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SURREALISM:
Thomas McCormick Gallery Part II Until April 28, 2001, "Surrealism: An American Attitude," at the Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago, offers the gallery visitor a significant sampling of Surrealist art in America: intuitive and reasoning trends, work exhibiting eclectic syntheses, and art which gave birth to important further movements. This exhibition does include a number of Surrealists who began their careers abroad and introduced new ideas into American art. Sarane Alexandrian in Surrealist Art (Thames and Hudson:1993) noted that the Chilean, Roberto Echaurren Matta, had joined Andre Breton's Surrealists in Paris in 1937, but underscored that "It was only on his arrival in the United States that the painting of Matta came to its full brilliance, and burst like a storm into a world which he constantly hereafter explored." She explains that "In New York Matta became a disciple of Marcel Duchamp...." At the Thomas McCormick Gallery, Matta's War of Nerves (Colored pencil, crayon on paper:15"x22":1940) is on display. This piece, signed and dated by the artist, represents that artist well. Surrealism, provoking so much in subsequent American art circles, was nonetheless very international in origin. And the Americas brought much to the U.S.. Wildredo Lam came from Cuba, by way of Paris, to New York City. His immersion in Afro-Cuban culture and consequent interest in 'primitive' art, as well as his immersion in the European avant-garde brought much to American artists such as Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Lam's untitled etching in two colors (1957) exemplifies the mediation such artists posed for future American explorations: influences and inspirations which are only now again coming to the fore. Marisol (Escobar) was born 1930, in Paris, to Venezuelan parents. In this exhibition, her mixed media construction, Untitled (1961), is both representative of her work, and engaging. In a very Surrealist sense, Marisol's piece, juxtaposed with the work of American-born Joseph Cornell, suggests that Surrealism in American art represents not so much an American adaptation of international art ideas, but an entrance, and even ascendency to the wider world. Previously, American art had been watched by others, even included as a curio. After Surrealism in America, American art became a leading force. Past shows at this gallery have shown an instinct for the crucial points when art has flashed into newer fields. (Witness "1949," earlier reviewed in www.artscope.net: July 1999). Here, the visitor confronts Cornell's Pleiades as Seen with Unaided Eye (Mixed media:10"x14"x4":1952-54), and An Owl for Ondine (Mixed media:9 1/2"x 6 1/2"x4 1/2":1954). Cornell mounts artifacts, once treasured, and then visually plays upon their state of being now. Much like a T.S. Eliot of objects viewed in their history, he shores fragments against contemporary dissolution, in crafted boxes and under glass.
Jan Matulka (1890-1972) is an important figure, and, together with Arshile Gorky, he introduced numerous modernist innovations into American art. The interests of these artists focused both about major Surrealist developments, and the kindred work of the Italian Scuola Metafisica, exemplified by Giorgio de Chirico. The Thomas McCormick Gallery has produced a comprehensive and well-documented monograph on Matulka ($25.00), whose estate they represent. Matulka is represented in this exhibition by five pieces from the 1930s and 1940s. "Surrealism: An American Attitude" also highlights many excellent artists who came from the Midwest, and further demonstrates how Surrealism evolved new guises in the New World. John Talleur received his BFA in 1947 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Iowa in 1951. This artist began his Surrealist interests in Chicago. His color woodcut Two Saints in Four Blocks (1958) was inspired by Virgil Thompson's 1928 opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, (with libretto by Gertrude Stein). Talleur's fascination with religious mystery particularly drew from Roman Catholic legacies, and Two Saints in Four Blocks posits a Surrealist conceptualism of religion's ambivalent melding of the worldly with the eternal. Behind this exhibition lurks a generous spirit and yet a certain irony to art careers. For over sixty years, Nathan Lerner was prominent in Chicago's art scene. Lerner was born to a Ukrainian family in Chicago's Maxwell Street neighborhood, and following studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1937 he joined Moholy-Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes, and Henry Holmes Smith at the New Bauhaus Institute of Design. He eventually opened his own design firm. Lerner was deeply involved with painting and drawing, but his reputation centers about his experimental photography. In recent years, ironically, he had gained fame as the landlord and advocate of outsider artist Henry Darger (reviewed October 2000 in www.artscope.net). Lerner's two renderings, and his manipulated photograph, Eye on Window (1943), reveal that he himself has contributed a considerable presence to the American avant-garde. Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) was born in Austin, Texas, but became a Chicagoan. In 1929, Abercrombie graduated from the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana with a major in Romance languages. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1930s before going to work for the WPA (1933-40). This artist drew upon her own experiences in psychoanalysis under Dr. Franz Alexander, who founded the Institute for Psychoanalysis. Abercrombie's vision is revealed in this showing in three oil paintings: Dog Howling at the Balloon (Oil on canvas:7"x15":1944); Strange Tree (Oil on board:9"x9":1954); and The Owl and a Tornado (Oil on board:10 3/4"x12 3/4":1956). Her aesthetic sense evokes an air of Rene Magritte within a landscape of the subconscious eye. In these works, a formal composition, rigid and meticulous, belies an irrational para-logicality. In 1977, Don Baum organized a major retrospective of her work at the Hyde Park Art Center.
Chicago does offer a notable contribution to "Surrealism: An American Attitude." Among those artists is Ellen Lanyon, born Chicago in 1926. Lanyon attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1944 to 1948. In the 1950s, her work involved large shadowy figures in atmospheric, dream-like interiors. During the 1960s, Lanyon developed a bright palette, and turned to family photographs, sports and circus magazine images. In the late 60s, she developed an allergy to turpentine and turned to acrylics and drawings. In this showing, her Cal Sag (Egg tempera on masonite:24"x37":1956) reveals a primal sense of man as an agent in his environment. Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera once, when asked about the impact of technology, said that, although man created machines for service, the imperatives of the machine now ruled over man; he viewed man as an unwitting geological force. Lanyon's Surrealist vision of this canal to the Chicago River seems to bear that out. Among her recent work is a ceramic tile mural for Chicago's Riverwalk. In the Post-WWII era, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago proved an important center from which Surrealist influence spread. June Leaf (born 1929) came to know Seymour Rosofsky, part of the SAIC group, about 1952, while a model in San Francisco. (Seymour Rosofsky (1924-1981) received his BFA (1949) and MFA (1951) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was associated with Chicago's "Monster Roster" artists.) Leaf moved to New York in the mid 1960s, and to Nova Scotia in 1970. Although her freely associative inspirations began with primitive goddesses and earth mother motifs, in recent years she has focused on smaller sculptures. "Surrealism" at the Thomas McCormick Gallery offers The Head (Painted steel:38"x45"x30":1980). This sculptural work, modest in scale, unites a Surrealist, even Dadaist, warm whimsy with mechanistic allusion -- what appears as a joyous portraiture, female and pharaoh-like, arises from a clockwork bust of struts and gears. If, as Riviera asserted, machine arises as master of man, here woman nonetheless arises as human element from all that the Modern has become. Emerson Woelffer (born 1914) also studied at SAIC in the mid-1930s, and he joined the WPA in 1938, working in Chicago and St. Louis. Hired by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1945 for the Illinois Institute of Design, Woelffer, in 1949, was invited by Buckminster Fuller to teach at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. This artist is represented by Untitled (Oil, roofing material on canvas:35"x28":1947), which is signed at lower right. There is, as the Gallery Notes observe, a totemic abstractionism about this work so reminiscent of the sculptures by Miro. Woelffer was among one of the early advocates of Surrealism among Chicago painters, and his subsequent excursions into Abstract Expressionism underlies the contribution of that current in art toward later specifically American developments. One