Ramberg’s preoccupation with psychosexual content was clear from the beginning. Six small paintings from her undergraduate years in the exhibition (which runs through August 11 before traveling to the Hammer Museum in October and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2025) show a figure cut off at the head and waist shyly disrobing. The series conveys the emotional vulnerability of a young woman revealing a secret self in art. Revelations abound in the exhibition, above all, the daunting force of Ramberg’s imagination as she transforms images gleaned from comics and catalogs into artworks where stylized coifs become urns and then corsets, bodies read as broken furniture, shiny hair doubles as wood, and muscle tissue provides material for tailored suits and jackets. She portrays the female body in ways tantalizing, rebellious, and problematic: encased in fetishistic lingerie, seductive, submissive.

Shame is a subtext in the early work, thematized in “Skin Pix” (1969), a series of heads in which each figure attempts to hide her rash-ridden face. In one painting, Rose’s Woe, rosacea afflicts a weeping figure veiled by a handkerchief, red roses decorate the wallpaper behind her, and real sugar roses adorn the painting’s faux woodgrain frame. The embarrassing inflammation is a metaphor: “Skin Pix” puns on “skin flicks,” pornographic films trafficking in illicit desire, while the redundant roses suggest female sexuality—here conceived as ailment. Elsewhere, Ramberg associates the flower with lacy undergarments and swollen high-heeled pumps, for example in Belle Rêve (1969), which also depicts a cloche-hatted head seen from the rear. A black-gloved hand reaches up to pat the luxuriant hairdo.

Disembodied hands become a recurring motif in paintings and drawings of the 1970s, inspired by gestures the artist studied in Japanese prints and recorded in her notebooks. Hands in Ramberg’s work clutch white kerchiefs or are bound by black satin straps. Polished red nails, an anachronism at a time when the “natural” look was in style, hark back to women’s fashion during the artist’s childhood. Eroticization of the hands may relate to memories of a mother’s touch, early sensuous experiences of being cleaned, cradled, caressed. The retro garments that mold and constrict the bodies in Ramberg’s provocative paintings—pointy brassieres, girdles, and underarm shields—date to her mother’s generation, and in an interview in 1990, she remembered her conflicted wonderment when as a girl she watched her mother put them on: “I thought it was fascinating … I thought it was awful.” Brilliantly, she reproduces this ambivalence for the viewer, delivering a potent frisson with pictures like Waiting Lady (1972), with its scantily clad figure doubled over, apparently awaiting punishment. The image is riveting yet unnerving because it suggests woman’s humiliation and abuse. Female masochism recalls the passive condition of infancy—having things done to one’s body, like it or not—and on another account, stems from social conditioning: women must repress aggressive impulses, which then morph into masochistic fantasies turned inward toward the self.

The plethora of social demands on women became Ramberg’s subject in the early 1980s. Haunted by the perennial tension for female artists between motherhood and career, she created a series of imposing, heterogeneous figures whose jumbled parts symbolize multiple female roles and split allegiances. In Hearing (1981), the assemblage consists of half a short-sleeved blazer, black nylons, and one sexy and one hugely cumbersome thigh-high boot; she expels a tiny, fully dressed adult from between her legs, while a miniature jacket (read: baby) clings to her side and a pair of trousers (husband?) hangs around her neck. In real life, Ramberg juggled work and family, domestic activities and artmaking. Sewing straddled both realms; she made clothes for herself and her husband and son, as well as quilts for her own aesthetic pleasure. For a time in the mid-’80s, quilting replaced painting in her studio practice.

Several of these monumental textiles feature in the exhibition, which concludes with a group of loosely painted abstractions, a dramatic stylistic departure from what had come before. Whereas the figurative paintings had been on Masonite, with ultrasmooth surfaces and crisp forms, here Ramberg adopted a canvas support, more yielding to the touch. In these linear, symmetrical, diagrammatic pictures, in a grisaille palette reminiscent of X-rays, she schematized the torsos that she subjected in her sketchbooks to untold formal variations: bustier, vase, armor, chairback. Over several pages, Ramberg drew and inventively redrew the thoracic cavity of the agonized body in Italian crucifixions, making the depression framed by the ribcage into a positive, phallic form.

Moreover, she had played in paintings of the ’70s with penile totems she called “Tall Ticklers,” sheathed in lace and tufted with fur, and with uterine forms anthropomorphized as confrontational figures where fallopian tubes become arms and the birth canal, a pair of legs. With the sketchbooks now on view for the first time along with the late paintings, one can see how Ramberg envisioned in the abstractions an internal bodily space either penetrated by or, better, having incorporated the phallus. Hers was a coherent project: to explore female experience and desire and, ultimately, to conflate feminine creativity and masculinist power. 

Howe’s development is clear in this retrospective at the Portland Art Museum, curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo Nation). His early watercolors are tentative and spare, informed by the decorative conventions of Pueblo pottery promoted in the studio program at the Santa Fe Indian School, where instructors eschewed modeling and perspective in favor of firmly outlined shapes and flat color on undifferentiated backgrounds. In his watercolors, Howe infused this Southwest-inspired vocabulary with Plains Indian detail, as seen in the colorful Sioux regalia sported by his stiffly dancing figures; these ethnographic artworks may have responded to prevailing tourist-market demands.

A greater naturalism entered his work in the 1940s, in scenes of hunting or art-making in which figures sit or kneel firmly on the ground, rather than float in isolation on the sheet, as in the earlier watercolors. In subsequent decades, Howe—now thoroughly conversant with European modernism through his MFA studies at the University of Oklahoma—adapted Cubist and Surrealist tendencies to Native subjects in fractured geometries or swirling currents of movement and life. His dancers become rapturous, his horses and riders bold, daring, fleet.

In his writings, Howe downplayed his non-Native influences, insisting instead on the importance of hide painting, parfleche decoration, and beadwork. He plotted his compositions using a point-and-line technique he called tahokmu, or “spiderweb,” and referred all geometric designs back to the abstracted diamond shape of a deer-hoof track. In truth, as this retrospective attests, his was an entirely original melding of both modernist and Plains abstraction. His syncretic innovations occasionally met resistance; in 1958, his quasi-abstract submission to the Indian Annual at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was deemed “not Indian.” Howe bristled indignantly in a written protest, arguing for the artist’s right to individualism, and rejecting notions of Native art as static and unchanging. His repudiation of artistic dictates from any sector make him a model of creative freedom.

A number of Howe’s pictures depict solitary figures in transcendent states: ceremonial dancers, or worshippers invoking cosmic powers. In Dakota Medicine Man (1968), a healer in buffalo-horned headdress conjures a turtle, symbolic of Mother Earth. A linear network encircles him, a crackling tahokmu force field of spiritual energy. The contemporaneous Skin Painter depicts an artist at work, likewise embraced by an electrifying web; he inscribes the deer-track diamond on an animal skin stretched before him. As a chronicler for the group, the traditional Plains artist would record the annual “winter count” of significant events by means of pictographs on hide. Like the medicine man, then, Howe’s painter offers his individual abilities in service of the collective.

This theme echoes in images Howe made of the Sun Dance, several of which are on view in this retrospective. Participants in this sacred ritual engage in a painful self-mortification, a symbolic self-sacrifice for the welfare of the group. The ceremony centers around a tall pole, an axis mundi mediating the sacred and the human. Dancers connect to it with ropes pinned to their chests, wounding themselves at the dance’s culmination as they fall away from the pole. In Sacro-Wi-Dance (Sun Dance), 1965, Howe envisions this climax in hot oranges and yellows, in a churning eddy of physical exertion, transcendence, and light. In rendering the scene from the ground looking up, he inserts himself and his viewers among the dancers—as participants rather than mere observers—inviting an empathic identification with Native bodies in their sacrificial moment of selfless ecstasy.

