Celtic cross. In Pond (1978), orbs blossomed from the floor, evoking lily pads or aquatic flowers. In other installations, she choreographed her paper constructions into configurations that had a poetic spatial economy. These works are meditative and transitory—and about as far from the mania of the Hairy Who or the Imagists as imaginable.
In her final years, Shaddle deepened this ruminative approach. She exhibited new collages in 2007 made in the aftermath of September 11. These pieces, composed from hundreds or maybe thousands of fragments of cut vinyl, suggest landscapes and dreamy patterns, intimating the ambient dust and debris of the attack on the World Trade Center—or, more philosophically, the atomization of a previously legible world. “They are accumulations,” Shaddle said of these vinyl shards.
Accumulations is an apt term for her entire body of work. Paper and vinyl and other castoffs gradually cohere into something distinct and meaningful. Similarly, when you look at the entirety of Shaddle’s long career, you see that her idiosyncrasy and uniqueness consist in embellishing ambiguity. Her work wavers between figuration and abstraction without committing entirely to either. Despite the dynamism of much of her art, particularly her sculptures, there is also a fugitive stillness, like a wave at the moment it has crested and not yet divulged the mysteries beneath.
On the afternoon of February 20, 1943, a volcano suddenly appeared in a cornfield near the remote village of Parícutin, Mexico. The field’s owner—a farmer named Dionisio Pulido—later recalled how a crack in the earth widened and swelled, belching sulfurous fumes as the newborn cone thrust skyward. Over the next several months, the volcano continued to grow. Dunes of ash drifted across the land. That June, Parícutin finally erupted in earnest. Two towns were evacuated and then devoured by molten rock. In one of them, San Juan Parangaricutiro, only the church’s bell tower remained standing amid the black lava field.
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Parícutin became a sensation, particularly among scientists, but also among Mexico’s artists. Many of the country’s Surrealists made pilgrimages to the site. One of those reportedly enchanted by the scene was Remedios Varo, the Spanish painter who’d emigrated to Mexico in 1941. In The Flutist (1955), Varo includes, in the background, a craggy volcano partly obscured by a tumult of clouds rendered in murky jewel tones—sapphire, jade, topaz. Her roiling sky looks almost oxidized, the effect of decalcomania, a popular Surrealist technique in which material is pressed against wet paint and then quickly pulled away to leave behind a chance texture. The volcano is but one small feature in this richly imagined canvas, but it evokes the mix of nature, science, and something like the magic of the unknown that suffuses all of Varo’s work.
In “Science Fictions,” the Art Institute of Chicago presents more than 60 of Varo’s paintings and drawings, all made between 1955 and 1963, the year she died of a heart attack at 54. Long revered in Latin America, Varo has entered the canon more slowly in the United States. This is her first exhibition here in more than two decades. Like other female Surrealists, especially her friend and fellow émigré Leonora Carrington, who shares a similar animism and mystical iconography, Varo’s achievements are still being measured. This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.
The title of the exhibition alludes to Varo’s connoisseurship of science fiction, evinced by the volumes of Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury from her personal library that are on view. But the title also suggests the extent to which many of her paintings smudge the boundaries between science and the occult. In Creation of the Birds (1957), a humanoid owl paints a bird that takes flight off the page, perhaps animated by the starlight refracted through a prism in the owl’s hand. The paint is piped in via metal tubes connected to two nearby biomorphic green orbs, which are themselves fed by thin glass plumbing that zigzags through a portal in the wall. Sympathy (1955) depicts a similar transfer of life force. A figure who, like most of Varo’s characters, appears androgynous sits at a table and strokes an orange cat that’s seemingly in motion, simultaneously hypnotized and convulsed by its owner’s attention. A geometry of finely incised electrical currents crisscrosses the air, emanating from the human’s fingertips and flaming head. Both paintings conjure a moment of alchemy in which people call on wild talents or esoteric knowledge to transform their world.
