The Face on the Canvas and Other Mysteries
By Ted Loos
ONE would think that the artist Jim Nutt would have a lot to say about the subject he’s been painting over and over, day after day, for the last 25 years: the off-kilter face of an imaginary woman with an impossibly monumental nose, an image that is apparently never too far from his mind.
One would be wrong.
Seated in his studio on a snow-covered street in this town just north of Chicago, Mr. Nutt, 72, laughed nervously in response to nearly every inquiry about the project that has consumed him for decades. “I don’t know,” he said, repeatedly and reflexively.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Mr. Nutt allowed when asked how the series got started and what it meant back then. More uncomfortable chuckling.
Stroking the bushy mustache he has worn since his early fame as a member of the 1960s Chicago artist groups the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, Mr. Nutt was always unfailingly polite and friendly, even as he evaded questions. But in an age when artists are trained to explain the point of their work succinctly — the better to market it to collectors, curators and dealers — there seemed to be something either willful or strangely innocent in Mr. Nutt’s responses. Or possibly both.
Gladys Nilsson and Jim Nutt
by Richard Hull
Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson are often described as “Chicago artists,” and it’s true that their work formed during a particular moment when Chicago Imagism appeared in the mid ’60s with the three Hairy Who shows at the Hyde Park Art Center. But I would argue that for the last 40 years Jim and Gladys, who met as students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and have been living together ever since, could have been living anywhere. With fierce independence and a nonchalant attitude toward reigning trends in contemporary art, they create paintings and drawings that root from an intense need to make things, and to make them right.
For several years, Jim and I have been team-teaching a class about looking at and discussing paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. A scrupulously detailed conversation about a Bruegel painting is fairly typical (we continued one in several emails), and though there are times we disagree about certain aspects of what a painting might do—much to the amusement of the students—we agree that there is always something new to discover. It is Gladys and Jim’s intense curiosity and connoisseurship of painting—and also opera and golf, among other things—that draws me to them. Of course, I admire the work, which, as Gladys put it regarding Jim’s work, has “a great deal of wonderful, masterful subtlety going on now.”
Jim and Gladys and I became friends 30 years ago, when the Phyllis Kind Gallery invited me to join them as a gallery artist. It was 1979; I was attending graduate school at SAIC. The first day I brought my work to the gallery, Jim and Gladys—whom I barely knew—were hosting a party for Roger Brown after his opening. Viewing their house and the unusual amalgamation of paintings and objects in it, and meeting some of the most interesting artists in Chicago, I felt lucky. Driving up to the house for this interview, I remembered that evening. After all these years, I still feel lucky to be in the presence of their wonderful home and great company.
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Jim Nutt is back in New York, sans straight jacket. Once a wildman, he was part of Chicago's Imagist/ Hairy Who movement, back in '66 when Hairy meant huge, when Ed "Big Daddy" Roth was customizing petroleum-powered hot rods with giant ratfinks, chrome pipes, metalflake paint jobs and two-tone flames, shortly after which S. Clay Wilson introduced the maniacal Checkered Demon and the ravishing Star-Eyed Stella. Meanwhile, in New York, the influential, serious works created by Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, and Warhol-also influences by commercial imagery-were being digested. Ans what a contrast using the same cultural raw materials: the Midwest output infantile, maybe; the East Coast oeuvre just possibly uptight.
The Hairy Who included graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; James Falconer, Art Green; Gladys Nilsson, now Nutt's wife; Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum, an Adolf Wolfli doppelgånger. Members of the Imagist movement included Roger Brown, Leon Golun. Ed Paschke (Jeff Koons, then a student, his assistant), Nancy Spero, and H.C. Westermann.
Refined Nutt: A Jim Nutt retrospective at Nolan
by Deven Golden
Jim Nutt: "Trim" and Other Works: 1967 – 2010 at David Nolan Gallery
Jim Nutt is part of the Chicago Imagists group which emerged in the 1960s as a regional version of Pop Art. His fellows included Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi, Roger Brown, Suellen Rocca, Christina Ramberg, Ed Flood, Art Green, and Nutt's wife Gladys Nilsson, almost all of them students of Ray Yoshida's at the School of the Art Institute. Unlike the New York Pop movement, the Chicago variety took pop culture as a starting point and then diverged in two important ways. First, its focus was on a much darker, more sexually charged imagery such as that found in burlesque photographs, wrestling posters, underground comics, and pinball machines. Second, where the New York variety presented a cool, decidedly non-expressionist style of rendering, Nutt and the other Chicagoans reveled in a controlled but highly personal approach to drawing. Nutt's earliest work in this mini-retrospective, Miss Sue Port, 1967, in acrylic on Plexiglas, presents an iconic example of this. Part freak show poster, part Pinball machine glass, it features an electric yellow androgynous personage with one extremely large, pointed breast, bulging cod-piece, truncated arms, a horror show face, and a massive, corseted posterior. A potent cocktail of revulsion and attraction, this is precisely the kind of work that brought the Chicago Imagists to critical attention.
