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Written by Debra Brehmer
May 19, 2011
“Lippy” by Jim Nutt. – Photo: Courtesy
I never liked Jim Nutt’s work. Emerging in the early 1960s in Chicago as part of what became the Hairy Who movement, Nutt spent two decades or more making cartoony paintings, often on shiny surfaces (Plexiglas or metal). Bad boy compositional antics of distorted, kooky figures with orifices, sexual peculiarities, hairy armpits, amputated limbs, warts and wounds felt like one-part carnival, one-part bored school boy doodles. The paintings held a strange set of double offenses – too goofy and too fussily crafted.
Then in the late 1980s, Nutt started painting what could be construed as portraits. He bled his previous figurative works of narrative, dropped the jokes and just painted women’s faces in three-quarter profile. Of course, they were Jim Nutt faces – angular, asymmetrical, miscued. He painted these portraits with the austere care applied to early Northern Renaissance works, a la Jan Van Eyck with his tiny brush and glazed surfaces or Hans Memling with his delight in delineating each eyelash and wrinkle.
These later Jim Nutt portraits didn’t interest me much either, but I had only seen them in reproduction where they looked flat and stylized.
In the past few years, Nutt and company, known broadly as the Chicago Imagists, have slowly risen out of their Midwest farm camp. A show of Ed Paschke’s work was curated by his former student Jeff Koons and shown at Gagosian Gallery in New York a year ago to much acclaim. Roger Brown, Gladys Nilssen (Nutt’s wife), Don Baum and Barbara Rossi are now being recognized as important cultural conduits of the 1960s and ’70s. They drew from broad influences: popular culture, self-taught art and underground comics as well as art history and politics.
This group now seems particularly absorbent of the crosswinds one might expect to feel in the middle regions of the country, where pop art was fertilized by surrealism and took on a decidedly odd countenance.
I went to Jim Nutt’s current show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (through May 29) because a friend who is a huge fan of Nutt’s told me I must. He advised that it is best to proceed backwards, beginning at the end of the show with the newest paintings.
Approaching the first portrait painting from 2010 called “Trim,” I leaned in to take a look. The scale of these works is modest at 25 x 24 inches. What immediately surprised me was the surface beauty of the paintings. No reproduction can come close to duplicating the nuanced, delicate patterns, shapes and fragile colors. Nutt demands that we engage in an intimate stance, a true relationship, one-on-one, with these strange beauties’ physicality. The paintings then reward our undivided attention with compacted virtuosity.
Nutt only makes one of these paintings a year and, surprisingly, uses acrylic paint. It is no stretch to say that at age 72, he has achieved some kind of master status and that these paintings are the contemporary, twisted equivalents of the greatest early Northern Renaissance portraits.
It is not the image of the face that speaks, but the skilled paint handling, with its gracefully woven complex geometries and minute patterns. Small passages chock full of pure poetic beauty abound. An oddly shaped hank of hair reminiscent of Ren and Stimpy cartoons in “Plumb” (2004) rises to a bald knoll where a lone black hair gracefully and humorously juts skyward. On the other side, the hair flips up in a perfect balanced oppositional pull and shimmers with highlight patterns.
The surfaces of these paintings read almost more like landscapes than faces. Each planar shift from the odd geometry of skewed noses, to the curves and gentle cubist loops of invented physiognomy, feels like rich terrain that we drive through very slowly so not to miss one sublime passage. The faces glow with their own internal, nearly phosphorescent light. Control and grace are the operational forces, as well as a skill set accumulated from 50 years of determined study.
The exhibition allows us to witness how evolutional Nutt’s development has been. Even in his earliest 1960s cartoony work, we see the interest in persona and human form and the painstaking insistence on craftsmanship; an outmoded concern that brings renewed pleasure.
In a catalog essay from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s previous Jim Nutt show in 1999, historian Robert Storr wrote that the portraits are “countenances that blossom like chiaroscuro orchids.” He also stated that: “Once seen, good painting is not forgotten.”
This is the heart of the show: Really good painting is almost a shock to the system. It lingers and creates an appetite for more.
In addition to “Jim Nutt: Coming into Character,” which runs through May 29, a related exhibition across the hall, “Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion,” offers work by 50 contemporary artists whose work resonates with Nutt’s. This smartly curated endeavor helps open up the broader context of these paintings and places Nutt within many other spheres of production and influences.
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