Varo was twice a refugee: first from the Spanish Civil War, then again from the Nazi terror in Europe. As if dramatizing this exile, many of her paintings feature subjects in medias res, riding bicycles, as in Toward the Tower (1960), or piloting phantasmagoric wheeled-winged-finned contraptions, as in Caravan (1955), Discovery (1956), or Starship (1960). Homo Rodans (1959), a sculpture made of fish and poultry bones, purports to be the skeleton of a creature that balanced on a wheel rather than legs. Other works, such as Vagabond (1957), are portraits of rustic dandies who could have just clattered out of some fairytale’s primeval forest. Varo heightens the otherworldliness by giving her vagabond a disproportionate body—his torso is too long, his arm is too low—and by ensconcing him in a sort of wheeled cocoon that doubles as an architectural overcoat and a jury-rigged safehold. He peers out from behind wooden doors that swing open like a cupboard.
As with many Surrealists, Varo’s images evade description. They seem merely whimsical when summarized, but her technical perfection edges them toward sublimity. In person, her paintings can appear textured, corroded, or exquisitely detailed—sometimes all at once. As an adherent of chance and mysticism, Varo experimented with unconventional methods. She scratched fine lines into her canvases with quartz crystals, and she used soufflage, the Surrealist trick of blowing wet paint to create random patterns.
Yet, her work is also highly controlled and rehearsed. She began with full-scale sketches on translucent paper, called cartoons, which she then transferred to hardboard by covering the back of the paper with graphite and retracing the image. The exhibition includes several of these preparatory drawings along with their finished versions, offering revelatory before-and-after access to Varo’s artistic practice. Like Parícutin, Varo’s bewitching visions seemed to erupt from deep down—a psychic outflow that remains a wonder.
But for all their enigmas, Varo’s paintings have an internal logic and narrative potency. Her storytelling prowess is most ambitiously realized in a suite of three canvases from 1960–61. In Toward the Tower, a brood of doppelgänger blondes in tunics bicycle behind a mother superior figure. The central blonde doesn’t have the chloroformed expression of her sisters, and her coif is unkempt, suggesting she’s not completely brainwashed like the others. In Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961), thesame women occupy a partly open belfry, embroidering vast bolts of cloth that tumble forth from the tower and become the outlying landscape, pictured here in a skewed aerial view of spindly trees, Italianate towers, and seas that defy any horizon. In the last panel, The Escape (1961), our rogue blonde has fled and appears with another figure, perhaps a lover, cruising through a realm of brackish fog and jagged cliffs in a vehicle that resembles a bristly clamshell. The series, hung on the exhibition’s back wall, is a showstopping sequence, whether read as a feminist fantasy or a parable of artistic creation.
A 2011 study at University College London found that when we behold a pleasing work of art, blood rushes to the head in a physiological reflex that’s akin to gazing at a loved one. What explains such an immediate and unconscious seduction? In his new book Affinities: On Art and Fascination, critic and essayist Brian Dillon takes this instinctive rapport as the starting point for a series of elegant and discursive meditations on art’s enchantments. The book is the third in a trilogy devoted to close reading; its predecessors, Essayism (2017) and Suppose a Sentence (2020), were paeans to essays and sentences respectively. In Affinities, Dillon turns his attention to images, and is again a rangy scavenger. His source material—photographs, film stills, and engravings, among other artifacts—chronologically spans the 17th century to the pandemic lockdown of 2020. Each chapter riffs on an image, tracing the contours of an artist’s biography or following Dillon’s own intuitive associations. Heavyweights such as Warhol, Arbus, and Eggleston mingle with more esoteric subjects like migraine auras, the 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, and the 19th-century astronomical observations of the English polymath John Herschel. Interlaced with these short exegeses is a ten-part “essay on affinity” that unpacks the historical, etymological, conceptual, and personal baggage of the term. The result is a provocative and open-ended investigation of art’s ineffable allure.