Over time, Nutt diverged from his Pop culture beginnings and the work began a gradual shift to a quieter internal narrative. The hyper-inventive figuration stayed, but Nutt slowly shed overt cultural references. By the early seventies, as represented in this show by the colored pencil drawing There Are Reasons, 1974, , the artist was playing with images of stage sets featuring wildly cavorting and contorted figures enacting sexually overt pantomimes. What followed was a consistent reduction in the amount of secondary information, coupled with an increasing focus on the figure. By the late eighties Nutt had narrowed everything down to isolated, singular, portraits.
The current series of refined women's heads as presented in the main gallery is experienced as a packed and careful condensation of Nutt's vision. For while the early works like Miss Sue Port feature tight compositions with dozens of objects and figures (the term horror vacui comes to mind), from a strictly mark-making perspective they are painted with the broadest of strokes. By contrast, in the later paintings the brush strokes are barely the size of an eyelash. Needless to say, making a painting with a brush this tiny requires literally thousands of marks. The result is a little less stuff, but a great deal more information being filled into each picture. This is no doubt part of the reason why Nutt produces but a few paintings a year. Indeed, of the seven drawings and three paintings representing the current work, only five of the drawings are from this year, and only one of the paintings, Trim.
It is not the process of making the paintings that stands out, but their hard won commitment to seeing. Standing in the main gallery, a quiet yet powerful meditative vibration seems to emanate directly from the works. Nothing is facile in these recent paintings and drawings; every mark is precise, meaningful and clear. This is easiest to discern in the drawings, where brief strong lines delineate a myriad of features and textures against the emptiness of the paper. The paintings have the same intensity of line, and add subtle modulations of color and tone. In whichever medium, when a female head is depicted, the individuality of the features are intensified, not obfuscated, by the careful abstraction of each nose, eye, ear, and mouth. As in Cubism, the features differentiate within a single picture because they compress many moments into a single image. But there is more to the time compression than that. Nutt's silent women simultaneously look at us and through us. Ignoring our pressing gaze, they look unrelentingly inward.
Jim Nutt: 'Trim' and Other Works: 1967-2010
David Nolan Gallery
527 West 29th Street
Chelsea
Through June 26
Jim Nutt works slowly, so an exhibition of three new, and newish, paintings and seven drawings mostly finished this year feels like a gift. The works are all portraits of women. They look back to Van Eyck, Ingres and Salvador Dalí for their extreme refinement and lucidity, but not for their intense realism.
Mr. Nutt's realism is something else altogether, a form of pictorial science fiction, perhaps. The trompe l'oeil fruit-and-vegetable portraits of Arcimboldo are precedents, although instead of fresh produce, Mr. Nutt gathers scraps from the dustbin of Cubism and Surrealism, assembling them into faces that also hint at landscapes, architectural edifices and sculpture. Noses in particular are carapaces with lives of their own. The dark-haired woman in "Plumb," clothed in a faceted, crosshatch pattern that seems to allude to Jasper Johns, has a sleek, black nose that resembles carved marble. The one of the woman in "Pin" has a crisp ridge, but soft sides where a shading from deep red to black might be a spreading bruise, a cold or the effects of liquor. And the nose of the redhead of "Trim" reflects the blue-on-blue dots of her dress, subtly implying a certain shininess.
Mr. Nutt's drawings may be even better than his paintings. Their lucidity becomes, literally, transparent, and their aberrant textures and delicate marks stand. Their strangeness goes on forever. A second room devoted to earlier works by Mr. Nutt provides background on his technique, subject matter, absorption of Surrealism and popular culture. The 1971 work "Running Out" presages the portraits in several ways. But this display is also a sad reminder that no New York museum has had the vision to assemble a full-dress Jim Nutt retrospective. ROBERTA SMITH
Jim Nutt's paintings and drawings, subject of an adumbrated overview at David Nolan Gallery, are testimony, underplay
By Mario Naves
Jim Nutt's paintings and drawings, subject of an adumbrated overview at David Nolan Gallery, are testimony, underplayed and undeniable to the vital role craft plays in generating aesthetic vitality.
For the past 20 years or so, Nutt has dedicated himself to portraiture—of a sort, anyway. His paintings of imaginary women isolated within dense fields of color combine Renaissance clarity, Surrealist scatology, Cubist abstraction, Persian concision, vernacular ornamentation, cartoonish elasticity and Vermeer-esque quietude. They are, in other words, a dizzying and unlikely amalgam of precedent; to Nutt's credit, the amalgam is wholly organic. Works like "Trim," "Pin" and "Plumb" signal an artist operating at the top of his game.
These recent paintings are exemplars of how eccentricity can be tempered and made resilient (or profound) by nuance. Certainly, there's little that's subtle about the work Nutt created during his 1960s tenure with the Hairy Who, an informal group of like minds centered on the Chicago Art Institute. Mining Freudian excess, comic strip brashness and the obsessive byways of Outsider Art, painters like Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Roger Brown and Ed Paschke created a mid-Western version of Pop Art—less epochal than the East Coast variant, perhaps, but what the art lacked in formalist detachment it made up for in idiosyncrasy, humor and, almost in spite of itself, humanity. Warhol is the icon, but Nutt is the artist. Who's to say which history will favor?
