Art_Ltd_2016_03_04_

52 art ltd - March / April 2016

In contrast to AbEx, the work was also differentiated and defined
by its embrace of the human figure. The exhibition, more clearly in
the catalogue than on the Smart’s walls, clearly indicates the figu-
rative nature of the Monster Roster (the name wasn’t coined until
late in its run, in 1959, by artist and critic Franz Schulze, who
would also later coin the term ‘Imagism’). And the figure was part
of its identity; it’s always been part of Chicago’s art identity, from

Albright to Golub and onward, the human figure under stress
(variously psychological, sexual, emotional, comedic, and yes,
existential) is the touchstone of Chicago painting and sculpture.
In a 1955 article for the College Art Journal(“A Critique of Abstract
Expressionism”), Golub had what must have seemed the provin-
cial audacity and disloyalty to throw a gauntlet at New York School
abstraction, challenging New York’s abjuration of the human

figure as mistaken, and its pursuit of primordial instincts and

primitivism as a sham.

Golub—and his work dominates this exhibition in number and scale—

brought his commitment to the figure to the studio every day, and

in work after work here you see human existence as an unending

struggle against long odds, the body as a battered instrument of vic-

timization, with the urge to survive one of its few ongoing dignities.

The canvas becomes something to scrape and scumble and attack,

and as the 1950s proceeded, color becomes something dolloped out

so parsimoniously as to be conspicuous by its near absence; early

works such as The Courtesans(c. 1950), or the later, monumental

Reclining Youthof 1959 exhibit his developing probing nature, the

earlier work a search through the sensuous tactility of paint, the latter

more a physical assault on canvas. Golub continues the several-thou-

sand-year-old tradition of the centrality of the human form, even if

now it often appears concussed and bereft. The show also offers

several versions of the charnel house horrors of Cosmo Campoli’s still

mesmerizing sculpture Birth of Death, (all c. 1950), and Nancy Spero’s

“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,” says Corbett. “So the deep psychological 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.”

“Untitled,” 1958, Fred Berger
Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago
Gift of Robert and Mary Donley
Photo: courtesy Smart Museum