[Adrian, Dennis. "Two decades of painting in Chicago: Beneath the 'Surfaces'", ''New Art Examiner'', December 1987, p. 26–9.][Adrian, Dennis. "Critical reflections on the development of Chicago Imagism," ''Chicago Imagism: A 25-Year Survey'', Catalogue, Davenport, IA: Davenport Museum of Art. 1994.] In terms of chronology and psychology, critics write that he "hovers at the edge" of the Chicago Imagists, sharing themes of sex, aggression, and psychological menace and a tendency towards vernacular expression.
[Newman, Christine. "When Jim Met Gladys," ''Chicago Magazine'', February 2011.] In the historical volume, ''Art in Chicago'' (2018), curator Robert Cozzolino suggests his peripherality—as with Chicagoans Linda Kramer and
Robert Lostutter—results partly from not exhibiting under the
"Hairy Who" or similar banners, but mainly, from his more thematically startling and ferocious depictions of socially transgressive sexuality.
[Cozzolino, Robert. "Raw Nerves," In ''Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now'', Ed. Taft, Maggie and Robert Cozzolino, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, p. 390.][Hyde Park Art Center. ''Hyde Park Art Center: 1939–1976'', Chicago: Hyde Park Art Center, 1976, p.32.] Critics
Peter Frank[Frank, Peter. "Hunting the Emergent American: On the Trail of the Exxon National," ''National Arts Guide'', January–February 1981, p. 16-24.] and Hawkins concur, describing his work as rawer than the Imagists, with cartooniness a "wrapper for something scarier, less aesthetic and polite."
Writer-gallerist
John Corbett
John Joseph Corbett Jr. (born May 9, 1961) is an American actor and country music singer. On television, he is best known for his roles as Chris Stevens on ''Northern Exposure'' (1990–1995), Aidan Shaw on ''Sex and the City'' (2000–2003), ...
identified Lamantia as a "psychosexual outlaw, making utterly original work with one foot inside and one outside the Imagist camp."
Painting
Lamantia first gained notoriety in the 1960s for his unfiltered, high-energy drawings.
[Dempsey, Jim. "Inside Out: Briggs Dyer & Paul Lamantia Drawings & Paintings from the 1960s," In Corbett, John and Jim Dempsey, ''Inside Out'', Catalogue, Chicago: Corbett vs. Dempsey Modern Art, 2006.] By the early 1970s, critics suggested that his more controlled and deliberately composed paintings had caught up in terms of freedom of invention and integration of feeling and execution.
In monumental works, he depicted surreal, ambiguously-sexed figures and groups—sirens, buxom temptresses, leather-clad dominatrixes, voyeurs, and mutant beasts—undergoing dizzying transformations into giant insects, plant-like forms and horrific organic conglomerations, while engaged in discomfiting, sometimes predatory sexual dramas.
[Adrian, Dennis. "Socko and subtle. Lamantia and Flood." ''Chicago Daily News'', May 25–26, 1974, p. 11.] In these paintings, faces, skin, sinuous legs, torpedo breasts, muscles and organs blend or morph into invented anatomies of snapping jaws, sprouting eyes, bird beaks, claws, tentacles and machine, while skin, makeup, masking, tattooing, scarring and costuming become indistinguishable, rendering interpretation compellingly ambiguous, for many critics.
In works such as ''Cancellation'' (1974–5) and ''Night Language 2'' (1977),
[Paul Lamantia website]
Paintings
Retrieved October 30, 2018. Lamantia set his scenes in garish, compressed domestic interiors that recall the harrowing rooms of
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...
and
Max Beckmann
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann (February 12, 1884 – December 27, 1950) was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s ...
.
[Artner, Alan G. Review, ''Chicago Tribune'', April 10, 1981, Section 2, p. 13.] Critics described the work as a tangle of bewildering abstract patterns, high-key color, frenzied line and strong contour, with contradictory forms that lacked a focal point or orientation to distinguish figure from ground.
[Adrian, Dennis. "Paul Lamantia," ''Visions, Painting and Sculpture: Distinguished Alumni 1945 to the Present'', Catalogue, Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1976, p. 100-1.] Simultaneously, they noted a clear level of formal structural integrity deriving from what Franz Schulze called Lamantia's "controlled wildness"
and his absorption of classical genre compositions of female nudes in interiors from Titian to
Matisse
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a drawing, draughtsman, printmaking, printmaker, and sculptur ...
