Chicago has never really recovered from Imagism. That local explosion—whose blast radius stretched from roughly the late 1940s through the mid-1970s—gave the city’s art scene the frisson that it long coveted in New York. Although Imagism’s practitioners disavowed charges of a formal coalition, critics demurred and set about conducting the art-historical equivalent of paternity tests. And so the Monster Roster, the postwar generation that included H. C. Westermann, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Seymour Rosofsky, and others, was retrofitted as an incubator for the expressive figuration, gutter wit, and linguistic hijinks that epitomized the Hairy Who in the 1960s. And the Hairy Who segued naturally into the illustrative vitality of near-contemporaries such as Roger Brown and Christina Ramberg, who in turn heralded their own stylistic offshoots and accomplices. This intergenerational froth coalesced into an unofficial movement, collectively known as Imagism, that’s as emblematic of Chicago as the Sears Tower.
Whatever its contested lineages, Imagism lent Chicago a modishness few associated with the “hog butcher for the world.” Beginning in the early 1970s, biennials took notice, major museums came calling, collectors and critics swooned—all of which was an intoxicating salve for the Second City’s anxieties of provincialism. At the time, Imagism looked like the Midwest’s answer to the coastal vanguard, a companion to Bay Area Funk and a riposte to New York Pop and Minimalism. (No matter that the Imagists didn’t endorse this view.) The fact that these artists were young, urban liberals gave them an invigorating currency; their work seemed to erupt with preordained hipness and subversion, even if the artists themselves were rather conventional. (The cohort included a few married couples—Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson, Sarah Canright and Ed Flood, Christina Ramberg and Phil Hanson—and at least one mother: Suellen Rocca.) More recently, Imagism has been hailed for its embrace of folk, ethnographic, and outsider art, its high ratio of women, its nonhierarchical ethos, and, in the case of the Hairy Who, its offbeat exhibition designs and accompanying zines. Over the last half-century, it has remained Chicago’s most lauded art provocation, and it still garnishes gallery calendars in New York and farther afield. Brown, Nutt, Nilsson, Rocca, Karl Wirsum, Robert Lostutter, Richard Hull, Richard Wetzel, and other Imagists and Imagist-adjacent artists have all headlined solo exhibitions since 2019. Westermann is the subject of a recent documentary. And now, two concurrent shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, Imagism’s birthplace, historicize the movement through the output of a load-bearing quartet.
Christina Ramberg. Waiting Lady, 1972. Courtesy the Estate of Christina Ramberg. Photography by Jamie Stukenberg.
Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective is an engrossing presentation of the late artist, who died young in 1995 and left behind paintings of alluring ambiguity: bound hands, women disrobing, and “corset urns”—Ramberg’s term for the hybridized objects, part garment and part container, that were the subjects of a 1970 piece. Four Chicago Artists, meanwhile, is a group show featuring Ramberg, Theodore Halkin, Barbara Rossi, and Evelyn Statsinger. The latter exhibition suggests not only affinities between these particular figures, but, as the title implies, an aesthetic continuity indigenous to Chicago itself. But what is it about form, these forms, that denote a uniquely Chicago sensibility? When form is put in service of what local critic Franz Schulze described as artists’ “highly personal, introverted and obsessive styles … doggedly infatuated with symbol, image, dream and pungent anecdote,” then form, it would appear, embodies a recognizably Chicago attitude. That attitude has ripened from regional aberration to one of the most distinctive aesthetic legacies of late twentieth-century American art—one that has dispersed via sometimes meandering backchannels. Jeff Koons, for example, studied under Imagists Wirsum, Ed Paschke, and Ray Yoshida. The cartoonist Chris Ware has acknowledged his debt to Roger Brown. Yet, form alone is an insufficient approach to Imagism and its myths.