Undefeated by obstacles impeding women with professional ambitions, Bonheur became the most renowned animalier of her time, bringing increased gravitas to her chosen genre. She hailed from a family of artists; her father trained her not only in painting and sculpture but also in a freethinking philosophy that bolstered her independence. Like Bonheur herself, The Horse Fair is categorically unconventional. It departs from the fashionable English pictorial treatment of horses as prized property of the landed gentry; Bonheur’s powerful animals are instead destined for punishing labor in the city. Energetically heroic rather than serenely bucolic, the picture avoids as well the orientalizing exoticism of Delacroix in favor of quotidian reality.

Nor is there a trace of sentimentality, a minor marvel given Bonheur’s affinity for equine subjects. (Her empathic identification with horses was such that when she had to dress in women’s clothes, she described herself as “in harness.”) Art historian James Saslow marshalled evidence in 1991 to argue convincingly that the blue-smocked figure riding a sorrel mount near the center of the composition, looking directly at the viewer, is a self-portrait. Thus we find Bonheur abjuring the royal and military associations of equestrian portraiture, proudly appropriating the genre for herself. Where was her Baudelaire, one wonders, a poet to celebrate this highly original painter of the spectacle of modern life?

His brilliant graphic sense produced Intimacies, a suite of ten prints depicting couples in domestic or hotel interiors, published in 1898. Vallotton relied on the most reductive formal means—the simple contrast of black on white—to establish richly ambiguous scenarios, hardly clarified by suggestive titles inscribed at the bottom of each block: The Lie, The Irreparable, or Five O’Clock (that hour when French men typically met their mistresses). Betrayal and blame are broadly assigned: in the Munch-like scene of The Triumph, a pitiless woman disdains her distraught husband; in Extreme Measure, it’s the sobbing wife who’s devastated. The lady in evening dress in Money seems unmoved by the disputation of her male companion, his intentions abstruse. Vallotton places him literally on the dark side, merging his figure with the shadows. Ironically, a year after he created this image, the artist left his own longtime mistress to marry a wealthy widow—for money. He was unhappy ever after.

Money’s composition is remarkable, fully two-thirds of it given over to solid black. In a similarly bold move, to cancel the edition, Vallotton cut up his woodblocks and compiled a single-sheet graphic novel, sans text, featuring an evocative detail from each print in Intimacies. One thinks of Zola—but also of Chris Ware—as these mute vignettes of passion and alienation form a disjunctive narrative of intimate sexual relations in Vallotton’s modern world.

In the nineteenth century, Chicago was an upstart crossroads of transportation and exchange, nervously looking east for established tastes. Collectors acquired art elsewhere; fine art offered an antidote to the city’s crass commercialism. Lacking patrons, artists formed supportive clubs and exhibition societies. The Chicago Academy of Design opened in 1866, later—under the patronage of tycoons like Charles D. Hamill and Marshall Field—morphing into the Art Institute of Chicago. Remarkably for the period, women were among the AIC’s faculty as early as 1881. One of them, the talented, short-lived Alice Kellogg Tyler, emerges as one of this book’s most exciting revelations. She also taught at Hull House, the social service center cofounded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Pervasive at the time was the belief that art could help elevate all segments of society. In this spirit, the Municipal Art League established a collection for schools and park field houses, and in 1905 a bequest from lumber baron B.F. Ferguson began to fund public sculpture.

In the early twentieth century, artists came and went, among them pioneering modernists Manierre Dawson and Raymond Jonson. Notable for his inclusion in the Chicago iteration of the Armory Show in 1913, Dawson had created his first abstract paintings in 1906. Given his thrilling promise, it is painful to learn how he quit the city—and art itself—in 1914 for his farm in Ludington, Michigan. Although the outraged reception of the Armory Show prompted New York painter Walt Kuhn, one of the event’s organizers, to dub Chicago a “rube town,” Jonson was among those inspired. He developed a rhythmic modernist style, before decamping to New Mexico in 1924. Other progressives welcomed modernism to the Arts Club, where contemporary art exhibitions—including Picasso drawings in 1923 and Guernica in 1939—alternated with Indian watercolors, Chinese bronzes and jade, and Polynesian antiquities. This ecumenical approach also characterized Helen Gardner’s textbook Art through the Ages (1926), which she wrote while teaching at the School of the Art Institute. Gardner transmitted a global perspective to her protégé there, Kathleen Blackshear. Legendary for SAIC field trips to the Oriental Institute and the Field Museum of Natural History, Blackshear inculcated in students an appreciation for world—not just Western—art.

In 1927, African sculpture was shown at the Art Institute alongside contemporary art in “The Negro in Art Week,” co-organized by the Chicago Woman’s Club and the Chicago Art League. Among the latter’s members was William McKnight Farrow, columnist for the Chicago Defender, who, like Alain Locke in the New Negro movement, embraced art as a means of racial uplift. Insisting on only positive images of African Americans, the League was often at odds with Archibald J. Motley, foremost painter of black life, including night life, on Chicago’s South Side. Other African American artists—Margaret Burroughs, Eldzier Cortor, Charles White—seem not to have been affected by this tension. Burroughs was a founder in 1940 of one of the most enduring institutions seeded by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the South Side Community Art Center. Costume balls, home decorating courses, and Gordon Parks’s South Side Camera Club made the SSCAC a cultural anchor.

Taft notes a robust camera culture in Chicago by this time, and describes how Harry Callahan, Arthur Siegel, and Aaron Siskind “used Chicago as a laboratory for picture-making.” All three taught at the Institute of Design, begun as the New Bauhaus in 1937, when the Association of Arts and Industries hired László Moholy-Nagy to establish a school on the European model. After only a year, the pragmatic Association withdrew its funding: businessmen wanted graduates with enhanced design skills, whereas Moholy-Nagy aimed to produce “more fulfilled human beings.” With private patronage, the school continued under Moholy-Nagy, accredited in 1944 as the Institute of Design, and later absorbed by the Illinois Institute of Technology. This episode is just one of myriad examples in Art in Chicago exposing the city as a hotbed of overlapping, sometimes competing interests eager to instrumentalize art, commercially, politically, and/or in the service of some moral or social program.   

AROUND MIDCENTURY, Chicago’s fine artists began displaying their work in members’ annuals at the Arts Club, in the AIC’s “Chicago and Vicinity” shows, at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and in exhibitions organized by the No-Jury Society. They also, as Cozzolino recounts, assertively made their own way. In 1947 Cosmo Campoli, Leon Golub,  Nancy Spero, and others launched “Exhibition Momentum” in protest over that year’s “Chicago and Vicinity” show. They continued mounting such alternative exhibitions for ten years. Imagine their disappointment when AIC curator Katharine Kuh, invited to curate the American pavilion for the 1956 Venice Biennale, selected only one Chicagoan, Ivan Albright, privileging instead work created in New York. In light of this perceived indifference, local artists assumed “a contrarian identity in relation to the international art world.”

The Momentum generation rejected Abstract Expressionism in favor of figuration. Cozzolino describes this strain of postwar Chicago art as “abject, raw, fixated on the body, its physicality, and psychological states.” In 1959, Campoli, Golub, and H.C. Westermann were represented along with Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, and Jean Dubuffet in Peter Selz’s “New Images of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Dubuffet had made a historic impact in Chicago eight years earlier with his “Anticultural Positions” lecture at the Arts Club. Less well known is his fascination with Albright, whose reliance on urban detritus for subject matter would carry forward in Chicago art. Claes Oldenburg took this sensibility with him to New York in scrappy early projects such as The Street (1960). At the SAIC, Ray Yoshida conveyed a love for “trash treasures” and pop culture to students, among them Roger Brown, who explained how he and his fellows considered comics and advertising not simply as source material but as art equivalent to one’s own.

An enthusiasm for all aspects of visual culture informed artist-curator Don Baum’s lively exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, beginning in 1956. There, the irreverent and often hilarious Hairy Who—including Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Karl Wirsum—made their debut. Critics recoiled, dubbing the artists “delinquents” and their exhibitions the “crème de la phlegm.” Grouped with contemporaries who also showed at the HPAC and the Museum of Contemporary Art (founded in 1967)—Brown, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg—these artists became known as the Imagists.