.
In the 1980s, critics observed that Lamantia's paintings, while thematically as unnerving as ever, became leaner, more painterly and open, and reminiscent of
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter El ...
's savage "Woman" paintings.
[Artner, Alan G. "Lamantia still tilts with towers of strength," ''Chicago Tribune'', November 14, 1986.] Works from ''Whisper'' (1980) to ''Blood Love'' (1993)
featured a subdued, finessed palette of whites, light yellows, pastels and deep purples, that enhanced the rhythms of streamlined,
Baroque compositions employing illusionistic, theatrical space.
Alan Artner compared the technique to Bacon's appropriation of Monet-like painterliness in his disquieting works; Buzz Spector felt this joy in painting offset a potentially moralistic tone in the work.
[Spector, Buzz. "Paul Lamantia," ''Artforum'', January 1987.] Lamantia's figuration also evolved towards an
H.P. Lovecraftian, sci-fi-like "mechano-morphism,"
with "metallic musculature suggesting malevolent sexual machinery"
merging with his existing re-grafted mutations.
Lamantia's paintings from the later 1990s onward returned to the more claustrophobic compositions of earlier work, incorporating the linear freedom of his drawings, but in a "less manic and tortured" form that critics described as "an amiable kind of chaos."
[Miller, Chris]
"Review: Subconscious Eye/Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art,"
''New City'', May 21, 2013. Retrieved October 30, 2018. James Yood called the work a "strangely hypnotic" catalogue of unmediated male desire "immersed in sheer pictorial thrill."
He suggested that Lamantia's uncensored, possibly confessional frankness about contradictory aspects of desire in works such as ''Still Lives'' (1995)
elevated what might seem retrograde or misogynist, much like Picasso's 1920s–1930s work.
Late paintings, such as ''The Solution'' (2010) or ''The Collector of Unfulfilled Dreams'' (2012)—Lamantia's "unnerving reworking of the Garden of Eden story"—feature a greater emphasis on the materiality of paint, the expressive possibilities of gestural accident, and flirtation with abstraction.
Drawing
In the 1960s, Lamantia attracted notice for drawings packed with sprawling comic- and
Miró-like forms and explosive energy, that some compared to the fantasy-scapes of
Roberto Matta
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (; November 11, 1911 – November 23, 2002), better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile's best-known painters and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art.
Bio ...
or
Hieronymous Bosch
Hieronymus Bosch (, ; born Jheronimus van Aken ; – 9 August 1516) was a Dutch/ Netherlandish painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work, generally oil on oa ...
.
Working in ball-point and felt-tip pen, pastel, gouache, collage, color pencil and crayons, he produced frenzied, intricate work that was unstable in its emotion and forms, and suggested a spontaneity that critics said was belied by its technical richness and finesse.
Robert Cozzolino called works of the time, such as ''Like Father Like Son'' (1968), "extraordinarily raw and vulnerable" treatments of family, identity and emotional states, that portrayed the angst of the period and its "the-personal-is-the-political" ethos.
[Cozzolino, Robert. "Excellence on Paper from Colonial to Contemporary, No. 7.: ''Like Father Like Son'' by Paul Lamantia," ''Drawing Magazine''. Winter 2015.][Williams, Austin R. "Curator's Choice," ''Drawing'', Winter, 2015, p. 83.]
Critics hold that the drawings, while thematically similar, are neither tangential nor mere studies, but autonomous, open-ended works that explore oneiric, metaphysical and visionary pursuits with a searing, concentrated energy.
[Paul Lamantia website]
Works on Paper
Retrieved October 30, 2018. Cozzolino, and others, consider the drawings to be among the least well-known, understudied bodies of work among artists of Lamantia's generation.
John Corbett, nonetheless, suggests that this work built "a historical bridge between the rough-hewn feel of earlier Monster Roster artists and the sleek, cartoonish gleam of later Imagist work."
Lamantia's drawing has continued apace his painting in subsequent decades, including some monochromatic drawings in the 1970s, such as ''Your Favorite Sores Bronze Plated in Raw Meat'' an
''The Vendor of His Scars''(Art Institute of Chicago collection), both from 1977.