You might ask: Why these shows, and why now? The short answer is that the Art Institute received mostly critical raves for its sprawling Hairy Who survey in 2018 and for its traveling Joseph Yoakum exhibition in 2021. (The overwhelmingly white Imagists lionized Yoakum, a Black self-taught artist from Chicago’s South Side.) Perhaps this fanfare convinced the museum that there’s a market for extravagant resurrections of local art history. Or perhaps, more idealistically, it’s just indisputable that these artists have influenced at least two subsequent generations of figurative painters and merit renewed attention. Writing about the Hairy Who show for Artforum, the critic Dan Nadel argued that the work “included some of the most profound investigations of consciousness and physicality of the past half century”—a claim that’s undeniable when you’re face-to-face with these images of feral slapstick and jittery menace.
In the case of Christina Ramberg, decades of simmering cult fame have finally boiled over into formidable heat. Culturally, the time is right for her explorations of physical mutability. Eyebrows would have torqued in the 1970s if you suggested her paintings weren’t largely about womanhood and its perils, but now we’re all enlightened enough to appreciate the subtext that speaks to queers, disabled people, transgender and nonbinary people, and anyone forced to pilot a jalopy of intractable meat otherwise known as a body. Four Chicago Artists, too, is relevant, and not just because it doubles as an inadvertent memorial: Statsinger died in 2016, Halkin in 2020, and Rossi just last year. This isn’t a commemorative showcase or a nostalgia trip so much as a narrow and well-meaning, albeit somewhat airless, inquiry into Imagism’s often radical brand of figuration.
Halkin, the oldest of the four, was born in 1924; Ramberg, the youngest, was born in 1946, just three years before Halkin graduated from the School of the Art Institute. (Statsinger was born in 1927; Rossi in 1940.) Despite their age differences, the four share a kindred visual idiom. The exhibition’s curatorial framing invites us to focus on the artists’ deployment of form, a key element of Imagism that’s often upstaged by the movement’s more obvious perversities. (See, for example, Nutt’s gallery of pimpled and oozing rogues.) But those forms—bulbous and biomorphic shapes for the most part—bury the lede: even in its more abstract iteration, Imagism imparts an ineffable neuroticism. (“Chicago art is the example of a deliberate if risky attempt to make ‘mad art,’” Donald Kuspit has noted.) One need only look at Statsinger’s 1977 painting Sound Raga (Fall) to see this fact in all of its counterintuitive drama. With its luminous gradients and rhythmic stripes, the painting at first recalls the meditative scenes Miyoko Ito produced around the same time—but don’t be lulled. There’s a sense of atmospheric disturbance here that’s only intensified by Statsinger’s palette of overcooked oranges, dusky reds, and humble blues and greens. Serrated edges divide the picture into quadrants, hinting at a kind of orderly violence. A sheared object, as of a shank or snapped wood, juts into the upper right frame. In the upper left, a radiant crystal—or a cell, yolk, or geode—emanates uselessly, like a radio in an empty room. It’s a painting of dissonant moods, at once ethereal and cautionary.
Dissonant moods also characterize the work of Barbara Rossi, a former nun turned artist. Her paintings, drawings, and fabric etchings are alternately delicate, grotesque, and enigmatic. Like the other Imagists, she concocted a pictorial language that evinces her eclectic influences, including, most notably, Indian vernacular paintings and devotional art. Her notion of “form invention”—a personal iconography wrought from the enjambment of imagination and observation—is the conceptual hook for the whole outing.
Barbara Rossi, Moon Meet May, 1993. Gift of the Kohler Foundation, Inc.
In Sky Dive (1973), Rossi reverse paints on Plexiglas to render an image that invokes the body while being neither wholly figural nor wholly abstract. If we take the painting’s title at its word, we might see this as an image of the nervous liquefaction one experiences when plummeting from an altitude of ten thousand feet. The body, if that’s what it is, has reached a berserk velocity. Turned inside out, it bulges with squishy pink sacks and misfit genitalia, errant talons and tubes—an anatomical heap in freefall. Snarls of real hair, perhaps Rossi’s own, are affixed to the upper right and left corners, literalizing the idea of windblown scramble. Reverse painting on Plexiglas—a painstaking process that grew out of repeated preparatory works that Rossi called “sweat drawings”—required that she make no mistakes, which foreshadows the drawings on view in the next room (“magic drawings”), in which she improvised without ever erasing her marks. These drawings, all of which are untitled and from the late ’60s, pursue form as a method of revelation.
