March / Apri 2016 - art ltd 53paintings were great to see, and among the surprises of the
exhibition was how good and terrifically creepy Fred Berger’s
paintings are.
But was the Monster Roster an art movement? Or was it rather
just a shared vocabulary, as so often happens in a particular place
at a particular time: you know, ideas are floating around and different
artists pick them up for a bit. The curators acknowledge that this is
an open question. Unlike the Imagists, who did eventually regularly
exhibit together, almost universally shared a dealer (Phyllis Kind) and
had the support and attentions of a great critic and curator (Dennis
Adrian locally, and on the national scene, Walter Hopps), the Mon-
ster Roster had none of that. Even the movement wasn’t named
until it was practically over, and there are artists displayed here to-
gether who barely knew one another. But the curators convincingly
draw these artists together visually and philosophically, so if it
wasn’t a movement before, it now probably is.
One thing that did unite them perhaps, if only loosely, was a shared
attitude of fearlessness. “Working on the exhibition, we were struck
by how exploratory and even experimental the artists were,” says
Corbett. “Sometimes experimentation is cast as something exclu-
sive to abstraction, but in the context of a figurative practice, you
only need to consider Golub’s scraped and gnawed surfaces, the
unconventional plastic wood and pliable polymers used by Di Meo
and Halkin, and the washy near-monochrome black paintings of
Spero, to sense how fearless they were, from a formal, material,
and technical perspective.”
The Monster Roster ended by the artists moving on, some of them
physically—Golub and Spero moved to Paris in 1959, and then to
New York in 1964; Westermann headed for Connecticut in 1961,
Irving Petlin left before that, June Leaf too—and some of them
stylistically, setting in motion what Franz Schulze once called “the
sorriest time in Chicago Art that I can remember, the early and mid
1960s,” identifying the period just before the Imagists began to
emerge. Schulze continues: “The energy of the 1950s had begun
to wane... and things began to die a little in the early 1960s.
People questioned whether there was such a thing as a ‘Chicago
School’ at all.” Some of the artists in this exhibition too have passed
away, Evelyn Statsinger as recently as February 13 this year (there
are 16 artists on view, a few just by a single work; 7 are living).
But that would end with the events of 50 years ago. At the end
of this Monster Roster exhibition, the Smart Museum installed
a room of Chicago Imagism from its permanent collection, with
works by Roger Brown, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Ed Paschke,
Christina Ramberg and Suellen Rocca. All these also exhibit the
human figure under stress, but it’s a kind of Pop and electric
stress, funny, upbeat, rich in vernacular culture references, with
not a whiff of the charnel house or existential despair, tongue in
cheek instead of knife in heart. Walking from the Monster Roster
into the Imagists you get that brightening feeling you experience
when you walk through an encyclopedic museum and transition
from, say, the 1970s into the 1980s, that you’re moving from the
modern to the contemporary. But before they dispersed for good,
the figures of the Monster Roster had, in channeling an anxious
zeitgeist, laid the seeds for what was to come. Looking back to
see these diverse young artists grappling so urgently with the
anxieties of the age, reminds us of how dark it was before that
light appeared.
1255 Delaware St., Denver, CO 80204- 573.1255 goodwinfineart.com
Mark Villarreal,Venetian Painting No.3,(detail ), 2015, oil on panel, 76.75 ́ ́ x 36 ́ ́Andy Berg,Oneiros,(detail ), 2 015, mixed media on panel, 24 ́ ́x 19 ́́Andy Berg
Mark Villarreal
April 23 - June 4, 2 016that was then
THIS IS NOW