Cozzolino posits a generational anxiety permeating Imagist art, relating, for instance, Nutt’s renderings of bound and mutilated bodies to reports of atrocities perpetrated in Vietnam. Anti-war sentiment registered powerfully in Chicago art, not least in reaction to the brutal crackdown during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which prompted artists nationwide to propose boycotting the city until the end of Mayor Richard Daley’s term. Oldenburg, beaten by police along with other protesters outside the convention, canceled his exhibition at Richard Feigen Gallery. Instead, Feigen mounted an invitational directed against the mayor.

The Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) arose in 1967, generating a famed gallery-of-heroes mural, The Wall of Respect (1967, destroyed,1971), on the city’s South Side. Members of AfriCOBRA (African Coalition of Bad Relevant Artists) embraced figuration, bold colors, and inscribed messages—features evident in paintings and prints as well as in clothing created by Jae Jarrell and tapestries by Napoleon Jones-Henderson. The latter studied with fiber artist Claire Zeisler, whose monumental sculptures echo African and other non-Western forms. Above all, AfriCOBRA spokesman Jeff Donaldson demanded an art “inspired by African people,” made “for people and not for critics whose peopleness is questionable.” In keeping with this drive for accessibility, murals proliferated as black, white, and Latino activist artists claimed walls throughout the city.

Also proliferating were alternative exhibition spaces, bolstered during this heyday of enlightened government patronage by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Breaking exciting new ground for women, Artemisia and ARC (Artists, Residents of Chicago) began as all-women galleries during the national upsurge of feminism in the 1970s. Artemisia thrived until 2003; ARC continues today, with exhibition opportunities for all genders. N.A.M.E. and Randolph Street Gallery contributed to the city’s developing performance-art culture. Interdisciplinary practices exploded in the 1980s, especially at the SAIC, where performance, sound art, video, and film were taught alongside electronics and generative systems.

Art in Chicago is a beautiful book on an unwieldy subject. Interspersed throughout are sidebars, edited by writer Erin Hogan, in which we learn, for example, about eccentrics such as Vivian Maier and Henry Darger, whose respective photographs and drawings became known only posthumously. Other sidebars treat Gertrude Abercrombie, jazz hostess and painter of quasi-Surrealist scenes, as well as topics like experimental music, art criticism, and the perennial problem of how to curate local artists into broader institutional missions.

This sampling format expands and takes over in a final chapter, a series of interviews and reflections assembled by Taft and consulting editor Judith Russi Kirshner to give a sense of the past two decades. Nick Cave joins Anne Wilson in conversation about their respective work in fiber; AIC curator Matthew Witkovsky writes about photographer Dawoud Bey. We hear from painters Julia Fish and Judy Ledgerwood, sculptor Richard Rezac, graphic novelist Chris Ware, video artist Gregg Bordowitz, community builders Dan Peterman and Theaster Gates. Painter Kerry James Marshall contributes a comic strip, “A Modern Saga of Love and Redemption,” wherein an amorous host shows his date a collection not of etchings but of tote bags from Chicago galleries and museums. In these five panels, Marshall brings the city’s art institutions into his very own love story. It is an ingenious finale to Art in Chicago, suggesting for the individual artist, as for the city itself, a necessarily rich and diverse ecology of art institutions large and small spawned by both elite and impassioned grassroots interests.

Inevitably in a book of this scope, oversights occur. Lamentably, there is no bibliography. One would have welcomed some acknowledgment of the important programming at the Chicago Cultural Center, a real boon for Chicago artists especially from the 1980s to the aughts. We have barely a word about the late Dennis Adrian, a brilliant and tireless critical advocate for Chicago artists. Absent too is gallerist Phyllis Kind, who showed self-taught artists along with the Imagists they inspired. Perhaps these omissions are intended to correct a common perception of Chicago art as cartoonish and idiosyncratic, but the conceptual art, cerebral abstraction, and community-based social practice showcased in the final chapter already redress the balance. These issues aside, Art in Chicago surpasses all previous accounts of the city’s artistic heritage. Unintimidated by the immensity of the task, its editors have matched their subject in ambition, inclusiveness, and verve. If you are a Chicagoan, this history will make you proud; if not, it will offer useful models for inventiveness and self-determination. If you are among Chicago’s exiles named or unnamed in this book—Jerry Saltz, Robert Storr, Alice Thorson, yours truly—it may, even if fleetingly, make you homesick.

Endnotes

1. Peter Schjeldahl, “Letter from Chicago,” Art in America, July/August 1976, p. 58.

The tell-all autobiography is not likely to endear its author to contemporary readers. Recently in the New York Review of Books, Hyman disclosed that he had been asked to evaluate the original manuscript and recommended against publication without severe editing. He was generous in his conclusion that the final version of Confessions has “a far more sane and sympathetic voice than in the original.”³ That may be the case in relative terms, but sane and sympathetic this book is not. The artist will be more positively remembered for his paintings, a fine selection of which, selected from West Coast collections by independent curator Bruce Guenther, appeared this past summer at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Portland. Most of the sixteen paintings and four drawings included in the exhibition “R.B. Kitaj: A Jew, Etc., Etc.” date to the artist’s last two decades of studio activity. All are of Jewish subjects—reminding us of the goal Kitaj somewhat glibly outlines for himself in Confessions, namely, “to do with Jews what Morandi did with jars.”

Kitaj penned his memoir in Los Angeles from 2001 to 2003, intending for it to be published after his death. No one pursued that goal until German curator Eckhart J. Gillen, poring over the artist’s papers in preparation for the 2012 Kitaj exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, discovered the typescript in the special collections department of the UCLA Research Library. Gillen edited the document—with, I think, far too light a hand—expunging at least sixty pages. He added a short preface by David Hockney, an epilogue to contextualize the memoir, a chronology, a bibliography, and a roster of Kitaj’s friends, family members, and artistic and philosophical influences. This apparatus frames a text that remains rambling, disorganized, repetitive to the point of tedium, and marred by hyperbole. From this narration, the artist emerges as a grandiose, hotly opinionated, swaggering male of the Norman Mailer variety, seething with self-righteous indignation. His hostility extends even to the reader—for example when, placing himself in the company of such artistic and literary lights as William Blake, Whistler, Courbet, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Zola, he rages, “and if you despise me even more for my Jewish audacity, fuck you and damn you to hell where the bad guys go.” This makes for tough reading, occasionally rewarded by Kitaj’s wit or, in certain passages, his astonishingly poetic metaphors and flights of imaginative fancy. And the irreducible problems he grapples with and/or embodies in these pages continue to perplex and fascinate: what constitutes a Jewish art, how an artist copes with criticism, and whether one can ever separate an artist’s personality (in Kitaj’s case so off-putting) from the work.

He was born Ronald Brooks-Benway to Jewish parents in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and was quickly abandoned by a father who decamped for California. Jeanne Brooks remarried, she and her son taking the surname of her new husband, the Austrian Jewish refugee Walter Kitaj. The artist says little about his childhood in his memoir, but late in the book he suggests the compensatory role that art assumed for him. “In the deep, dark Depression of the 1930s,” he recalls, “I came alive, after my father fled to L.A. in my infancy, in the great Cleveland Museum, in its children’s art classes, losing myself among its oil paintings, and into the very pictures, like Alice. . . . That museum, Rodin’s Thinker at its helm, was my Combray, my Liffey, my Vitebsk.” He decided to become a painter, later fulfilling his dream after a stint in the merchant marine by means of an enviable art education: first at Cooper Union in New York, which was tuition-free; then, supported by his grandmother Kitaj, at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna; followed by the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford on the GI Bill—he had enjoyed a comfortable army posting as an illustrator in Paris and Fontainebleau in 1956 and 1957—and finally at the Royal College of Art in London. Kitaj maximized all these advantages, achieving notoriety in the milieu of distinguished fellow figure painters he called the School of London, including Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Hockney, among others [see Books this issue].