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Dillon begins with semantic negotiations. “How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities,” he writes. He describes affinity as “something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions.” Dillon’s brand of affinity goes deeper than the internet’s algorithmic recommendations, and is more authentic than the manufactured kinships trumpeted in marketing collateral. Affinity, he writes, is like fascination, but not. It’s a less sentimental sibling to appreciation: a term with the same bloodline but a different character. It’s beyond aesthetics. It’s impermanent. Ultimately, it’s not even thinkable—a “mode of dumb fascination.” Elsewhere in the book, he describes the attempt to anatomize affinity as “stupid” and “idiotic.” His thematic playground here is the gap between how art transfixes us and our inability to articulate that transfixion. (T.J. Clark’s 2006 book on Poussin, The Sight of Death, shares such language; he wonders if only “the physical, literal, dumb” act of looking can satisfy the mind.)
It’s risky to structure a book as a kind of Wunderkammer—what if it dissipates into its own eclecticism?—and riskier still to feature artists who have been embalmed by decades of analysis. But Dillon’s accretive method is itself a textual demonstration of affinity that helps his various subjects cohere. Artists who have their own chapter reappear in chapters about others: William Klein is invoked alongside Arbus and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada; Claude Cahun is mentioned in connection to Dora Maar and Francesca Woodman. Chapters succeed each other in subtle embellishment, echoing or annotating earlier themes. In the first essay, for example, Dillon considers Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, the first book in English to present observations made with a microscope. “Among the better-known illustrations in the first edition of 1665 are those showing a fly’s many-faceted eye, the starry shapes of ice crystals and a prodigious bristling fold-out flea,” Dillon writes. This is followed by a chapter on Louis Daguerre’s Vue du boulevard du Temple (ca. 1838), a photograph of a Paris street that’s believed to be the first to depict living people: the smudged apparitions of a man and his boot polisher. Nothing links these two works except an analogy that Dillon leaves implicit: Just as a microscope reveals the invisible world around us, so can a photograph illuminate what we typically ignore.
This understated approach is typical of Dillon. He writes atmospherically and impressionistically rather than critically. Here is how he describes a photo of dancer Loie Fuller: “She looks like a primitive aircraft coming apart, a soft disintegrated Blériot.” About the elderly subject of a 1970s Eggleston photo, whose particolored dress clashes with the floral cushion she sits on, he writes: “She holds onto her cigarette as if she might disappear amid all this patterned excess.” In Arbus’s ensemble of outcasts and misfits he discerns an “aristocratic distance”—an apt phrase whose accuracy doesn’t evoke any one image but the whole dispassionate vantage of Arbus’s work.
As befits a book conceived during the pandemic, Affinities is introspective and fitfully elegiac, even as it seeks communion. In his chapter on Vue du boulevard du Temple, Dillion recalls walking around London during the spring of 2020. He notes “a category of city person who seemed suddenly more visible than before”—fellow housebound Londoners out for a stroll who, like Daguerre’s phantasmal figures from nearly two centuries earlier, are rendered newly vivid by their circumstances. A chapter about the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a monument in London whose plaques record stories of ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, begins as another pandemic scene before taking a more philosophical turn. “The things a nation may conceal from itself inside an idea of heroism,” Dillon muses, noting that many would-be plaques on the monument remain blank. Elisions, often conceptual, recur throughout the book, most pointedly in the final chapter, which lists “images that are not mentioned and do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind.” (Among the missing: French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s depiction of his cat catching a ball; filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroid of his wife and their dog standing by a fence in Russia.)
These missing images parallel one of the book’s subtexts: artists’ oblique and unacknowledged relationship to modernism, which Dillon defines broadly as the aesthetic tendency toward ambiguity and formal experimentation. He suggests that the 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron might be considered a modernist, her blurred portraits and tableaux vivant representing “a deliberate effort to capture something evanescent but particular.” The French photographer and filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who made lyrical documentaries about aquatic life, is another modernist, one who attends “to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street.” (Note how gracefully Dillon posits additional affinities.) If part of Dillon’s project is to reclaim or excavate lineages of modernism, then another definition of affinity emerges. To be modern is to connect one thing to another. Affinity is connection; affinity is modern.
