Richard Wetzel | |
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![]() Wetzel in 2014 | |
Born | Elmhurst, Illinois, U.S. | October 23, 1943
Education | BFA, School of the Art Institute Chicago, MA, Northern Illinois University |
Known for | Painting, collage, sculpture |
Spouse | Janice Anderson |
Richard Wetzel (born October 23, 1943) is an American artist. He is best known for his oil paintings but also has exhibited collages and sculpture. In 1969 and 1970, Wetzel exhibited with the Chicago Imagists, a grouping of Chicago artists who were ascendant in the late 1960s and early 1970s. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Born in Elmhurst, Illinois, Wetzel was the second of three boys (with brothers David and Douglas). Both Wetzel's parents were artists. Wetzel's father, Wilbert, was a photoengraver. His mother, Elfreda, was a commercial artist. The family eventually settled in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
Wetzel's interest in art developed at an early age, but he was also a three-time gymnastics individual medalist (pommel horse) on the Arlington High School (AHS) team that won two successive Illinois State Gymnastics Championships: 1958–59 and 1959–60. [6]
At age 17, two significant events influenced Wetzel's future direction. The first was the arrival of artist James F. Walker as an art teacher at Arlington High School. [7] Walker arrived from his teaching position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) during Wetzel's senior year, 1960–61. Walker was an artist who created mixed-media surrealist images. [7] The second event was a trip to New York City to view an exhibition of the works of Max Ernst at the Museum of Modern Art. [8] The influence of these two artists would shape Wetzel's vision for decades to come.
After graduation, Wetzel enrolled in SAIC in fall 1961, where he studied with Vera Berdich, [9] Whitney Halstead, [10] Thomas Kapsalis, [11] and Sonia Sheridan. [12] While at SAIC, Wetzel met classmate and fellow artist Janice Anderson. They married after Janice's graduation in 1965.
Prior to his marriage, Wetzel moved to Chicago's Old Town, a neighborhood known for the arts, its bars and nightlife, and 1960s hippie counterculture. In 1962, Wetzel opened the Sedgwick Street Gallery with AHS classmate Dennis Rice on North Avenue at the Sedgwick L Stop. The gallery was located up the street from the Mole Hole, home of the counterculture newspaper the Chicago Seed, and walking distance from Cabrini Green, a low-income, high-rise complex known for high poverty and crime. [13] At the gallery, Wetzel and Rice exhibited the works of Karl Wirsum, Barry Malloy, Luis Ortiz, William Nichols, Bill Arsenault, Ed Paschke, and Wetzel's mentor, James F. Walker, as well as his own work.
In 1968, Wetzel graduated with honors from SAIC with a BFA. The Institute awarded him a Foreign Travelling Fellowship, which he would later use to travel and study abroad. [14] After graduating from SAIC, he continued his studies at Northern Illinois University, earning an MA in 1969. In the fall of 1970, Richard and his wife, Janice, traveled throughout Europe for eight months on his fellowship, studying art and architecture. After returning to Chicago, they both assumed teaching positions in city and suburban art departments, where they continued teaching until retirement, Janice in the Chicago Public Schools, and Richard in Niles Township High Schools. They lived, worked, and traveled together until Janice's death in 2014. [15]
The Chicago Imagists [1] were a group of graduates and students of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, all in their 20s, who came to be regarded in the art world as “the Chicago vanguard.” [3] Their work was exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) in nine exhibitions between 1966 and 1972. The nine shows at HPAC were aligned into three groups: The Hairy Who, The Nonplussed Some, and The False Image. [4] [16] [17] According to Robin Dluzen, the Imagists were “mainly white but with an unusually large percentage of female members … 7 women amongst 11 men …” [18]
These events were organized by Don Baum, exhibitions director at HPAC, and a participant in one of the nine shows. [5] Baum would later organize two exhibitions for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The first of these, Don Baum Says Chicago Needs Famous Artists, included works by Wetzel. The second show, Made in Chicago, did not. Made in Chicago traveled on to the São Paulo Bienal in Brazil and also to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. [19] [20] [21]
James Yood offered a concise definition of the Imagist aesthetic:
… funky and irreverent subject matter (often with sexual and/or violent overtones, with imaginative fantasies dealing with the figure under extreme physical or psychological stress), a predilection for narrative themes drawn from vernacular sources, a decided openness to influences from self-taught artists and from sources outside the mainstream of Western art history, a taste for garish and obsessively busy small-scale compositions driven by a concern for symmetry and a linear approach to the figure, surrealistic whimsy and ironic and caustic humor undercutting the “serious” status of the art object, high-keyed color, scrupulous and fastidious craftspersonship [sic] tending toward the suppression of evidence of the experiential residue of the artist's hand, and iconic independence and idiosyncratic mannerism of the most manic sort. [22]
Franz Schultze in ARTNews 1971 described a cliquishness in the various groups.