Signing with Marlborough Gallery in the early 1960s, Kitaj remained in London, seat of his international success, for forty years. Though he enjoyed guest teaching stints at Berkeley (1967–68) and UCLA (1970–71), he returned each time to his adopted British home, because, he admits, “the Bitch Goddess had me by the balls.” Subscribing to the New Yorker was one way he could maintain some connection to his native culture; thus it was in 1963 that he happened upon Hannah Arendt’s reports on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. Deeply disturbed, Kitaj entered what he calls his “Morbid Period,” reading and brooding about the Holocaust, thinking about his own previously neglected Jewish identity. He had grown up an atheist, believing, he writes, “that I could be a Jew only if I wanted to be a religious one; if not, not.”⁴ Realizing that Jews in the Holocaust had been murdered irrespective of their religiosity, Kitaj embraced his Jewish heritage and began to ponder the question of a Jewish art.

What might that be? Kitaj eschewed “dancing Hasids and Menorahs and flying cows and all that schmaltz”; he wanted instead to be modern. We learn in his memoir how diligently he set about his project to be reborn as a Jew and to integrate his ethnicity into his art. Already a voracious reader and bibliophile, Kitaj immersed himself in the study of Torah and its exegetes, discovered the philosopher Gershom Scholem and through him Walter Benjamin, and drew up a list of his “top ten” modern Jewish painters. One of them, Pissarro, appears in a deftly painted homage (2007) included in the Oregon Jewish Museum’s exhibition, along with other images of venerable Jews in Kitaj’s pantheon: Proust, Soutine, and, by proxy, Kafka, personified by his tragic protagonist in a painting titled, like the story, The Hunter Gracchus (2007). Pissarro in Kitaj’s powerful conception of him is a hoary sage whose head and impressive brushstroke-beard overflow the composition; observed from a low vantage point, he seems possessed of all the magisterial authority of a biblical prophet.

In another portrait, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (2007), Kitaj draws with his paintbrush the world-weary philosopher’s head, one side of her sagging face pressed up against a green strip of wall—as if she were eavesdropping on the darkness beyond. Listening is a significant theme for Kitaj. His bold charcoal-and-pastel self-portrait in profile (1997–2001), which shows him casting a suspicious sidelong glance at the viewer, features a red hearing aid planted firmly in his ear. Kitaj did wear such a device, but it was also symbolic for him; it appeared earlier in his painting of the emblematic post-Holocaust wanderer, The Jew, Etc. (1976–79, one of two similarly titled works in the show), which depicts a shadowy fedora-hatted man on a train. The hearing aid implies the figure’s vulnerability, isolation, and, perhaps also a displaced Jew’s necessary wariness and attentiveness. British scholar Anthony Rudolf has related Kitaj’s hearing-aid motif intriguingly to the exhortation to Jews in the Hebrew prayer Shema Israel—“Hear,  O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”⁵ And Kitaj, invoking voices emerging from his subconscious to haunt his canvases, instructs his viewers, “Listen to them. They will tell you what a Diasporist has on his mind.”⁶

THE CROWNING if unresolved achievement in his struggle to define a Jewish art must be his eloquent First Diasporist Manifesto, published in German in 1988 and in English the following year. Kitaj invents the term “diasporist art” both to characterize his own work and, I suspect, to seal his identification with his displaced forebears, despite, as Gillen notes in his epilogue to Confessions, the unbridgeable difference between the historical forced expulsion of the Jews and the artist’s own self-chosen, privileged, American expatriate life in Oxford, London, Catalonia, or Paris.⁷ In his manifesto, moreover, Kitaj acknowledges that dislocation is hardly unique to the Jews, citing other groups including Armenians, Black Africans, and “Palestinians prominent and suffering among them.” His argument grows even more diffuse as he includes as refugees those alienated others of “the self-estranged sexual Diaspora.”⁸ Straddling two cultures, American and British, Kitaj sees diasporist art as paradoxically both internationalist and particularist, while he retroactively recruits uprooted artists he admires—Beckmann, Cézanne (who left Paris for Provence), Mondrian, Picasso, Bauhaus artists and Surrealists—as diasporists or honorary Jewish kin.

As a kind of visual counterpart to the manifesto, Kitaj painted himself as his bespectacled diasporist hero Benjamin in Unpacking My Library (1990–91), titled after the writer’s well-known essay from 1931. The large canvas, which presents a summa of the artist’s intellectual passions, served as the centerpiece of “A Jew, Etc., Etc.” It depicts Kitaj in a cluttered interior amid boxes and books, his second wife, Sandra Fisher, in the background, like the queen’s chamberlain standing in the doorway in Las Meninas. Small pictures by Kitaj pals Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin, and Hockney hang on the rear wall;⁹ shelves leaning in a corner have yet to be put in place. The whole scene spills toward the viewer through a giant blue porthole, recalling Kitaj’s experience as a seaman, in transit here on the clichéd ship of life. His curious contorted posture—that of Rodin’s seated Thinker, running—aptly conveys his at once contemplative and peripatetic existence.

Another major painting in the exhibition, Whistler vs. Ruskin (Novella in Terre Verte, Yellow, and Red), 1992, captures a different aspect of Kitaj’s persona, the pugilistic firebrand always aching for a fight. The composition riffs on one of George Bellows’s famous boxing pictures, Dempsey and Firpo (1924), casting Whistler and his critical nemesis as naked contestants in the ring. Kitaj aligns himself in this project with Bellows—born, like him, in Ohio—as well as with the red-haired referee in the picture and with the figure of Whistler, who has just knocked his hapless opponent tumbling backward and headlong over the ropes. The painting allegorizes the ascendancy of artist over critic, invoking the famous libel suit Whistler brought against Ruskin in 1877–78 for defaming his pictures. Whistler won, though hardly in the spectacular fashion portrayed by Kitaj. Proud of his own “American pugnacity,” Kitaj asserts in his autobiography that he was destined to become “Whistler’s successor-trouble maker in London.” Again and again he boasts of his role as “the most controversial painter alive.” This attitude prepares us for his ferocious indignation over negative reviews of his 1994 retrospective at the Tate Gallery and his outrageous framing of this minor episode in an otherwise meteoric artistic career as the “Tate War.” The military metaphor serves as the title of a chapter in his memoir that Kitaj devotes to the retrospective’s reception, in which he calls his critics fuckers, brands them as a conspiratorial lynch mob, and compares them to Hitler.

So unhinged must Kitaj’s vituperations have been in the original manuscript for Confessions that Gillen intervened, swapping out offensive passages for an apparently more temperate diatribe, which Kitaj had called “J’accuse” after Zola’s historic open letter in 1898 attacking Alfred Dreyfus’s anti-Semitic oppressors. In this chapter, Kitaj ascribes the negative Tate reviews to British critics’ anti-modernism and anti-intellectualism, as well as their envy of his own writerly gifts, large house, and beautiful wife. Less absurdly, he objects to their insistence on the visual autonomy of the work of art—they spurned his inclusion of lengthy commentary on or alongside his pictures—and to their bias against him as a Jew. That bias was real, albeit not universal, exacerbated by the artist’s brash impudence in making an issue of his heritage rather than quietly assimilating into mainstream British culture. Stoked in his righteous rage by his friend and one-time neighbor in London, Philip Roth, Kitaj overreacted. For the rest of his life, he waged a hateful campaign against his critics, maniacally comparing his personal art battles to geopolitical conflicts in Northern Ireland and Palestine.