But affinity is also, finally, a mood, as Dillon concedes. And the mood is intimate in two back-to-back chapters—the most moving in the book—that look outside the canon toward more workaday, even vernacular, imagery. In the first, Dillon considers a press photograph of a charismatic Christian congregation, shot in Dublin in the 1980s or ’90s. “Their faces compose a selection of mundane ecstasies, such as I know well from certain churches of my childhood,” he writes. His mother, plagued by depression and, later, a fatal autoimmune disorder, belonged to just such a congregation, a “rapt sorority of the unwell and the unhappy.” Dillon recognizes his mother’s ghost in the faces of these middle-aged pilgrims, one of whom offers her hands in a gesture that’s either beseeching or quizzical. In the following chapter, he writes about his aunt, whose paranoid grievances against her neighbors culminated in a series of reconnaissance snapshots taken around her property: of hedges, doors, windows. “You can pursue vigilance and attention into a kind of fugue state, almost hallucinatory,” Dillon writes. He’s referring to his aunt, but the line has a cautionary tone, self-conscious and chastened.
That tone recurs a few pages later, when Dillon confesses a suspicion that “nothing I write pursues an argument or is built to convince. Instead, I simply get into a mood about the thing I am meant to be writing about, and pursue that mood until it is exhausted or has filled the space it was meant to fill.” He’s right, of course, but he’s in good company: Wayne Koestenbaum, Maggie Nelson, Walter Benjamin, and, most emphatically, Roland Barthes all share Dillon’s dilatory, memoiristic method. Like those writers, Dillon revitalizes images by respecting their inherent ambiguities and enigmas rather than seeking to resolve them. (One more quote: Dillon calls the work of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi “a domestic photography, dedicated to an infinity of small things, impossibly tender and exposed.”) Dillon is acutely sensitive to the subfrequency of his chosen images, and he regards them with curiosity and sympathetic scrutiny.
In one of the book’s late chapters, he writes about the final TV interview that British dramatist Dennis Potter did, in 1994, shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Potter remarks that impending death has made the world almost hyperreal—more radiant, more fully itself. Dillon achieves a similar miracle in these pages, the “mundane miracle of looking,” as he calls it. The images he contemplates become sharper and stranger, aligned in myriad inscrutable ways to each other and to the world. It’s an irreducible process that’s finally beyond our understanding but impossible to resist—something, perhaps, like love.
The painter Paul Cadmus once remarked that, in the 1930s, homosexuals in New York were simply called artists. How queerness came to be synonymous with the arts is really a story of modernism itself—one rife with private codes and intimate patronage. Think of Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde coterie in Paris, or Natalie Barney’s contemporaneous Left Bank salon, or Cadmus’s own circle in New York. From at least Oscar Wilde on, queerness and aestheticism have been linked in the public imagination.
“The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930,” an exhibition at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, seeks to underscore that fact on a grand scale. The show was intended to be a single blockbuster survey until the pandemic forced the curators—a team of 23 scholars led by Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis—to split it into two parts. The first half gathers some 100 works in various media from multiple (predominantly Western) countries; the second, larger installment, which will add more artists from the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia into the mix, opens at Wrightwood in 2025.
As its lofty title indicates, the exhibition begins with the troublesome word itself. Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny is credited with coining the term homosexual in 1869 to denote a distinct group of people rather than a behavior. The word had legal and medical implications that were more useful for bureaucrats than the general public. But by the late 19th century, when British physician Havelock Ellis and writer John Addington Symonds wrote Sexual Inversion, their landmark study of homosexuality, the term was in wider vogue. Conceptually, “The First Homosexuals” aims to examine how the nascent word and its attendant identity filtered into and influenced visual art throughout the following decades. Did such work intimate or envision a self-awareness that written language could not?
The answers offered here are mixed. In some ways, the exhibition’s incompleteness hampers its impact. The six decades charted provide a temporal constraint without narrative cohesion, a deficiency that even the overtly editorializing wall text can’t remedy. Instead of facilitating an aesthetic interplay and organic dialogue among the selected works, the curators opt for a curiously anthropological approach. This is reflected in the exhibition design: each small room, painted a distinct color and connected to others by archways that evoke Stein’s or Barney’s bohemian salons, showcases one of nine thematic categories: “Before Homosexuality,” “Archetypes,” “Desire,” “Past and Future,” “Public and Private,” “Colonizing,” “Between Genders,” “Pose,” and “Couples.” Work is hung nonchronologically, so there’s no sense of continuity or progression, just diligent eclecticism.
