50 art ltd - March / April 2016But something never comes from nothing. There was art and there
were artists in Chicago before the advent of the Imagist generation,
and in several instances—Ivan Albright, for example—they achieved
national recognition, and artists such as John Storrs, Archibald Mot-
ley, Richard Hunt, Gertrude Abercrombie and others enjoyed
significant careers. And there was a generation of artists working in
Chicago throughout the 1950s, just before the rise of the Imagists,
that also included participants who would achieve local and/or national
stature (Robert Barnes, Dominick Di Meo, Leon Golub, Theodore
Halkin, June Leaf, Irving Petlin, Seymour Rosofsky, Nancy Spero,
Evelyn Statsinger, H. C. Westermann, etc.) This latter group, collec-
tively known as the “Monster Roster,” is currently receiving its first
large museum examination (through June 12) at the Smart Museum
of Art, at the University of Chicago. Titled “Monster Roster: Existen-
tialist Art in Postwar Chicago,” the show is curated by independent
curators and gallery owners John Corbett and Jim Dempsey along
with Smart Museum curators Richard A. Born and Jessica Moss.
It’s an intriguing exhibition, a bit unwieldy (it has four curators and six
essayists), and to those fairly familiar with this material there was lit-
tle that seemed a game-changer here. But seeing the work together,
as it so rarely was during its creation or since, is a valuable experi-
ence. As the exhibition’s title indicates, the curators buy into—as I
think they should—similar arguments made about Abstract Expres-
sionism in New York during the same period: that this was a charged
moment in art history when existence and art-making seemed a mat-
ter of life and death, when the question on many lips was, “Should
I die or should I paint?” As Harold Rosenberg (who later taught at
the University of Chicago) put it, “painting became the means of
confronting in daily practice the problematic nature of modern individ-
uality.” Note Rosenberg’s decisive word choice, not the “potentially
problematic nature...” not the “sometimes problematic nature...”
but straight out and blatant, modern individuality was problematic.
Art-making was serious stuff, a sensibility that permeated and
obsessed all these artists, formed in the dramatic crucible of the
1930s and 1940s.
Imagine you are, for example, Leon Golub. You’re born in Chicago in
1922, so when you’re a small boy, the economic system of the planet
comes crashing down in the worst Depression of the century, and the
next decade seems an endless stream of unemployment lines mor-
phing into soup lines, lean and mean. You’re so bright that you earn
your BA in 1942 at the age of 20 at the University of Chicago and then
enlist, spending most of the next four years in Europe with the US
Army. Then the war ends, but instead of the giddy flush of victory, it
all seems soiled, the horrors of the Holocaust are exposed all around
you in Europe, and your government drops atomic bombs on Japan-
ese cities. You return home to Chicago for study at the SAIC under
the GI Bill to a hard and tough blue-collar city (read Nelson Algren’s
1951 essay “Chicago: City on the Make”) and begin a marriage in
pretty dire poverty, just as the Cold War starts and nuclear annihilation
becomes a realistic concept. So, if you’re Leon Golub, you’re
probably not going to paint two pears and an apple. And Golub didn’t.And it wasn’t just Golub. As curator John Corbett notes, that very real
sense of existential dread casts a shadow over much of the Roster’s
output from its early days. “The aspect of the Monster Roster that
was somewhat unexpected to us was the force that WWII exerted
on virtually all of the artists’ work,” he observes. “So the deep psycho-
logical element, which of course also relates to all sorts of other
things like Freudian psychoanalysis, Greek and Roman mythology,
and existential philosophy, is rooted in a palpable sense of anxiety
and dread. That portentousness germinated in the direct experience
of the war for many of the artists, and in the terrifying fear of nuclear
annihilation that was a prevalent part of American daily life in the ’50s.”above:
“The Ischian Sphinx,” 1956, Leon Golub
Oil and lacquer on canvas. Collection of Ulrich and Harriet Meyer
Art © Estate of Leon Golub/Licensed by VAGA, New YorkRight:
“Man with a Dog,” c. 1950, George M. Cohen
Oil on board. Courtesy George Cohen Estate
Photos: courtesy Smart Museum