Early pieces like "Miss Sue Port" and "Coursing" are slick, bright and brainy riffs on Miró, cut-rate advertising and the body as both a source of comedy and a site of confusion; these contrivances radiate with gleeful insolence. Colored pencil drawings from the early 1980s depict male-female relations with relatively predictable staginess, but they do evince an increasing technical facility—a characteristic that would gain in intensity with the portraits.
Viewers should bring a magnifying glass in order to fully appreciate Nutt's astonishing dexterity as a paint-handler. His women are realized through infinitesimal hatchings of acrylic paint, deliberate and tender marks that accumulate into pearlescent fields of transitory color, shapes of sloping plasticity and, in the end, visages of uncanny restraint. An accompanying suite of pencil drawings pale when compared to a painting like "Pin," a woman whose morphing features are a form of transmuted landscape or sexual congress. And that's only the beginning of a web of allusions Nutt puts masterfully into place.
Jim Nutt
The wacky Chicagoan has begun to look canonical. A pocket retrospective revisits rowdydow work from Nutt's days as a "Hairy Who" Surrealist, in the sixties, and then jumps to his recent fantasy portraits, in smooth paint or careful pencil, of oddly configured women. With aromatic color that extends to beautifully crafted frames, the pictures evoke the clenched intensity of icons. They convince a viewer that an exactly squashed nose or a twisted brow is a matter of some formal and meaningful, critical import. Call it geek neo-classicism. Through June 26.
Jim Nutt, "Trim and Other Works: 1967–2010"
A founder of Chicago's Hairy Who group presents a little bit of his past and his present.
By Paul Laster
A Pop artist with a Surrealistic bent, Jim Nutt is widely recognized as a founding member of the Hairy Who, a group of artists who were part of the Chicago Imagists movement of the 1960s and '70s. Influenced by cartoons and advertisements, Nutt started out making comical and erotically charged paintings and drawings that wryly commented on the human condition. For his third solo show at David Nolan Gallery, the artist presents eight offbeat works from his early career, plus ten peculiar portraits from the past decade of imaginary women.
Coursing (circa 1966)—portraying a funky female lacing up her corset while spewing smoke from a cigar or cigarette—is a classic example of Nutt's sensibility. A tennis shoe grows out of this pinup princess's shoulder; her long, flowing hair wraps behind her, creating tongue and tonsil shapes; and her knees reveal fleshy, feminine faces and torsos in profile. Painted on the wall-facing side of a Plexiglas sheet, the piece exhibits the part-insider, part-outsider nature that is an important characteristic of all of Nutt's work.
Newer paintings, such as Pin, Plumb and Trim, distort female portraiture in uncanny ways. Shifting planes and patterns define faces filled with sublimated sexual forms; their large angular noses and sculptural hairdos are especially notable for their visual innuendo. Equally, Nutt's drawings, which dominate the show, pack a powerful punch, illustrating the delicate, sensuous line that keeps the artist's work sublime.
Head Case
by Jerry Saltz
Back in the late 1970s, when I was a young artist (yes, I was once one, too) and still living in Chicago, Jim Nutt was the enemy. I hated his work, It stood for everything I - then an Artforum-obsessed, insecure Midwesterner - was against: It wasn't about materials, process, or abstraction. It wasn't post-minimal, rigorous, or Bruce Nauman enough. Instead. it was surreal, funky, and festively colored. Bizarre characters did batty things in shallow space. Women with teeny, atavistic arms gaped at men with squished penises as pint-sized figures darted about like crazy wraiths.
Jim Nutt at Nolan/Eckman
by David Ebony
For the past decade or so, Jim Nutt has concentrated on painting schematic heads of imaginary women, which he refers to as "portraits." While perusing this wonderful exhibition of three recent, medium-size acrylic paintings and a dozen related pencil drawings, I kept thinking of Sargent's famous quote, "A portrait is a likeness in which there is something wrong about the mouth." In the works on view, Nutt seems to have reached a new level of refinement that at ties recalls Ingres's technique. But the 66-year-old Chicago Imagist pioneer, known for his inventive approach to the figure, has lost none of his penchant for outrageous distortion, nor his sense of humor.
Art in Review: Jim Nutt: Portraits
by Roberta Smith
It's not too early in the season to place this show, dominated by Jim Nutt's impeccably chiseled, feather-light portrait drawings from the 1990's, on a list of the season's best. Mr. Nutt, who turned 60 last year, is the leader of the Hairy Who or Chicago Imagists. He is also one of the most original, if least appreciated, artists of a generation born in the late 1930's that includes such lights as Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Lucas Samaras, Sigmar Polke and Frank Stella. In addition Mr. Nutt is working at the height of his powers.