That’s not to say there aren’t gems on view. British painter Duncan Grant’s Bathers by the Pond (1920–21), a scene of languorous male sunbathers rendered in stippled paint and earthy tones, inspires reverie. American painter Charles Demuth’s Eight O’Clock (Early Morning), 1917, is a tender watercolor in which two men—one sitting dejectedly in pajamas, the other standing imploringly in underclothes—share a moment of ambiguous domesticity while another (nude) man washes his face at a sink in the background. Bath House Study (no date), a drawing in black chalk by Swedish artist Eugène Jansson (1862–1915), depicts an almost geometric configuration of nude men, each suspended in his own erotic lull—a tableau that wouldn’t be out of place in the late 20th-century oeuvres of Americans Patrick Angus or John Burton Harter.
Other works here allude to deeper cultural currents. A wall of archival photos documents the Elisarion, a neo-religious temple that poet and artist Elisàr von Kupffer built in Switzerland with his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer. These images—some of which feature men in makeshift crowns and sarongs striking poses in nature—evoke the utopian spirit that infused transatlantic queer life in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as embodied by, for example, American poet Walt Whitman and his British counterpart, Edward Carpenter. Growing Strength (1904), an imposing oil painting by the German artist Sascha Schneider, portrays a seasoned bodybuilder appraising the biceps of a young acolyte—a precursor to the physique magazines and “cult of the body” that defined gay life in midcentury and beyond.
To its credit, the show also looks beyond a strictly male or Anglophone conception of homosexuality. Carte de visite photographs by the Norwegian couple Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg show the women dressed as men, or in more androgynous garb. Likewise, photos by Alice Austen, one of the first American women to shoot pictures outside the studio, capture playful, if covert, moments of lesbian sociality. Paintings and scrolls by Japanese and Chinese artists, several of whom are unknown, offer the show’s most explicitly erotic interludes, as in one print illustrating a sinuous mixed-sex orgy. Elsewhere, an unknown photographer depicts two Black actors, one in drag, dancing the cakewalk in Paris at the turn of the century. Louis Lumière’s silent film clip Le Cake-Walk au Nouveau Cirque (1903), the oldest known recording of a drag performance, plays on a nearby monitor. Even more than a century later, the footage of entertainers enacting a dance that originated among enslaved people radiates a haunting jubilance that is both carefree and tainted by the bigotries of its time.
A handful of pieces feel adrift. American painter Romaine Brooks’s 1912 portrait of the Italian nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sober likeness in Brooks’s characteristic gray palette, is a puzzling choice. (D’Annunzio, an infamous womanizer, was not homosexual, and he looms in joyless hauteur over the room.) A Brooks self-portrait—or one of her many portraits of female contemporaries—would have been a stronger choice. With three paintings on view, the Canadian artist Florence Carlyle is allotted more wall space than her elegant but otherwise dull portraits of women merit. And the show’s “Colonizing” section, which tries to explore how Western attitudes toward homosexuality diverged from those of Indigenous and Eastern populations, is undercooked. Wilhelm von Gloeden, the German photographer who decamped to Italy to stage pastoral fantasies with nude Sicilian boys, is included here, although his role as a colonizer is debatable.
Ultimately, the exhibition has the tone of a sociology textbook: serious, pedantic, often more stately than intoxicating. The very premise feels misconceived. It is not as if 1869 were a eureka moment that launched queer artists, en masse, into careers of self-representation. Increasing secularism, urbanization, and mass media did more to define homosexual identity than did the invention of the word itself, yet those realities remain either unexplored or oblique here. Instead of tracing a back channel story of modernism, the curators deliver a jumbled Wunderkammer. For a show that takes pains to frame homosexuality as fluid, the thematic layout comes off as rigid and delimiting. Here’s hoping the second installment loosens up.