They cluster in small groups and—rather like the secret kids' clubs that flourished in the days of radio serials and the Sunday funnies—they even assume corporate names, like The Hairy Who ([Jim] Nutt, [Gladys] Nilsson, [Karl] Wirsum, Suellen Rocca, Art Green, James Falconer), The Nonplussed Some ([Ed] Flood, [Ed] Paschke, Sara Canright, Richard Wetzel, Don Baum), the False Image (Roger Brown, Phil Hanson, Christina Ramberg, Eleanor Dube). [16]
In fact, as Schultze noted in 1969, Imagist artist Robert Guinan participated in the Nonplussed Some show but was later replaced by Don Baum in Nonplussed Some Some More. [3] Shultze's omission of Guinan in 1971 points to a question of who is in the Imagist roster.
Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune art critic, commented on the 2000 Imagist show at the Chicago Cultural Center:
Some artists in “Jumpin' Backflash”—Robert Guinan, Richard Wetzel—didn't fit the developing definitions of the style and were passed by almost from the beginning … … That few of the painters beyond Ed Paschke and Jim Nutt ever took their art further perhaps says something about Imagism and arrested development. [23]
Peter Schjeldahl in Art in America observed that from the first HPAC exhibition in 1966 the alignments among the artists morphed almost continually.
The groups miscegenated briskly in a series of Hyde Park shows that, with themes and costumes, were also theatrical events: “Marriage Chicago Style,” for instance, solemnized the joining of members of the Who and the Some, plus Barbara Rossi. [17]
James Yood in 2000 observed, “Many of these artists did not feel at the time, nor do some admit today, that they are particularly linked to one another …” [22] Wetzel's participation with the Imagists ended in 1970.
Wetzel did show his work in the 2000 group exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, Jumpin' Backflash: Original Imagist Artwork, 1966–1969. This exhibit marked the first time that the works of all fifteen artists of the nine HPAC shows were included in one exhibition. [22] Wetzel was quoted in the program notes for Jumpin' Backflash:
… the current exhibit is the first time that ALL the “Imagist” artists have been included, in person or in print … it should present a rare opportunity to read the works instead of the words. [22]
A documentary film about the Imagists was released in 2014, Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. [24]
From 1962, Wetzel has exhibited his work in both solo and group exhibitions. Sue Taylor in the Chicago Sun-Times observed in 1985 that
Like others associated with [The Chicago Imagists], now internationally renowned, Wetzel has intensified the individual aspects of his style in the 15 years since the inception of Imagism. [25]
Wetzel continues to live in Chicago, where he works in collaboration with DAKOtravail.