The tragic coincidence of his mother’s demise in the US at the time that the hurtful reviews of his retrospective were still fresh, and of his wife’s sudden death from a brain aneurysm shortly thereafter, traumatized him irreparably. Fisher was only forty-seven years old. Fifteen years Kitaj’s junior, she had assisted him with his career, helped rear his two children from an earlier marriage, run his household, and given him a son, his “only Jewish child.” Insanely, he blamed her death on his critics. We learn nothing from his autobiography of Fisher’s own struggles as an artist, though he briefly approves of her efforts and assigns her influences ranging from Manet to the Ashcan School. In fact, she was the daughter and pupil of American realist painter Ethel Fisher and enjoyed commissions in London and artistic collaborations of her own. Her sister, in a communication to Gillen noted in his epilogue, provides a corrective to the legend Kitaj perpetuated about the cause of his wife’s death: “Sandra’s life and concerns,” Margaret Fisher remembers, “were at the time stressed to the maximum by a unique career opportunity related to the New Globe Theatre, an opportunity that collided head on with responsibilities concerning [her son’s] school, our father, Kitaj’s mother and some family conflicts in addition to the stress of the retrospective.”¹⁰ This account poignantly testifies to the disproportionate familial burdens and other obstacles to success that women artists so often face relative to their male counterparts.

KITAJ HAD LOST his first wife, Elsi Roessler, to suicide in 1969. In Confessions, he treats this episode, in less than a paragraph, as a complete enigma. He does not ponder how his behavior—his chronic philandering and frequent extended absences from the family—might have contributed to her despair. For pages and pages throughout the memoir, he celebrates his sexual escapades, orgies, group sex with his Berkeley students, adulteries (about which he feels guilty), and above all his whoring, which he distinguishes from adultery and pursues with enthusiasm wherever he goes. “Puritans please ignore sex scenes,” he instructs, casting readers who do not share his particular brand of pleasure as prudes, while saluting his presumed sympathizers, i.e., men with erotic tastes like his. Just as he always sought to insert himself within a great lineage of artistic forebears, Kitaj places himself in a distinguished (to his mind) tradition of johns: prowling the Ramblas in Barcelona or the Rue Saint-Denis in Paris, he imagines himself in the steps of Baudelaire, Cézanne, Degas, Flaubert, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Kafka, Manet, Picasso, Proust, Toulouse-Lautrec, and all “the millions of men who followed their pricks there.”

It is not Kitaj’s sexuality but his sexual prerogative, its blithe taken-for-grantedness, that gets on one’s nerves. He sees the world in Alexander Portnoy terms, surrounded during an artist residency at Dartmouth by “plenty of pretty WASP girls, but they wouldn’t put out,” and sharing his crudest fantasies, as when, while kneeling before Princess Anne to receive an honorary doctorate, he thinks about “fucking Karine [his favorite French prostitute] . . . , her long legs flailing in the sweaty air.” With such “blasphemies,” as he terms them, Kitaj aimed to “drive London hacks out of their fucking small skulls.”

Readers won’t fail to notice how the artist’s construction of his masculinity depends on this insistent kind of heterosexual braggadocio, so frequently demeaning to women. It may be, at least in part, a hyper-reaction against the feminization of the Jewish male in Western discourse—the studious, passive, and gentle rabbinical type set against the assertively virile gentile model. Feminist critics have pointed to similar misogynist tendencies in Roth and Saul Bellow and wondered whether those writers’ virulent affirmation of Jewish masculinity depends inevitably on the denigration of women. Thus in the case of Kitaj, Janet Wolff asks, “can the male ‘Diasporist’ artist in the late twentieth century confront and resolve his own gender anxieties and produce work which is not also a record of this particular struggle?”¹¹ Her conclusion is yes, sometimes. Kitaj himself professed to be a feminist,¹² a dubious claim given all the evidence to the contrary he provides in Confessions. Late in life, he seems to have thought that by painting goddesses rather than prostitutes he was “mending [his] incorrect ways,” thus demonstrating his complete misunderstanding of feminist politics and goals.

Several of his goddess paintings were exhibited in “The Jew, Etc., Etc.” Kitaj created them in Los Angeles, where he relocated from London in 1997 to be near his grown children and their families. There he became somewhat reclusive, immersing himself in mysticism and art. He studied the Kabbalah and imagined that Fisher was in communication with him from beyond the grave, as a Shekhina, or feminine manifestation of God. The paintings are fantasy double portraits of himself and his Shekhina-muse. In one, Los Angeles No. 26 (nose kiss), 2003, the angelic Fisher, with multicolored wings and clad in an open green robe, embraces the artist, kissing him gently as he fondles her breast. Los Angeles No. 8 (2002) shows him with a long white beard and three arms, holding a hat, a staff, and a paintbrush, the artist as Wandering Jew, pausing before his large canvas, dabbing his painted muse’s wing. The spookiest picture in the exhibition was surely the premonitory Studio Where I Died (2005), depicting a red interior with Kitaj’s big disembodied head, only half visible, staring out from behind a black door shrouded in shadow. In the foreground we see a bed, from which a naked woman departs, a chair, papers, a palette, and a variant of the small sculpture familiar from Cézanne’s Still Life with Plaster Cupid (1894), collapsing love and art in the same image. Here the statue is pierced with arrows. “Later, when we are dead,” Kitaj wrote eerily in his First Diasporist Manifesto, “the art is (life-less?) alone in the room.”¹³ Roessler, his first wife, and Benjamin, his hero, had shown him the way. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Kitaj committed suicide in 2007 in his studio.

“Can anyone doubt that we are fatally rooted in the first part of our life?” he asked rhetorically in the manifesto.¹⁴ Kitaj’s psychobiography has yet to be written. Whoever undertakes it will need to consider his position in an Oedipal quadrangle—mother and son and two fathers, one of whom the child never knew. Extrapolating from the existence of a few disdainful British newspaper critics, the artist speaks in Confessions of and to “my host of enemies,” an army of unknown, imagined nay-sayers and rivals, like the absent father to whom he must prove his superior worth again and again. Estranged from his biological patrilineage, he finds an artistic one, seeking substitute fathers in authorities of the past, Pissarro, Cézanne, Picasso, striving to join their ranks and even to surpass them in skill and renown. Almost too obvious is Kitaj’s repeated enactment in his art and life of a dual attitude toward his mother—in compulsive whoring and debasement of women with multiple sex partners, on the one hand, and in exaltation of the angel/madonna who was his wife and Shekhina, on the other. Of interest might also be the artist’s projective identification with his “killer-critics,” expelling his murderous rage onto them and then accusing them of wanting to assassinate him. A psychobiography might explore the vengeful fantasies memorialized in sketches and paintings that Kitaj devoted to the “killer-press,” which are among the many works reproduced in Confessions. These visual and textual artifacts constitute the evidence upon which a future penetrating study of an irascible, troubled, and trouble-making Jewish artist might be constructed.   

Endnotes

1. R.B. Kitaj and Timothy Hyman, “A Return to London,” in Joe Shannon, ed., R.B. Kitaj, Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981, p. 48.

2. R.B. Kitaj, Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter: Autobiography, Munich, Schirmer/Mosel, 2017.

3. Hyman, “A Born-Again Jew,” New York Review of Books, Apr. 19, 2018, p. 59.

4. “If not, not” became the title of a major landscape painting (1975–76, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), to my mind one of Kitaj’s finest pictures, a mysterious meditation on the Final Solution with arcane allusions, according to the artist, to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Eliot’s “Waste Land,” and Giorgione’s Tempest. See Kitaj, “Prefaces,” in Richard Morphet, ed., R.B. Kitaj: A Retrospective, London, Tate Gallery, 1994, pp. 120–21.

5. Anthony Rudolf, “The Jew, Etc.,” in Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters, London, National Gallery Co., p. 58.

6. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto, reprinted in Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, New York, Routledge, 1999, p. 39. 

7. Eckhart J. Gillen, “Epilogue,” in Kitaj, Confessions of an Old Jewish Painter, Munich, Schirmer/Mosel, 2017, p. 351.

8. Both quotes, Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto, p. 36.

9. The three paintings were identified by curator Bruce Guenther in his gallery talk at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, Portland, Ore., July 11, 2018.