interesting inclusion to "Surrealism: An American Attitude" are the two renderings by Chicago artist Peter Karklins: voices of the deep...deep sea voices (Pencil on board:6 7/8"x5":2001) and Untitled (Pencil on paper:2 13/16"x3 9/16":2000). The Gallery Notes state: "We literally met the artist a week before the opening and could not resist adding him to the roster." Karklins studied at the City College of Chicago with Frederick Armour and Bob Katzman, and later worked with Cosmo Campoli at the Contemporary Artist's Workshop. The work is good and it is encouraging to see a premier gallery active in promoting living artists on the basis of their art. An architectural model maker by training, Karklins currently supports his art by working as a night watchman. In a showing of such extent and quality, it is difficult to alert the gallery visitor to all he might anticipate. Several trips to this exhibition are called for. Lorser Feitelson's Magical Forms #165 (Oil on canvas:45"x40":1948) demonstrates the fluidity of style which characterizes so many of the artists of this American Surrealism. Art critic and historian, Robert Rosenblum, noted Feitelson's earlier fusion of "biological, astronomical, and Christian prototypes of creation through a strange dictionary of images rendered, as was so often the case in de Chirico's still lifes, both as palpable, shadowing casting objects hovering on a steeply tilted table and as flat, schematic drawings," and that critic called attention to this artist's attempts "to probe the buried symbolic life of an odd array of objects culled from nature, science and myth." In Magical Forms #165, Feitelson's art veers closer to a curved and active, flat-plane and geometricized Neo-Plasticist approach. Feitelson exemplifies an intuitive current in American Surrealism which recedes from the figurative and enters a domain of archetype akin to Miro and late Kandinsky. "Surrealism: An American Attitude" is an exhibition of wide range unified by a common desire: to flee past tradition and create a new expression based on what the artist finds, without words or rationale, within the mind at play. This exhibition returns the gallery visitor to the initial exhilaration Surrealism brought to America, the excitement which spurred subsequent, distinctly native currents. Too often academia, museums and critics have allowed our experience of art and art movements to drift into routines and formulae: familiar names and easy summaries. Exhibitions such as "Surrealism: An American Attitude" are particularly valuable, not just for reassessing undervalued art, but for recreating in some small way the excitement and dialogue which enveloped art at that time. Many of these artists, or their estates, are handled by the Thomas McCormick Gallery, which marshalls expertise and effort toward documenting and annotating the artwork. There are excellent publications at the gallery to supplement this showing, and as a number of the artists here are handled by the gallery, a visitor can inquire about additional works not now on display. "Surrealism: An American Attitude" is accompanied by a six-page brochure, excellently illustrated with color reproductions, with concise and informative text by gallery director Thomas McCormick. The artists represented in this showing are: Gertrude Abercrombie, Thomas King Baker, William Baziotes, Tom Benrimo, Eugene Berman, Dorr Bothwell, Joseph Cornell, Francis Criss, Leonard Edmundson, Jules Engel, Lorser Feitelson, William Ferguson, Arshile Gorky, John Graham, James Guy, Hananiah Harari, Gerome Kamrowski, Peter Karklins, Leon Kelly, Jules Kirschenbaum, Wilfredo Lam, Ellen Lanyon, June Leaf, Nathan Lerner, Helen Lundeberg, Marisol, Ezio Martinelli, Roberto Escaurren Matta, Jan Matulka, Robert McChesney, Leonard Nelson, John O'Neil, Melville Price, Seymour Rosofsky, Maybelle Stamper, John Talleur, Oscar Thalinger, Steve Wheeler, Emerson Woelffer, Gordon Wagner. "Surrealism: An American Attitude," is on display at the Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago, until April 28, 2001.
Finis Part II --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Relevant books may be purchased through this site's Barnes & Noble link. Diego Rivera is quoted by Lucienne Bloch in Art in America (Feb.1986). Sarane Alexandrian's Surrealist Art (Thames and Hudson:1993) is in print. Art in Chicago: 1945-1995 (Thames and Hudson/ Museum of Contemporary Art:1996) contains profiles for Gertrude Abercrombie, Ellen Lanyon, June Leaf, Nathan Lerner, Seymour Rosofsky, and Emerson Woelffer. |
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