Whitney Halstead, Artforum, 1968
The juxtapositions typical of collage are blended to achieve a lyrical (and here, dreamlike) mood in Richard Wetzel's transfer images on glass. Black Eyed Susan's Circle typifies his achievement in synthesizing disparate elements in a quiet, understated tone. [26]
Franz Schultze, Chicago Daily News, 1968
Wetzel makes dreamy, low-key collages with ectoplasmic faces … [9]
Harold Haydon, Chicago Sun-Times, 1969
… Wetzel's large and ingenious photo collages … [27]
Franz Schultze, Chicago Daily News, 1969
… Wetzel's complicated surrealist symbolism … [3]
Harold Haydon, Chicago Sun-Times, 1975
With precision and subtlety, [Wetzel] draws organic and vegetable forms at about the scale of cabbages and squashes, while emphasizing the prehensile aspect of vegetation. Tendrils and claws reach out to grapple in these imagined encounters in the land of chlorophyll. Just as vegetable claws resemble beatle [sic] and crab pincers in Wetzel's drawings, so flying seeds acquire monarch-butterfly and other insect wings. These drawings transmit the essence of a quiet, desperate struggle from existence. [28]
Harold Haydon, Chicago Sun-Times, 1981
Rapacious flowers and other vegetation, painted large—as if from an insect's point of view—loom large against dark pastoral landscapes in Richard D. Wetzel's exhibition …
In Wetzel's world, precisely painted plants, fierce in fang and claw, can be as prosaic as green beans or as fantastic as root systems. Their victims usually are eggs, whose fate is to be seized and devoured. Only one escapes, in the painting titled “Deliverance,” borne aloft by a monarch butterfly and by its coloration, obviously an egg of the monarch clan.
If all this imagery is taken as a paradigm of earthly existence, Wetzel's view must be quite on the mark. [29]
Jeff Abell, New Art Examiner, 1984
The paintings make use of intensely bright colors, most often to delineate shapes against the generally darker background colors. For example, a strange claw-like shape is outlined in a very hot yellow-orange against a purple background, so that the figure glows against its ground. [30]
Sue Taylor, Chicago Sun-Times, 1985
… the brilliant radiating colors and mysterious, iconic images that have long distinguished Wetzel's art are still his major concerns. Each image is set against a monochromatic background of the deepest blue, purple or green, which may be read as an infinite spatial recession, indicative of the vague realm of imagination. [25]
Sue Taylor, Chicago Sun-Times, 1985
What is unique about his current paintings is their powerfully emotive quality, for they operate largely on the level of feeling. The forms he uses, for all their rich ambiguity, are direct, simplified, and distilled, and their suggestiveness is of a kind everyone can understand—intuitively … [25]
David McCracken, Chicago Tribune, 1985
… Zaks is showing paintings by Richard Wetzel, work very much in the Chicago School tradition: hard-edged forms at once organic and artificial—they reminded me, oddly, of electron photomicrography—in eerie, strangely erotic colors. [31]
G. Jurek Polanski, Jumpin' Backflash: Original Imagist Artwork, 1966–1969, 2000
There are images which linger long after viewing. A prime example is Death-Breath, a 1966 serigraph on paper among the works by Richard Wetzel. Both in spirit and execution, it implies affinities with such German expressionists as Georg Grosz, but for Wetzel, allied with the “Nonplussed Some,” Vietnam, not Dachau, more likely supplied the inspirational matrix. [32]
The Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) is a visual arts organization and the oldest alternative exhibition space in the city of Chicago. Since 2006, HPAC has been located just north of Hyde Park Boulevard, at 5020 S.Cornell Avenue, in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.
Karl Wirsum was an American artist. He was a member of the Chicago artistic group The Hairy Who, and helped set the foundation for Chicago's art scene in the 1970s. Although he was primarily a painter, he also worked with prints, sculpture, and even digital art.
Roger Brown was an American artist and painter. Often associated with the Chicago Imagist groups, he was internationally known for his distinctive painting style and shrewd social commentaries on politics, religion, and art.
James T. Nutt is an American artist who was a founding member of the Chicago surrealist art movement known as the Chicago Imagists, or the Hairy Who. Though his work is inspired by the same pop culture that inspired Pop Art, journalist Web Behrens says Nutt's "paintings, particularly his later works, are more accomplished than those of the more celebrated Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein." According to Museum of Contemporary Art curator Lynne Warren, Nutt is "the premier artist of his generation". Nutt attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois. He is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Gladys Nilsson.