When he died in 1956, British artist Austin Osman Spare had been all but forgotten by the cognoscenti who had once hailed him as the finest draftsman of his generation. His early work was favorably compared to the intricate ink illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley. But his later excursions into ritual magic and the occult, exemplified by the grimoires he published, arguably sidelined his career. The subtitle of a 2012 biography dubs him “London’s Lost Artist.”
“Psychopathia Sexualis,” recently on view at Iceberg Projects in Chicago, was Spare’s first solo exhibition in North America. It was an especially pungent debut amid the trigger warnings and pandemic-induced body horror of our moment. Named after German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 study of sexual pathology, the show presented a folio of forty-four untitled pencil drawings that illustrate a cornucopia of perversions—bestiality, coprophagia, urolagnia, name your pleasure—along with stock-in-trade like fellatio. The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University acquired the folio in 1963, under somewhat murky circumstances, and it remained unheralded until now.
There’s speculation that a kinkster couple commissioned the work in the early 1920s. The result features a cast of phantasmagoric characters: satyrs, horned men, figures caught between genders or species, nightmarish penis-shaped creatures. The human bodies in Spare’s work are overripe and unmanicured. They occupy vacant space that’s indistinguishable as interior or landscape, although vestiges of erased lines are sometimes visible. A vague air of pestilence dominates, underscored by the cankered faces and copious runoff of semen, vomit, feces, and urine. If Spare’s erotic vignettes recall those of precursors such as Belgian Symbolist Félicien Rops, Hungarian painter Mihály Zichy, and French illustrator Martin van Maële, his fixation on excretion and physical degradation is singular in its extremism.
Austin Osman Spare, Untitled, ca. 1921-22,
pencil on paper, 17 by 14 inches.
All of this grotesquerie is exuberant. Spare’s figures are soiled revelers, captive gluttons, and dead-eyed hedonists, daring the viewer to condemn their bacchanal. In one drawing, three misshapen, golem-like creatures urinate on a voluptuous woman lounging below. Her eyes are closed in relish, and the sinuous streams of urine form a kind of pedestal around her. She seems imported from a Rubens canvas, as if Spare were taking the piss out of art historical beauty standards. Similarly, in another drawing, a figure who resembles Spare—his tousled hair a trademark—is bent over, defecating onto two figures preoccupied with their own masturbatory idyll.
Spare’s line has a calligraphic subtlety and a lithe vigor that troubles distinctions between clothing, bodies, and bodily fluids. Forms dissolve and coalesce, as in another drawing in which a mass of ruined faces that bring to mind Honoré Daumier’s caricatures swells toward a winged vagina cruising overhead. This outcrop of men is rendered with such gestural intensity that it could well be an example of Spare’s automatic drawing, in which lines roil in feverish elaboration.
The sequence of depravity was momentarily calmed in a grid of nine drawings that depict either couples or solo models. These images feel starkly modern, even as they hint, however vulgarly, at romantic idealism. In one scene, a man poses with his arm behind his head, miming ancient statuary, while a curvaceous woman clings to him. The man’s oversize penis penetrates her, although the mood isn’t sexual. It’s as if the couple’s genitals are engaged in their own mindless tasks. Throughout these drawings, there’s a sense of instinct taking over, of figures relieving themselves in every way imaginable, sometimes experiencing pleasure, at other times only fulfilling a dull commitment to physical necessity. This wild, startling show was as much an illustration of carnal satisfaction as an exercise in arousal: of desire, disgust, pity, and fascination.
Chicago novelist Nelson Algren described his hometown as a city “that was to forge, out of steel and blood-red neon, its own peculiar wilderness.” He was talking about a mercantile city, an ecosystem of trainyards and jails and bars, but he was also gesturing to a density that felt untamed, in which anything could happen. Tony Fitzpatrick, another Chicagoan, literalizes the idea of urban wildness in “Jesus of Western Avenue,” an exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, just outside the city. Comprising nearly one hundred multimedia collages and etchings (plus a quilt), the show has the vigor of a career retrospective, albeit one permeated by nostalgia and ironic sentimentality. Like Algren, whose work he has illustrated, Fitzpatrick is both a mythologizer and a booster of Chicago. His show is equal parts paean and eulogy. The metropolis that Fitzpatrick enshrines here doesn’t exist anymore and perhaps never did, except in the romantic imaginations of born locals.
