CHELSEA — Four artists from Chicago: Theodore Halkin, Evelyn Statsinger, Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg at the Art Institute of Chicago introduced me to unfamiliar work by artists I’ve written about. The exhibition, curated by Mark Pascale, Stephanie Strother, and Kathryn Cua, made visual and aesthetic connections that I knew were there but hadn’t seen. It also presented a slice of Chicago’s rich art history that underscored its independence from New York.
The four artists, whose work was separated by more than two decades, belonged to different generations and groups (Monster Roster, American Surrealism, Chicago Imagists), but all attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They all devoted themselves to drawing, producing meticulous works on a modest scale in a range of media and techniques, including paint on Plexiglas, photograms, prints, and quilting. Eventually, Statsinger, Rossi, and Ramberg collaborated on the drawings for Exquisite Corpse, sometimes with Ramberg’s husband, Philip Hanson, and Karl Wirsum, a founding member of the legendary Chicago band the Hairy Who. To their credit, the artists rejected the standards proposed in influential essays on modern art, such as Clement Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting” and Harold Rosenberg’s “American Action Painting.”
Whatever the global reach of these artists after their deaths, this exhibition reminds us that art is created locally and reflects its surroundings. The more time I spent in the exhibition and the more works I saw (including lesser-known pieces like Rossi’s photograms and etchings on nylon, Statsinger and Ramberg’s sketchbooks, and Halkin’s frottages), the more I wanted to learn more about the lesser-known paths they took in their art. That’s what great exhibitions do – they satisfy you and leave you thirsting for more at the same time.
When I saw Rossi’s collage Rhapsodent II – My Dentist’s Dream (1974-84), I wondered how many collages she had made, especially since it has little in common compositionally with her paintings. Was this a form she had explored? I am not aware of any exhibitions devoted to these works or her photograms or her prints on textiles such as silk and nylon.
The exhibition 2015–16 Barbara Rossi: Bad Trait in the less than ideal lobby gallery of the New Museum was the first exhibition of her work in New York since the 1990s. Curated by Natalie Bell, it consisted of a small, carefully selected selection of graphite and colored pencil drawings and paintings on Plexiglas, with no accompanying catalog. Whole sections of her work remained hidden from me until now; Rossi’s diverse techniques and materials were to be brought to light with a retrospective. The wondrous traveling exhibition Christina Ramberg: A Retrospectivecurated by Thea Liberty Nichols and Mark Pascale and accompanied by a highly informative catalogue, would serve as an excellent model.
This attention seems to be growing for Statsinger and perhaps also for Halkin, the only artist of this group about whom I have never written and about whom I knew the least. During my stay in Chicago, I visited the recent exhibition Ted Halkin: Rediscovered Works, 1964–69 at Corbett vs. Dempsey and learned more about an artist whose sculptures and bas-reliefs I had seen in the 2016 exhibition Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. I discovered that his art took a sharp and unexpected turn in the mid-1960s. I wondered if Halkin knew the work of Suellen Rocca, a founding member of Hairy Who; gallery owner John Corbett told me that Rocca had been Halkin’s student and they had remained friends. He confirmed my suspicion that they had had a mutually fruitful exchange—we assume that students learn from teachers, but it can also be a two-way street. Halkin’s paintings and drawings from the mid- to late-1960s feature colorful, imaginative sculptural objects composed of organic, abstract, and architectural forms, set in an architectural interior, with a touch of the close presence of nature. In the Art Institute exhibition, Halkin’s drawings stand out from those of the other three artists for his use of colored pencils, colored chalk, and black felt-tip pens, as well as charcoal transfer, collage, and etching.
Looking at the drawings of Exquisite Corpse and the creative reciprocity between Halkin and Rocca brought to mind some distinctive features of the Chicago art scene—for example, its sense of community, its rejection of weary mainstream notions of the solitary, heroic artist, and the role that the city’s museums like the Field Museum and the Art Institute played in the development of these artists. The Art Institute’s collection of surrealist art has been on display for many years and feels deeper and more extensive than the exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. There I first saw works by Chicago-based artists Ivan Albright, Gertrude Abercrombie, and Óscar Domínguez, none of whom I have seen represented at MoMA. Moreover, the exhibitions reminded me that art can be created in an apartment; you don’t need an army of assistants to do it, which has become a measure of financial wealth and entrepreneurship since the 1990s. Perhaps the DIY side of “American-style” painting should be more celebrated.
Four artists from Chicago: Theodore Halkin, Evelyn Statsinger, Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg runs through August 26 at the Art Institute of Chicago (111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois). The exhibition was curated by Mark Pascale, Stephanie Strother and Kathryn Cua.