The Chicago Imagists are a group of representational artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s.
Barbara Rossi is a Chicago-based artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group that in the 1960s and 1970s turned to representational art. She first exhibited with them at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1969. She is known for meticulously rendered drawings and cartoonish paintings, as well as a personal vernacular. She works primarily by making reverse paintings on plexiglass that reference lowbrow and outsider art.
Visual arts of Chicago refers to paintings, prints, illustrations, textile art, sculpture, ceramics and other visual artworks produced in Chicago or by people with a connection to Chicago. Since World War II, Chicago visual art has had a strong individualistic streak, little influenced by outside fashions. "One of the unique characteristics of Chicago," said Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts curator Bob Cozzolino, "is there's always been a very pronounced effort to not be derivative, to not follow the status quo." The Chicago art world has been described as having "a stubborn sense ... of tolerant pluralism." However, Chicago's art scene is "critically neglected." Critic Andrew Patner has said, "Chicago's commitment to figurative painting, dating back to the post-War period, has often put it at odds with New York critics and dealers." It is argued that Chicago art is rarely found in Chicago museums; some of the most remarkable Chicago artworks are found in other cities.
Gladys M. Nilsson is an American artist, and one of the original Hairy Who Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists active during the 1960s and 1970s. She is married to fellow-artist and Hairy Who member Jim Nutt.
Raymond "Ray" Kakuo Yoshida was an American artist known for his paintings and collages, and for his contributions as a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1959 to 2005. He was an important mentor of the Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who specialized in distorted, emotional representational art.
Suellen Rocca was an American artist, one of the original Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who turned to representational art. She exhibited with them at the Hyde Park Art Center from 1966 through 1969. She was curator of the art collection and director of exhibitions at Elmhurst College.
Culture Coast Chicago is a collection of artistically vibrant neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. Known for its high concentration of museums, music and theater ensembles, performance venues, cultural nonprofits, and arts education opportunities, the region spans from just south of McCormick Place to the South Shore Cultural Center and is bordered by Lake Michigan to the east and the Dan Ryan Expressway to the west.
Turtel Onli is an American artist, entrepreneur, author, art therapist, educator, and publisher.
Phyllis Bramson is an American artist, based in Chicago and known for "richly ornamental, excessive and decadent" paintings described as walking a tightrope between "edginess and eroticism." She combines eclectic influences, such as kitsch culture, Rococo art and Orientalism, in juxtapositions of fantastical figures, decorative patterns and objects, and pastoral landscapes that affirm the pleasures and follies of romantic desire, imagination and looking. Bramson shares tendencies with the Chicago Imagists and broader Chicago tradition of surreal representation in her use of expressionist figuration, vernacular culture, bright color, and sexual imagery. Curator Lynne Warren wrote of her 30-year retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center, "Bramson passionately paints from her center, so uniquely shaped in her formative years […] her lovely colors, fluttery, vignette compositions, and flowery and cartoony imagery create works that are really like no one else's. Writer Miranda McClintic said that Bramson's works "incorporate the passionate complexity of eastern mythology, the sexual innuendos of soap operas and sometimes the happy endings of cartoons." Bramson's work has been exhibited in exhibitions and surveys at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution, and Corcoran Gallery of Art. In more than forty one-person exhibitions, she has shown at the New Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Boulder Art Museum, University of West Virginia Museum, and numerous galleries. She has been widely reviewed and recognized with John S. Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundation grants and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, among others. She was one of the founding members of the early women's art collaborative Artemisia Gallery and a long-time professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, until retiring in 2007.
Christina Ramberg was an American painter associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of representational artists who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1960s. The Imagists took their cues from Surrealism, Pop, and West Coast underground comic illustration, and were "enchanted with the abject status of sex in post-war America, particularly as writ on the female form." Ramberg is best known for her depictions of partial female bodies forced into submission by undergarments and imagined in odd, erotic predicaments.