10. Margaret Fisher, personal email communication quoted in Gillen, “Epilogue,” p. 363 n. 43.

11. Janet Wolff, “The Impolite Boarder: ‘Diasporist’ Art and Its Critical Response,” in James Aulich and John Lynch, eds., Critical Kitaj: Essays on the Work of R.B. Kitaj, New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 2001, p. 40.

12. Ibid., p. 38.

13. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto, p. 34.

14. Ibid., p. 41.

Those tensions are intriguingly brought out in the retrospective now at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Its title, “Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables,” signals the fictive nature of Wood’s apparently straightforward American scenes. In a foreword to the exhibition catalogue, director Adam Weinberg announces the revisionist impulse informing this project, refusing what might have been a nostalgic exercise—Wood himself envisioned in his paintings an idyllic American past that never was—in favor of a quest to understand how the artist created mythic images that are by no means unequivocal.¹ This nuanced investigation, organized by curator Barbara Haskell, surveys more than a hundred artworks that reveal a surprisingly multifaceted talent. Wood’s best-known pictures are here, including American Gothic (1930) and the bitingly satirical Daughters of Revolution (1932) and Parson Weems’ Fable (1939), as well as early still lifes, portraits, and fantasy Iowa landscapes; in addition to easel paintings, we find highly finished pastel drawings, lithographs, murals, jewelry, metalwork, assemblage, stained glass, book illustrations, and textile and furniture designs. The oeuvre is superbly contextualized in the catalogue, with new insights by Haskell herself and five essayists who had not previously written about Wood—Glenn Adamson on the artist’s decorating projects, Eric Banks on his literary associations, Emily Braun on Wood and Magic Realism, Richard Meyer on recent discussions of his homosexuality, and Shirley Reece-Hughes on his set designs and passionate involvement with theater.

Haskell also includes a narrative chronology of Wood’s life, which builds in detail and momentum as she moves through his humble beginnings and rise to fame to his beleaguered tenure at the University of Iowa. Here are the facts. Wood grew up on a farm outside the tiny town of Anamosa, Iowa, relocating to Cedar Rapids with his mother and three siblings when his father died in 1901. After high school, he spent two summers at the Minneapolis School of Design, Handicraft, and Normal Art. His artistic training was inconsistent; despite study at the University of Iowa and the Art Institute of Chicago, he never earned a degree. He served stateside in the army at the end of World War I, then taught school in Cedar Rapids while living with his mother, an arrangement he maintained, save during his four trips to Europe, until her death in 1935. He enjoyed decorating projects for several Iowa hotels, businesses, and residences and founded a community theater in Cedar Rapids, where in 1928 he executed the huge, twenty-four-foot stained-glass Veterans Memorial Window (beautifully re-created at half scale for the Whitney exhibition), supervising its manufacture in Munich. Around this time, he switched from painting what he called “Europy” scenes impressionistically to indigenous subjects in a crisp, hard-edge style.

Instantly famous thanks to American Gothic, Wood became associated with Regionalism in the early 1930s, founding the summer Stone City Art Colony in northeast Iowa to encourage art-making and art appreciation in the heartland. He invited the local farmers and townspeople to the colony for weekly exhibitions and sales, hoping to broaden their attitudes toward art.² The experiment ended after two years, leaving him deeply in debt. With a commission for a mural cycle at Iowa State University in Ames, documented on video in the exhibition, Wood became state director of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) in 1933. Resented by a number of his assistants, who petitioned for his removal, he resigned in 1935. Working closely with his secretary, Park Rinard, he commenced his autobiography, “Return from Bohemia,” for Doubleday, Doran & Company but could not get past his first ten years. Through his employment with the PWAP, he was offered a teaching position at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. This began a series of emotionally exhausting battles—his brief marriage and bitter divorce; financial woes; attacks on his art, teaching, and character by fellow faculty members; and mean-spirited rumors of his homosexuality. Although he was represented by a New York gallery and marketed prints through Associated American Artists, he struggled in the late ’30s to regain solvency. He died of cancer in an Iowa City hospital in 1942.

This fraught life story alerts us to the darker side of Wood’s art and challenges the widespread notion of him as an avatar of small-town values—bland, good-natured, and simple. Haskell recognizes not only the artist’s remarkable creativity but also the strangeness and alienation pervading many of his pictures. As an Americanist, she is concerned to point out how his mature career coincided with the Great Depression and heated debates about “true” national identity, drawing parallels to our own historical moment. But she focuses her analysis on Wood the man, treating his works as “primarily expressions of his inner life.”³ From this perspective, she demonstrates to great effect what R. Tripp Evans proposed in his revelatory 2010 biography and what critic Donald Kuspit argued in these pages long before anyone else: “Wood is more an artist of unconscious life than of the consciously known world.”⁴

Certainly he was at odds within himself, partly on account of his ambivalence toward his own homosexuality, which then-prevailing attitudes forced him to keep secret, partly because he was at once devoted to and disaffected from his family, community, region, and nation. All failed to offer him the sense of acceptance and belonging that home should provide. His choice to return from Bohemia (read Chicago, Paris, or Munich) to a conservative, even puritanical Iowa seems puzzling and poignant. And he never ceased to suffer from the shock of his stern father’s premature death. This loss was grievous and complicated: it left him clinging to his mother as he internalized paternal prohibitions on his sexuality and disapproval of his artistic aspirations. He may have felt that he could never live up to the manly model his father had provided.

The divided feeling Wood harbored toward male authority figures comes through in a number of his paintings in the exhibition. A viewer may shrink before the imposing, supremely self-possessed figure in Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer (1928–30), a man known in Cedar Rapids as “Daddy” Turner; Wood depicted him against an historical map of Iowa, which this pillar of his community had helped to conquer, control, and “civilize.” Turner’s bespectacled, steely-eyed gaze predicts the intimidating stare of the dress-coated American Gothic farmer, whom Wood managed so ingeniously to render as both awesome and ridiculous. When he was commissioned in 1931 by a group of Republican businessmen to honor then President Herbert Hoover with a picture of the West Branch, Iowa, cottage where he was born, Wood produced a weird storybook scene falling so short of any kind of genuine tribute that his exasperated patrons refused it.

In 1939, ostensibly to bolster the national spirit as many Americans pondered the possibility of joining a European war against fascism, Wood revisited the uplifting parable of George Washington and the cherry tree in Parson Weems’ Fable. The result was an odd piece of theater, in which showman Weems, one hand behind his back, parts a pair of curtains to reveal his fabulous invention. But the scene Wood has him present ignores all bromides about truth-telling, forgiveness, and paternal pride in favor of an unsettling confrontation between a scolding father and recalcitrant son. Wood endowed the hatchet-wielding boy with the face from Gilbert Stuart’s portrait on the dollar bill, embedding in the intergenerational squabble the son’s future ascendancy over the father: wayward little George would become not a mere patrician paterfamilias like his own but the immortal father of his country.

Whatever Wood’s conscious intentions, fathers are undermined in these works, as in an odd late portrait, The American Golfer (1940). The commission came from one Merrill Taylor to paint his father-in-law, and after three years of fits and starts Wood finally depicted his white-haired subject, “pioneer banker” Charles Campbell, out of doors on his Michigan estate, in sports jacket and tie, poised at the end of a golf swing.⁵ The horizontal oval format, most unusual for a portrait, accommodates an expanse of manicured green lawn in the background. Campbell’s distant gaze doubles as visionary and, presumably, focused on the soaring golf ball he has just dispatched. His arrested motion only partly accounts for the overall sense of eerie stillness and quietude beneath a wan cloudless sky. The sprig of red-tinged oak leaves over the figure’s right shoulder is a curious element. At once decorative embellishment, naturalistic detail, and clichéd reminder of the autumn of life, it intrudes on the composition almost from nowhere, like the hand of death reaching toward the unknowing portrait subject. Wood makes a point of dangling a long twig from the leaves, terminating in an empty cupule from which an acorn has fallen. The acorn for him was a symbol of virility and strength; accordingly, the acorn-studded crown of an oak tree in the foreground of The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover foretells presidential might.

