Post War and Contemporary Art

Provenance:

Phyllis Kind Gallery, Chicago

Russell Bowman Art Advisory, Chicago

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

Lot Essay:

Jim Nutt first attracted international attention as a member of the Hairy Who. The group exhibited together several times between 1966-69 around the country but were based initially in Chicago. They espoused no collective philosophy or formal manifesto but came together out of shared sensibilities, largely ignoring the vogue at the time for New York abstraction and opted instead to incorporate Surrealism and Expressionism with the illustrational style of American comic books. Representational rather than abstract, Nutt's own work seems to signal content and to lay out some comprehensible, if bizarre, story line.

Nutt’s colored pencil drawing from 1982, I’ll look for an other, continues the theatrical themes that the artist had begun to explore in the 1970s. Drawing had always been an important part of the artist’s practice. From 1975 to mid-1977, Nutt concentrated primarily on pencil drawings of stages with complex scenery populated by multiple figures. By about 1980, a formal change occurred in the drawings, with the focus on a single figure or pair of figures within a simple interior space, framed by rigid curtains or proscenium. The figures, as seen in those of I’ll look for an other, are also less distorted and more geometricized, with an air of domesticity. These seemingly familiar couples may well have been influenced by the work of the artist’s wife, Gladys Nilsson, which frequently spoke to issues of “women’s work.”

In the present drawing, both the man and woman are nude, yet easily exist together inside the confines of a small room. The woman holds up a small mirror, a recurrent motif in Nutt’s work, to the mustachioed man (who bears a striking resemblance to the artist). As Chicago critic Dennis Adrian stated, “His [Nutt’s] protagonists and subsidiary figures often hold mirrors, magnifying glasses, examining lenses, or objects that both glow and reflect. These figures constitute a frequent reiteration of the idea that seeing is a kind of thinking.” (“The Metaphysics of Perception in the Drawings of Jim Nutt,” Drawing, July-August 1993, p. 29) The idea of self-examination and reflection, and perhaps falling a little short in the process, is further heightened by the typically tongue-in-cheek title given by the artist.