Fitzpatrick is a self-taught artist who grew up in a large Irish Catholic family. His résumé includes stints as a tattooist, bartender, and boxer, and he still moonlights as an actor. The exhibition’s name derives from the street where Fitzpatrick’s studio is located, near Humboldt Park. From the earliest work on view (a 1994 etching) through the most recent mixed-media collages (the bulk of the show), Fitzpatrick has mined the same visual vocabulary drawn from comic books, holy cards, tattoo art, vintage matchbooks, and midcentury ads. He can also sometimes resemble a distant heir to the Chicago Imagists, whose exuberance and sardonic humor he shares. A published poet, Fitzpatrick occasionally garnishes his work with snippets of portentous verse: “On Western Avenue, / the bird of last things / awaits the final night / of lillies grown in / a bloody red garden,” reads a stanza from Holy Ghost of Western Avenue #2 (2020).
Tony Fitzpatrick, Holy Ghost of Western Avenue #2, 2020, watercolor, ink, gouache, colored pencil, and ephemera on paper, 11 by 14 inches.
In these and most other recent works, matchbook covers advertising defunct Chicago businesses do double duty as a border and a visual chorus. Humboldt Park Winter Juncos (I, Apostle of This Radiant Place, Cast My Bread on Your Water), from 2021, features a stamp-size ad for the Edgewater Beach Hotel, a luxury playland on the shores of Lake Michigan that was demolished in 1971. The ghosts in Fitzpatrick’s work are architectural and cultural.
Perhaps to offset this spectral quality, Fitzpatrick also populates his pictures with vibrant portraits of creatures whose regal scale dwarfs the surrounding mélange. While many of the works—roughly the first half of the show—were produced in the past two years, and some, such as The Plague Angel, from 2020, obliquely acknowledge the pandemic, they are dominated by animals rather than people. The collages incorporate quirky headlines about locusts and murder hornets, or monumentalize birds against a debris field of retro iconography. In Humboldt Park Winter Woodpecker (Among the Spirits), the eponymous bird is perched among an intricate bricolage of musical notes, jaunty skulls, a raven, a scorpion, and stock illustrations of men and women that could have been clipped from postwar catalogues. The mood of sinister schmaltz is central to Fitzpatrick’s aesthetic; every reference is so self-aware that even allusions to murder, drugs, or other weighty fare feel cheeky. Likewise, in Humboldt Park Tern (Longing for the Sea), the presentation is both ennobling and kitschy, with the namesake seabird surrounded by a similar explosion of skulls, flowers, kitten heads, and cartoon characters. In mythology, birds are emissaries from the afterlife; Fitzpatrick’s birds, framed against litter of long-gone Americana, look as though they’re here to remind us that nothing lasts forever.
The collages are so rambunctious, and their gridded compositions so meticulously choreographed, that viewers must get close to experience their tactility. But the closer one gets to the art, the farther away this jazzy, all-nite, gin-and-tonic version of Chicago seems. If the exhibition’s title invites thinking of Fitzpatrick as the Jesus of Western Avenue, then he is a self-appointed savior, redeeming Chicago from encroaching banality by insisting on its dynamism. The show isn’t a critique of gentrification but a seductive, idiosyncratic Baedeker that suggests we might still find a bygone city lit by the Technicolor glow of cocktail bars and beachfront hotels, a city of louche pleasures and casual vice. It’s no accident that much of the period Fitzpatrick preserves here roughly coincides with his childhood in the 1960s. Nostalgia is a kind of escapism, and so is his art.
Fitzpatrick has said this will be his final museum show; perhaps like those birds in Humboldt Park, he knows when it’s time to move on.