Conspicuously absent in the Campbell portrait, the acorn appears in abundance among the leaves behind the young cannoneer in Wood’s 1927 study for one of the servicemen in the Memorial Window. This shapely, bare-chested figure, wearing the traditional sailor’s hat with pom-pom and clinging bell-bottom pants, assumes a hip-shot pose and holds a long staff used to clean the cannon bore. Male beauty is gloriously celebrated in this life-size drawing which the artist clearly treasured. Turning over to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum his other preparatory studies, he kept this one for himself and preserved it carefully. His erotic surrender is powerfully suggested in the astonishingly alluring image at the same time that he hints, whether consciously or not, at his own inhibitions or restraint: the peculiar stick protruding up for no discernible reason between the sailor’s legs is tied tightly in two places with the same kind of knot that secures the young man’s fly. The figure’s seductive aspects are suppressed in the stained-glass window, but Wood’s tender sensitivity to the male body comes through again in the later lithograph Sultry Night (1939), in which a naked farmhand, with tanned limbs and pale torso, cools himself with a bucket of water at day’s end. Attracting no extraordinary attention at the Whitney, the lithograph was a scandal in its time, causing Wood much embarrassment when it was banned from the US mail and Associated American Artists abruptly capped its print edition at 100 rather than the standard 250 impressions.

Wood had in this case severely misjudged his audience, and one is reminded of why his intimates and supporters had to protect him at every turn. He was already under suspicion in Iowa by virtue of being an artist in the first place, such that his Cedar Rapids patron John Reid, lobbying in 1933 for a mural commission for Wood in Lincoln, Nebraska, felt compelled to protest too much that Grant Wood is “every inch a man and entirely free of the vices that usually go with men of his profession. He is wholesome, red blooded and a man’s man from every standpoint.”⁶ Yet judging from the works on view at the Whitney, Wood had zero appreciation for female beauty and virtually no understanding of women’s bodies.⁷ There are no feminine counterparts to the comely cannoneer or the vulnerably exposed farmhand in Sultry Night. Gingham-clad farm wives and daughters in Wood’s “Fruits of Iowa” (1932) and in his large drawings for the Madeline Darrough Horn children’s book Farm on the Hill (1936) are, like their male counterparts in these series, stylized and sexless. When he departed from depicting women as generic types, the results were strange. In one such instance, he tried to make up to his sister for the dour image he had made of her as his model for the daughter/wife in American Gothic, painting what he must have thought was a very fetching Portrait of Nan (1931); but he rendered her as the weirdest of Weird Sisters, in a blouse with gigantic black polka dots and black bows at her shoulders that look like bats, and with sunken breasts that rest just above her belt. Similarly, in American Gothic, the otherwise flat-chested woman possesses one breast—drooping at the level of her waistline. The clumsiest passage of all appears in Woman with Plants (1929), Wood’s homage to his mother as an aged midwestern Mona Lisa. It is a seated portrait in which the old lady’s lap is a flatly painted mound, not willfully distorted or stylized but fumbled, with no foreshortening. Skilled as he was as a realist painter, Wood could not render the maternal body without apparent ineptitude.

He could, on the other hand, satirize women with devilish aplomb, as in Daughters of Revolution where, as has often been noted, the three smug grannies gathered before an image of Washington crossing the Delaware look like geezers in drag. Wood had reason to resent the Daughters of the American Revolution, who had given him grief for employing German craftsmen to produce his Memorial Window, and he skewers them in this painting with vengeful delight. It is a little harder to justify Victorian Survival (1931), a mocking sepia-toned riff on a tintype of the artist’s own maternal great-aunt, Matilda Peet. Wood made of her in this unforgettable image a humorless, thin-lipped, stoop-shouldered, up-tight matron with severely pulled-back hair and an incongruous black choker encircling her absurdly elongated neck. Seated primly and rigidly beside her candlestick telephone, she embodies inhibition and rectitude. It is a very mean picture. Perhaps with her phone the figure personifies the small-town gossip from which Wood himself suffered, and the fact that he could produce such a cruel travesty suggests the degree of hurt he must have endured. Clearly, it was unlike anything experienced by either of the other two Regionalists with whom Wood is less and less convincingly lumped these days, his friends Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry.

Likewise his transcendent feeling for the Iowa countryside. Grouped at the end of the exhibition, landscapes such as Young Corn (1931), Near Sundown (1933), and Spring Turning (1936) present the rolling, anthropomorphized earth as an object of corporeal desire. That desire is controlled by an extraordinary tidiness, imposed both on the land by its cultivators and on the composition by its artist, yet the feeling remains intense. Clouds, trees, and all other pictorial elements are subject to a decorative abstraction. In Spring Turning, the green fields are especially vast and undulating, worked by three minuscule farmers, as the rounded hills and meticulously plowed fields are seen from high above. The lofty viewpoint is overdetermined, related recently by Jason Weems in Barnstorming the Prairie to aviation and aerial photography, and by Reece-Hughes in her Whitney catalogue essay to the “balcony perspective” of Wood’s work in theater.⁸ At the same time, this hovering distance over the earth may have alleviated Wood’s fear of surrender, of fusion or ego annihilation that can accompany an oceanic experience. Closer in, at ground level in Fall Plowing (1931), we see the carpetlike sod sliced and lifted by the penetrating blade of an antique walking plow, strangely abandoned. The hallucinatory passage has been called erotic.⁹ As Braun observes in her essay on Magic Realism, however, the sexual innuendo in Wood’s landscapes, as in his ironic genre scenes such as American Gothic and the confrontational Appraisal (1931), in which she detects a suggestive spark between the handsome farm woman and a city matron come to purchase a chicken, “may—and did—pass unnoticed.”¹⁰

Braun’s thoroughly original and persuasive reframing of the artist’s work within an international interwar artistic tendency dominated by disquieting, uncanny representations of modern reality—she gives examples from German New Objectivity, Italian metaphysical painting, and American Precisionism—should change art history. Wood, an alienated artist torn between tribal allegiance and his own innate difference, took recourse in a subversive kind of populism. Norman Rockwell he was not and could never be: note that when he tackled patriotic subjects he ended, more often than not, with parodies. His midwestern images, Braun argues, “confirm the inadequacy, even the falsity, of the term ‘Regionalism’: they intimated desires and behaviors that knew no borders but because of social, moral, and political reasons had to hide behind reality.”¹¹ Often imprudently co-opted by conservatives to advertise “traditional American values,” Wood was and continues to be misunderstood because, on some urgent level and in spite of himself, he wanted it that way. 

Endnotes

1. Adam D. Weinberg, “Foreword,” Barbara Haskell, ed., Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018, p. 7.

2. “The crowd that comes are usually expecting to see something freakish,” a teacher reported from the colony. “Grant is experimenting with nudes which he is slipping into the exhibitions one at a time to break the natives in gradually,” undated letter (summer 1933) from David McCosh to Anne Kutka, David John McCosh Collection and Archive, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene.

3. Barbara Haskell, “Grant Wood, Through the Past, Darkly,” in Haskell, ed., Grant Wood, p. 14.

4. Donald B. Kuspit, “Grant Wood: Pathos of the Plain,” Art in America, March 1984, p. 143. See also R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

5. The subject is identified in Darrell Garwood, Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood, New York, W.W. Norton, 1944, p. 212.

6. Letter from John Reid to E.P. Schoentgen, Oct. 17, 1933, Papers of John Cantwell Reid, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City.

7. Wood’s brief marriage at age forty-four to Sara Sherman Maxon, eight years his senior, seems to have been a platonic arrangement. In her unpublished memoir, Sherman revealed how, repulsed by sexual relations in her first marriage, she found with Wood “the peace and contentment for which (she) had been looking,” quoted in Evans, Grant Wood: A Life, p. 209.