Don Baum (1922–2008) was an American curator, artist and educator, most known as a key impresario and promoter of the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists that had an enduring impact on American art in the later twentieth century. Described by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) as "an indispensable curator of the Chicago school," Baum was known for lively and irreverent exhibitions that offered fresh perspectives combining elements of Surrealism and Pop and that broke down barriers between schooled and untrained, or so-called outsider artists. From 1956 to 1972, Baum was exhibitions director at Chicago's Hyde Park Art Center. It was there, in the 1960s, that he became involved with a group of young artists he exhibited as "Hairy Who" that later expanded to become the Chicago Imagists. That group included Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, and Karl Wirsum. Baum mounted two major shows at the MCA that featured the emerging artists in their first museum exhibitions: "Don Baum Sez: 'Chicago Needs Famous Artists'" (1969) and "Made in Chicago" (1973), which shaped a vision of Chicago's art world as a place of meticulous craftsmanship and vernacular inspiration.
Arthur Lerner is an American artist, known for his atmospheric figurative paintings and drawings, landscapes, and still lifes. He is sometimes described as a realist, but most critics observe that his work is more subjective than descriptive or literal. Associated with Chicago's influential "Monster Roster" artists early in his career, he shared their enthusiasm for expressive figuration, fantasy and mythology, and their existential outlook, but diverged increasingly in his classical formal concerns and more detached temperament. Critics frequently note in Lerner's art a sense of light that evokes Impressionism, delicate color and modelling that "flirts with dematerialization," and the draftsmanship that serves as a foundation for all of his work. The Chicago Tribune's Alan Artner lamented Lerner's comparative lack of recognition in relation to the Chicago Imagists as the fate of "an aesthete in a town dominated by tenpenny fantasts." Lerner's work has been extensively covered in publications, featured in books such as Monster Roster: Existential Art in Postwar Chicago, and acquired by public and private collections, including those of the Smithsonian Institution, Art Institute of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, among many.
David Sharpe is an American artist, known for his stylized and expressionist paintings of the figure and landscape and for early works of densely packed, organic abstraction. He was trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked in Chicago until 1970, when he moved to New York City, where he remains. Sharpe has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), The Drawing Center, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Chicago Cultural Center, among many venues. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, and been acquired by public institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, MCA Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, among many.
Paul Christopher Lamantia is an American visual artist, known for paintings and drawings that explore dark psychosexual imagery. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the larger group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists.
Robert Morris Donley is an American artist who has been identified with the Chicago Imagist movement. Judith Wilson of the Village Voice called him the "Chicago imagist Tolstoy." The narrative aspects of his work center on broad social and political statements that are complex--often playful and satirical with respect to ways in which propaganda, power, and social diversity mix with and conflict with historical and religious personalities. In his career retrospective in 2000 at the Chicago Cultural Center, Dr. Paul Jaskot wrote that "his art investigates the changing political and social geographies of [the modern] city."
Frank Piatek is an American artist, known for abstract, illusionistic paintings of tubular forms and three-dimensional works exploring spirituality, cultural memory and the creative process. Piatek emerged in the mid-1960s, among a group of Chicago artists exploring various types of organic abstraction that shared qualities with the Chicago Imagists; his work, however relies more on suggestion than expressionistic representation. In Art in Chicago 1945-1995, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) described Piatek as playing “a crucial role in the development and refinement of abstract painting in Chicago" with carefully rendered, biomorphic compositions that illustrate the dialectical relationship between Chicago's idiosyncratic abstract and figurative styles. Piatek's work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, MCA Chicago, National Museum, Szczecin in Poland, and Terra Museum of American Art; it belongs to the public art collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and MCA Chicago, among others. Curator Lynne Warren describes Piatek as "the quintessential Chicago artist—a highly individualistic, introspective outsider" who has developed a "unique and deeply felt world view from an artistically isolated vantage point." Piatek lives and works in Chicago with his wife, painter and SAIC professor Judith Geichman, and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.
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