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Jim Nutt at David Nolan
By Donald Kuspit
What struck me about this exhibition of Jim Nutt’s works (perhaps it had something to do with the tidy elegance of the installation) was not the monstrousness of his figures, to refer to their place in the so-called Chicago monster roster, or to their supposedly “hairy” (who) character, in the slang sense of that word—difficult, frightening, or risky—but rather the immaculateness of their execution. His figures may be monstrous and hairy, but Nutt is a perfectionist—a master draftsman.
Almost half the show, which included works made from 1967 to this year, were drawings, seven of them of female heads completed since 2008. (The show also featured three paintings of female heads made over the past six years.) However bizarrely distorted, usually by outlandish hairdos and enlarged noses-sometimes grotesquely beaklike (conveying the generally predatory character of Nutt’s women), and often with flaring nostrils—the heads are exquisitely rendered, the “soft touch” of the refined lines even suggesting that the artist has a certain affection for his female subjects. Nutt has been linked to Expressionism and Surrealism, but I think a better link is to Paul Klee: There is the same whimsical fantasy, the same precisely focused singular image; perhaps most tellingly, there is a tendency toward decorative patterning, evident in the neat, repetitive lines of the hair, and also in the designs on some of the blouses of the bust-length figures.
JIM NUTT
by David St.-Lascaux
Jim Nutt is back in New York, sans straightjacket. Once a wildman, he was part of Chicago’s Imagist/Hairy Who movement, back in ’66 when Hairy meant huge, when Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was customizing petroleum-powered hot rods with giant ratfinks, chrome pipes, metalflake paint jobs and two-tone flames, shortly after which S. Clay Wilson introduced the maniacal Checkered Demon and the ravishing Star-Eyed Stella. Meanwhile, in New York, the influential, serious works created by Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist, and Warhol—also influenced by commercial imagery—were being digested. And what a contrast, using the same cultural raw materials: the Midwest output infantile, maybe; the East Coast oeuvre just possibly uptight.
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Jim Nutt, "Trim and Other Works: 1967–2010"
David Nolan Gallery
By Chris Bors
JIM NUTT, part of a large number of artists known as the Imagists, who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in the 1960s and '70s in show curated by the artist Don Baum, is perhaps best known for his affiliation with the Hairy Who. While definitely not outsider artists, the group of six graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who made up the informal group that exhibited under the Hairy Who moniker in the late 1960s – James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum – unconsciously bucked the trends that were most prevalent in the art world at the time. The Hairy Who's work displayed a strong graphic quality, comic- and cartoon-inspired drawing, and an interest in pattern, while influenced by African and American Indian art. In a 2002 interview with Dan Nadel published in Issue 3 of The Ganzfeld, Nutt states that their connection with the Art Institute of Chicago's museum, school and faculty had a more profound impact on the group than anything else and that, "Basically we were individual artists who saw an opportunity to make an impact and have fun with what we produced by exhibiting together."
"Trim and Other Works: 1966-2010" at David Nolan Gallery features drawings and paintings from the 1960s through today. In the back room are examples of Nutt's work, mainly from the '60s and '70s, that resembles cartoon illustration or cels from animated cartoons. Broad Jumper (1969) in fact, a somewhat grotesque rendering of a woman leaping through the air with cartoon motion lines around her, is painted on the reverse of a shaped piece of Plexiglas, a technique that is employed in traditional cel animation.
While Nutt has remained true to his Hairy Who roots, in his more recent work he has refined his aesthetic into a highly personal visual language that is more about process and introspection than it is about an obvious graphic narrative. The painstakingly rendered paintings in hand-crafted frames and graphite drawings that make up the newer work, all portraits of anonymous women, are tightly focused and display an obsession with pattern, surface and line quality. Because it takes Nutt about two years to compete a painting, there are only three on view. While not as flat as Takashi Murakami's Superflat aesthetic, which resembles an industrialized product, Nutt's work nevertheless borders on obsessiveness. Each painting exudes its own personality, partially because the artist's hand is evident in its making. Subtle gradations of color play off hard-edge outlines, flat backgrounds and intricate patterns, as seen in the crisscross shapes of the woman's blouse in Plumb (2004). Nutt pays particular attention to the nose on these faces, and fills the women's significant proboscises with stripes, spots and lines, which resemble camouflage.