The real-time discovery of form is a through line of Rossi’s career. Hung amid the aforementioned drawings are four black-and-white photographs of driftwood. These images, from 2004, comprise a suite of disfigurement. Seeing them gives you a sharper sense of what Rossi meant by “form invention.” Untitled (Elephant), a drawing from 1967, features a swollen travesty of a face, one that looks as if it’s been kissed repeatedly by a sledgehammer. Juxtaposing this drawing and the driftwood photographs isn’t just about underscoring their visual similarities. It’s also a demonstration of Rossi’s particular turn-ons as an artist. Her “stream-of-consciousness” drawings and her salvaging camera alight on the same motif, whether excavated from her own psyche or out in the wild. This process happens again when she transforms Man of Sorrows, an almost cartoonish fifteenth-century German woodcut of Christ’s suffering, into a series of color etchings and hand-stitched “quilt pictures” that seem to buzz with private obsessiveness. Her renditions riff on the original—and perhaps nod to other versions, such as Albrecht Bouts’s, circa 1500, or James Ensor’s, from 1891—only now Christ is funkier and more freakish, his body a cluster of amorphous shapes.
Halkin, too, relied on chance in his work. According to Gregg Hertzlieb, a curator who showed Halkin at Valparaiso University in 2014, the artist “described his process as a ‘messy’ one, where a measured chaos eventually suggests routes and strategies for greater shape and clarity in the picture.” The idea of “measured chaos” animates many of Halkin’s drawings, which can look like drunken schematics. The dotted line (as in “cut here”) is a recurrent device, but whether it’s structural or purely decorative depends on your eyes’ stamina. You suspect that submerged beneath the smudged swaths of color and architectural bric-a-brac is something gnomic but useful—a sort of Barthesian punctum that will make the whole picture talk. In an untitled drawing from 1967, that role is played by the hazy glimpse of a cityscape that breaks through the surrounding miasma of penciled shapes and shading. That whiff of a city operates like a dream of reason in an otherwise riotous cloudburst. Similarly, in the drawing Ruins (1967), a lone, darkened window beckons from a half-obliterated jumble that might once have been a building. That window both obscures and discloses, as does much of Halkin’s art.
The tension—or perhaps it’s just playfulness—between disclosure and concealment is also the dynamic engine behind Statsinger’s sketchbooks. Almost every page features a cutout, so to flip through the books is to stumble along after an iterative narrative whose denouement is forever receding. Likewise, the ten exquisite corpses on view—which includes contributions from fellow Chicagoans Wirsum and Phil Hanson—highlight the volatility that’s synonymous with Imagism. Ramberg’s work, for example, is all about the shape-shifting nature of form. Her drawings position morphology as the very oxygen of her imaginative universe. One sketch on view here includes variations on a garment—perhaps belted shorts—that is utilitarian and deeply ridged. In the margin, Ramberg scrawled “hand grenade,” and suddenly the innocuous attire takes on the deadly credentials of an explosive.
Evelyn Statsinger, Sound Raga (Fall), 1977. Gift of the Evelyn Statsinger Cohen Trust.