8. Jason Weems, “Adaptive Aeriality: Grant Wood, the Regional Landscape, and Modernity,” chapter 3 in Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015; Shirley Reece-Hughes, “Moments of Discovery: Grant Wood’s Theatrical Paintings,” in Haskell, ed., Grant Wood, p. 54.

9. Wanda Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1983, p. 90.

10. Emily Braun, “Cryptic Corn: Magic Realism and the Art of Grant Wood,” in Haskell, ed., Grant Wood, p. 75.

11. Ibid.

Vases appear in all the paintings. With this motif, Malaska invokes the lily-filled vases in countless Annunciations as well as the age-old trope of woman’s body as vessel. She titled her exhibition “Heavenly Bodies,” and in a gallery talk explained her ambition to counter masculinist reifications of the female body in Western art. This is a common feminist strategy, but Malaska focuses uniquely on the postnatal body, and on women’s grief, critiquing canonical treatments of the mater dolorosa as, in her words, “drapery with a face.” The mother is also a body, Malaska asserts in her pictures, often wracked with feeling. Seeking to convey intensely felt female experience, she devises figures bent out of shape, rubbery, rippling. If women’s uncontrolled emotion is perceived as unbecoming, Malaska foregrounds it ruthlessly, her images rivaling Picasso’s horrific portrayals of Dora Maar crying. Indeed, in addition to the paintings, she exhibited a series of charcoal drawings of expressive female heads—counterintuitively titled “Volatile Bodies,”  perhaps to affirm the oneness of mental and corporeal existence—that evoke Picasso’s weeping women.

Possible sources for the anxieties on display in the exhibition are all over the news: war, mass shootings, sexual abuse, domestic violence, the continuing oppression of women. Thus, in the claustrophobic painting Wake to Weep, the figure’s face becomes a mask of tragedy, with hollow black eyes and downturned mouth, as she checks the latest post on her phone. Crouched on her elbows and knees, she embodies despair; her ashen-gray animal body is the color of mourning, her exhausted breasts hang like the dugs of Romulus and Remus’s lupine nurse. Form and Void allegorizes the disparity between the mortal reality of the female body and the societal fantasy of ever-nubile perfection, or between us and our ego ideals. Here, a Godiva with cascading hair takes a selfie while kneeling before a mirror that misinforms her with an image of her girlish counterpart. Painted with a plethora of warm brown brushstrokes, the mature figure begins to disintegrate before our eyes. Her shattering confrontation with the youthful vision in the mirror recalls the moment Dorian Gray rediscovers his portrait. It is a memento mori for our times.

Known for his quiet abstractions, Washington-based painter Denzil Hurley titled this exhibition “Disclosures,” showing eleven recent mixed-medium paintings and five small ink studies. Almost all the works are monochrome, and many are mounted on sticks or poles, like signs carried at rallies. In their makeshift quality—the sticks are repurposed mop or broom handles or pipes—they evoke impromptu street actions rather than convention-hall campaign events. ZB4, Four Square (S), 2013-15, consists of four black paintings of various sizes suspended from a twelve-foot, horizontal copper rod, as if to be carried by marchers advancing side by side. ZD5, Coupled Glyph #4 (2016-17), unique in the exhibition for its upbeat color, might be a jerry-built directional sign, with two small orange-painted canvases abutting at the top of a stick, each inscribed with a big black arrow. But one arrow points right, the other left, conveying only baffling contradiction.

Several works on view incorporated the blank wall of the white cube. In ZBA2, Blue Glyph (2016-17), for instance, an indigo-painted rectangular frame at the top of a stick encloses only empty space where a message might be. For ZB2, Notch Glyph (2015-17), Hurley stacked four long black monochromes to a height of eighty inches. The two bottom canvases measure eighty inches across; the top two fall short by about ten inches. The resulting impression is of a monumental black square with a white “notch” at its upper right corner. Hurley alluded to Malevich’s iconic Black Square (1915) throughout the show and, in Cut-in/Cut-out A4D (2016-17), to the Russian’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918), a single white square afloat on a white ground. In Hurley’s reprise of White on White, the inner rectangle is a negative, literally cut out of the larger, mottled-white monochrome, exposing the wall behind the painting. As in ZB2, Notch Glyph, whiteness is presented as absence. Even as Hurley maintains his formalist stance, explaining in an interview on the museum’s website that he is preoccupied with “color, layering, stacking, erasure and . . . surfaces,” his modernist project opens onto issues of race. With the subtlest of moves, he weds abstraction to extra-aesthetic concerns: Black Lives Matter protests come to mind, with the chilling recollection that the white-clad Klan has had a presence in the state of Washington since the 1920s. “Suprematism” begins to connote something other than a once-revolutionary style of painting. 

A didactic label noted that the artist conceived of this series while visiting Barbados, his original home, his fascination with repurposed materials and modular forms sparked by the island’s built environment. A crayon-and-ink study from 2012, Portal and the Deep Blue #1, suggests a doorway glimpse of sky or ocean from a dim interior. In the related painting, J2#1, Portal (2015-17), looming nearly seven feet tall, the blue is gone; only a stark black rectangle confronts the viewer, propped on a piece of lumber that serves as a threshold into a dark pictorial space. Tellingly, in the time between Hurley’s sketching and painting, the possibility of a beautiful transcendence gave way to foreboding ambiguity. 

Eighteen landscape paintings (all 2016) made up the exhibition Stephen Hayes called “In the Hour Before,” most depicting unremarkable terrain. Roseburg (10-1-15) resembles a Daubigny only just begun, with light camouflage colors—brown, tan, and Army green—limning a dull country expanse along a featureless road. In Tucson (1-8-11), several tall spindly palms line an empty street receding diagonally toward the horizon. An outsize stand of shrubbery in the foreground dissolves into a cluster of olive-green brushstrokes loosely applied, while, close by, a melting, indeterminate blue shape bleeds onto a sandy parkway. Squat, nondescript structures and a few more trees huddle at the edge of what might be a vacant parking lot; an anomalous blue-gray paint patch hovers over them, attached to no subject at all. A thinly brushed, earthy-pink sky rains down from above. Liquid and fragile, the scene almost evanesces into pure painterly effects. 

Such deft blending of representation and sheer abstraction underpins Hayes’s eminence as a supreme kind of painters’ painter in the Pacific Northwest. In this exhibition, however, an unnerving disjunction arose that seemed uncharacteristic of his work: the serenity of the individual landscapes belied the traumatic theme of the series. In addition to Roseburg and Tucson, Hayes’s sites include Littleton, Newtown, Charleston, and Colorado Springs, while the dates memorialized in his subtitles conjure the headlines one would rather forget. In a gallery statement, Hayes explained that his pictures derive from Google Earth, which he employed to view locations of mass shootings, first those in Paris, where he had traveled shortly before the terrorist attacks last November, and then those in Jerusalem and town by tragic town in the United States. If the project became for the artist a means of honoring victims and bereaved survivors, the series confronted viewers with the brutal fact of violence fatally erupting in the midst of ordinary daily life. 

As paintings, Hayes’s works are unsensational, and also beautiful in their execution; as memento mori they are effective and deeply disturbing. They at once deliver and perversely disrupt aesthetic pleasure, as when, relishing milky-white scumbling amid the blue ether in a hazy suburban scene, I was jolted out of my absorption by a glance at the wall label: San Bernardino. Similar experiences must have vexed viewers who, on the night of the exhibition’s opening, debated the appropriateness of Hayes’s apparently provocative move. Some complained of too many pictures, an objection that seemed directed at curatorial judgment but was likely a displaced response to the bewildering surfeit of murderous events recently in the news. We still sometimes cling to the fantasy of art as an autonomous realm where only detachment and delectation reign. Insistence on that consoling fantasy grows ever stronger in the face of such random, irrational destruction as that which Hayes seeks to undo by turning back the clock to a moment of normalcy “in the hour before.”