Nutt's graphite on paper works, all untitled, further cement the artist's standing as a master manipulator of line. Pairing these drawings with Picasso's psychological portraits of women would make for a fascinating juxtaposition, especially since Picasso used his friends and family as subjects, while Nutt is deliberately elusive about the background of his imaginative females. – Chris Bors
Refined Nutt: A Jim Nutt retrospective at Nolan
by Deven Golden
Jim Nutt: "Trim" and Other Works: 1967 – 2010 at David Nolan Gallery
Jim Nutt is part of the Chicago Imagists group which emerged in the 1960s as a regional version of Pop Art. His fellows included Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, Barbara Rossi, Roger Brown, Suellen Rocca, Christina Ramberg, Ed Flood, Art Green, and Nutt's wife Gladys Nilsson, almost all of them students of Ray Yoshida's at the School of the Art Institute. Unlike the New York Pop movement, the Chicago variety took pop culture as a starting point and then diverged in two important ways. First, its focus was on a much darker, more sexually charged imagery such as that found in burlesque photographs, wrestling posters, underground comics, and pinball machines. Second, where the New York variety presented a cool, decidedly non-expressionist style of rendering, Nutt and the other Chicagoans reveled in a controlled but highly personal approach to drawing. Nutt's earliest work in this mini-retrospective, Miss Sue Port, 1967, in acrylic on Plexiglas, presents an iconic example of this. Part freak show poster, part Pinball machine glass, it features an electric yellow androgynous personage with one extremely large, pointed breast, bulging cod-piece, truncated arms, a horror show face, and a massive, corseted posterior. A potent cocktail of revulsion and attraction, this is precisely the kind of work that brought the Chicago Imagists to critical attention.
Over time, Nutt diverged from his Pop culture beginnings and the work began a gradual shift to a quieter internal narrative. The hyper-inventive figuration stayed, but Nutt slowly shed overt cultural references. By the early seventies, as represented in this show by the colored pencil drawing There Are Reasons, 1974, , the artist was playing with images of stage sets featuring wildly cavorting and contorted figures enacting sexually overt pantomimes. What followed was a consistent reduction in the amount of secondary information, coupled with an increasing focus on the figure. By the late eighties Nutt had narrowed everything down to isolated, singular, portraits.
The current series of refined women's heads as presented in the main gallery is experienced as a packed and careful condensation of Nutt's vision. For while the early works like Miss Sue Port feature tight compositions with dozens of objects and figures (the term horror vacui comes to mind), from a strictly mark-making perspective they are painted with the broadest of strokes. By contrast, in the later paintings the brush strokes are barely the size of an eyelash. Needless to say, making a painting with a brush this tiny requires literally thousands of marks. The result is a little less stuff, but a great deal more information being filled into each picture. This is no doubt part of the reason why Nutt produces but a few paintings a year. Indeed, of the seven drawings and three paintings representing the current work, only five of the drawings are from this year, and only one of the paintings, Trim.
It is not the process of making the paintings that stands out, but their hard won commitment to seeing. Standing in the main gallery, a quiet yet powerful meditative vibration seems to emanate directly from the works. Nothing is facile in these recent paintings and drawings; every mark is precise, meaningful and clear. This is easiest to discern in the drawings, where brief strong lines delineate a myriad of features and textures against the emptiness of the paper. The paintings have the same intensity of line, and add subtle modulations of color and tone. In whichever medium, when a female head is depicted, the individuality of the features are intensified, not obfuscated, by the careful abstraction of each nose, eye, ear, and mouth. As in Cubism, the features differentiate within a single picture because they compress many moments into a single image. But there is more to the time compression than that. Nutt's silent women simultaneously look at us and through us. Ignoring our pressing gaze, they look unrelentingly inward.
Jim Nutt: 'Trim' and Other Works: 1967-2010
David Nolan Gallery
527 West 29th Street
Chelsea
Through June 26
Jim Nutt works slowly, so an exhibition of three new, and newish, paintings and seven drawings mostly finished this year feels like a gift. The works are all portraits of women. They look back to Van Eyck, Ingres and Salvador Dalí for their extreme refinement and lucidity, but not for their intense realism.
Mr. Nutt's realism is something else altogether, a form of pictorial science fiction, perhaps. The trompe l'oeil fruit-and-vegetable portraits of Arcimboldo are precedents, although instead of fresh produce, Mr. Nutt gathers scraps from the dustbin of Cubism and Surrealism, assembling them into faces that also hint at landscapes, architectural edifices and sculpture. Noses in particular are carapaces with lives of their own. The dark-haired woman in "Plumb," clothed in a faceted, crosshatch pattern that seems to allude to Jasper Johns, has a sleek, black nose that resembles carved marble. The one of the woman in "Pin" has a crisp ridge, but soft sides where a shading from deep red to black might be a spreading bruise, a cold or the effects of liquor. And the nose of the redhead of "Trim" reflects the blue-on-blue dots of her dress, subtly implying a certain shininess.