Such doubling recalls the wordplay and double entendre that mark many Hairy Who titles. (A 1972 Nutt diptych is called He Might be a Dipdick But They Are a Pair, to cite just one example.) But it also recalls the woozy juxtapositions and ambiguities of Surrealism. We should be reminded of this, as Surrealism is inseparable from this generation of artists and from Chicago’s sense of its own iconoclasm. You only have to wander upstairs to the Art Institute’s Modern Wing to see the rapport between Imagism and its European—and, later, homegrown—forebears. The organic shapes of Yves Tanguy and Jean Arp are obvious precursors, as are the narrative enigmas of Magritte, Man Ray, and de Chirico, among others. Local fantasists such as Gertrude Abercrombie, Julia Thecla, and Ivan Albright carried the torch for visionary art in midcentury Chicago. In 1951, Jean Dubuffet delivered his seminal lecture “Anticultural Positions” at the Arts Club, in which he advocated for the “values of savagery … instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness.” His canon-busting salvo reaffirmed Chicago’s commitment to deeply personal and unabashedly symbolic art, as well as its sympathy toward outsiders. (Chicago’s repertoire of notable self-taught artists is arguably unrivaled by any other American city.) This egalitarianism helped to encourage the efflorescence of Imagism among critics and collectors over the ensuing decades.
The critic Peter Schjeldahl argued that the character of the Midwest—the region’s native antagonism, its waffling between certainty and nihilism—enabled Imagism to take root in Chicago in a way it never would have elsewhere. For him, the phenomenon offered “a style of frozen hysteria, a style for consciousness driven back by its own revulsions while remaining half in love with them.” What Schjeldahl alludes to is Imagism’s inherent tension, a tightening of the screws that mimics Chicago’s own self-perception. The city is stranded in the geographic and cultural middle, the birthplace of vulgarities such as mail-order retail, McDonald’s and Twinkies, but also a metropolis groaning with global ego. These contradictions manifest literally, like certain infections do. Out of the endless prairie flatland rise towers of glossy verticality. Asphalt and pavement end abruptly in a shock of freshwater lake. Humans, dwarfed to human scale, enact nightly operas of vengeance and conquest that send some mother reeling. If Chicago is still stinging from A. J. Liebling’s infamous takedown in the New Yorker in 1952 (“Chicago’s bid for grandeur has failed”), it’s also still seduced by architect Daniel Burnham’s mandate to “make no little plans.” Caught between its streetwise compulsions and its drastic ambition, the city seethes.
Christina Ramberg. Black ‘N Blue Jacket, 1981. Courtesy the Estate of Christina Ramberg. Photography by Jamie Stukenberg.
At the risk of overstating my case, let me suggest that when you consider Imagism through a formal lens alone, you miss this subliminal, feverish backdrop—the roiling sense of something or someone in mid-crisis, of psychological jeopardy and erotic fiasco, of personal quirk veering toward calamity. You see these moods play out in Ramberg’s women, almost always depicted faceless or from the neck down, attired in lingerie and posed as if for some sadomasochistic ritual. Or you see them in Roger Brown’s sardonic scenes of fiery skyscrapers, downtown avalanches, and highway mudslides. And you see them again, in various approximations, in the four Chicago artists in this exhibition. All of the artists internalize what Franz Schulze diagnosed as the essential Midwestern spirit: “lonely, flat, hot, bawdy, intense”—traits that distinguish the artists’ narratives and thematic preoccupations as much as their techniques. The writer Thomas Dyja bills Chicago “the home of the national id,” and nowhere is this sobriquet truer than in Imagist art. It’s an anxious, overwrought, rude, jokey, carefree, caustic style, as purely American as anything I can imagine.
My point is that chasing form has a kind of academic futility in the face of so much strong visual medicine. Although it can be fun and even edifying to make connections between each artist’s pictorial language, that finally starts to feel like a sightseeing exercise. Imagine an architectural walking tour, for example, in which you soberly gawk at a cornice, walk fifty feet, and soberly gawk at another cornice much like its predecessor. But you never step back to notice that the cornice ornaments a madhouse. I don’t mean to defame sightseers or cornices but, rather, suggest that form alone doesn’t entrap the heart. When dealing with a city as romantic and brawling and cynical and self-deluded as Chicago, and with a movement as rambunctious as Imagism, form is just the start. “Watch yourself watching the world,” Rossi advised her students. Similar advice applies here: Watch yourself watching the art. It’s not only those swarming squiggles and patterns that make your heart stutter, but also the riddle beneath or behind them, like, say, a city briefly glimpsed but promising a hell of a time.