Mr. Nutt's drawings may be even better than his paintings. Their lucidity becomes, literally, transparent, and their aberrant textures and delicate marks stand. Their strangeness goes on forever. A second room devoted to earlier works by Mr. Nutt provides background on his technique, subject matter, absorption of Surrealism and popular culture. The 1971 work "Running Out" presages the portraits in several ways. But this display is also a sad reminder that no New York museum has had the vision to assemble a full-dress Jim Nutt retrospective. ROBERTA SMITH
Jim Nutt: "Trim" and Other Works:1967-2010
By Mario Naves
Jim Nutt's paintings and drawings, subject of an adumbrated overview at David Nolan Gallery, are testimony, underplayed and undeniable to the vital role craft plays in generating aesthetic vitality.
For the past 20 years or so, Nutt has dedicated himself to portraiture—of a sort, anyway. His paintings of imaginary women isolated within dense fields of color combine Renaissance clarity, Surrealist scatology, Cubist abstraction, Persian concision, vernacular ornamentation, cartoonish elasticity and Vermeer-esque quietude. They are, in other words, a dizzying and unlikely amalgam of precedent; to Nutt's credit, the amalgam is wholly organic. Works like "Trim," "Pin" and "Plumb" signal an artist operating at the top of his game.
These recent paintings are exemplars of how eccentricity can be tempered and made resilient (or profound) by nuance. Certainly, there's little that's subtle about the work Nutt created during his 1960s tenure with the Hairy Who, an informal group of like minds centered on the Chicago Art Institute. Mining Freudian excess, comic strip brashness and the obsessive byways of Outsider Art, painters like Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Roger Brown and Ed Paschke created a mid-Western version of Pop Art—less epochal than the East Coast variant, perhaps, but what the art lacked in formalist detachment it made up for in idiosyncrasy, humor and, almost in spite of itself, humanity. Warhol is the icon, but Nutt is the artist. Who's to say which history will favor?
Early pieces like "Miss Sue Port" and "Coursing" are slick, bright and brainy riffs on Miró, cut-rate advertising and the body as both a source of comedy and a site of confusion; these contrivances radiate with gleeful insolence. Colored pencil drawings from the early 1980s depict male-female relations with relatively predictable staginess, but they do evince an increasing technical facility—a characteristic that would gain in intensity with the portraits.
Viewers should bring a magnifying glass in order to fully appreciate Nutt's astonishing dexterity as a paint-handler. His women are realized through infinitesimal hatchings of acrylic paint, deliberate and tender marks that accumulate into pearlescent fields of transitory color, shapes of sloping plasticity and, in the end, visages of uncanny restraint. An accompanying suite of pencil drawings pale when compared to a painting like "Pin," a woman whose morphing features are a form of transmuted landscape or sexual congress. And that's only the beginning of a web of allusions Nutt puts masterfully into place.
Jim Nutt
The wacky Chicagoan has begun to look canonical. A pocket retrospective revisits rowdydow work from Nutt's days as a "Hairy Who" Surrealist, in the sixties, and then jumps to his recent fantasy portraits, in smooth paint or careful pencil, of oddly configured women. With aromatic color that extends to beautifully crafted frames, the pictures evoke the clenched intensity of icons. They convince a viewer that an exactly squashed nose or a twisted brow is a matter of some formal and meaningful, critical import. Call it geek neo-classicism. Through June 26.
Jim Nutt, "Trim and Other Works: 1967–2010"
A founder of Chicago's Hairy Who group presents a little bit of his past and his present.
By Paul Laster
A Pop artist with a Surrealistic bent, Jim Nutt is widely recognized as a founding member of the Hairy Who, a group of artists who were part of the Chicago Imagists movement of the 1960s and '70s. Influenced by cartoons and advertisements, Nutt started out making comical and erotically charged paintings and drawings that wryly commented on the human condition. For his third solo show at David Nolan Gallery, the artist presents eight offbeat works from his early career, plus ten peculiar portraits from the past decade of imaginary women.
Coursing (circa 1966)—portraying a funky female lacing up her corset while spewing smoke from a cigar or cigarette—is a classic example of Nutt's sensibility. A tennis shoe grows out of this pinup princess's shoulder; her long, flowing hair wraps behind her, creating tongue and tonsil shapes; and her knees reveal fleshy, feminine faces and torsos in profile. Painted on the wall-facing side of a Plexiglas sheet, the piece exhibits the part-insider, part-outsider nature that is an important characteristic of all of Nutt's work.
Newer paintings, such as Pin, Plumb and Trim, distort female portraiture in uncanny ways. Shifting planes and patterns define faces filled with sublimated sexual forms; their large angular noses and sculptural hairdos are especially notable for their visual innuendo. Equally, Nutt's drawings, which dominate the show, pack a powerful punch, illustrating the delicate, sensuous line that keeps the artist's work sublime.