In the catalogue to Lamantia's 2016 retrospective, Margaret Hawkins described late drawings, such as ''Oddball Losers'' (2000) and ''Peep Freak'' (2001), as gorgeous explorations of "infinite inner space" that flow "directly from the subconscious" and teem with provocative sensory information
Since 2014, Lamantia has started painting on frozen pizza boxes, leaving portions of the color food photography to peek through and morph into skin and eyes; these works share an affinity with 16th-century
Mannerist
Mannerism, which may also be known as Late Renaissance, is a style in European art that emerged in the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520, spreading by about 1530 and lasting until about the end of the 16th century in Ita ...
Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (; also spelled ''Arcimboldi'') (1526 or 1527 – 11 July 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.
These wo ...
's "whimsically grotesque portraits."
In addition to his drawings, Lamantia has also created prints at Anchor Press in Chicago and Lakeside Press in Michigan.
Collections and recognition
Lamantia's work belongs to public collections, including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Art Institute of Chicago,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,
Collection de l'art brut
The Collection de l'art brut (literally "Collection of Raw Art"; sometimes referred to as "Musée de l'art brut") is a museum dedicated to outsider art located in Lausanne, Switzerland.
See also
* American Visionary Art Museum
The American ...
(Lausanne, Switzerland),
[Collection de l'Art Brut]
Lamantia, Paul, ''Grand Dessin''
Collections. Retrieved June 19, 2023.[Collection de l'Art Brut]
Lamantia, Paul, ''The Door Way of the Demons''
Collections. Retrieved June 19, 2023. Milwaukee Art Museum,
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA), formerly known as the Madison Art Center, is an independent, non-profit art museum located in downtown Madison, Wisconsin.
MMoCA is dedicated to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving modern and co ...
,
Cincinnati Art Museum
The Cincinnati Art Museum is an art museum in the Eden Park neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1881, it was the first purpose-built art museum west of the Alleghenies, and is one of the oldest in the United States. Its collection of ov ...
, Elmhurst Art Museum, Figge Art Museum,
[Figge Art Museum]
Paul Lamantia, ''Early Daze'', 2003
Collection. Retrieved November 2, 2018. Contemporary Museum, Honolulu The Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House, formerly The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, was integrated into the Honolulu Museum of Art under this name. It was the only museum in the state of Hawaii devoted exclusively to contemporary art. The Contemp ...
,
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Pennsylvania (; (Pennsylvania Dutch language, Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a U.S. state, state spanning the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern United States, Northeastern, Appa ...
,
[Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art]
Paul Lamantia
Collections. Retrieved November 2, 2018. Brauer Museum of Art
The Brauer Museum of Art is home to a collection of 19th- and 20th-century American art, world religious art, and Midwestern regional art. It is located in the Valparaiso University Center for the Arts (VUCA) on the campus of Valparaiso University ...
,
Smart Museum of Art
The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art is an art museum located on the campus of the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. The permanent collection has over 15,000 objects. Admission is free and open to the general public.
The Smart Muse ...
,
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
The Block Museum of Art is a free public art museum located on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. The Block Museum was established in 1980 when Chicago art collectors Mary (daughter of Albert Lasker) and Leigh B. Block (f ...
,
Minneapolis Institute of Art
The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is an arts museum located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Home to more than 90,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, Mia is one of the largest art museums in the United State ...
,
[Minneapolis Institute of Art]
Paul Lamantia, ''Storage for a Seasonal Home'', 1972–3
Collections. Retrieved November 2, 2018. The Playboy Collection,
Illinois State Museum
The Illinois State Museum features the life, land, people and art of the State of Illinois. The headquarters museum is located on Spring and Edwards Streets, one block southwest of the Illinois State Capitol, in Springfield. There are three satell ...
, DePaul Art Museum,
[DePaul Art Museum]
"DePaul Art Museum receives gift of 114 works by Chicago-based artists,"
News. August 18, 2016. Retrieved May 20, 2021. Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art
The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (UIMA) ( uk, Український Інститут Модерного Мистецтва (Ukrayinskyi Instytut Modernoho Mystetstva)) is a modern art museum serving the Chicago area with an ongoing program o ...
,
[Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago]
Permanent Collection
Retrieved May 20, 2021. and
Wright Museum of Art The Wright Museum of Art is a small art museum maintained and operated by Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin. It houses a collection of approximately 6,000 objects, has five gallery spaces, and provides training for undergraduate students in muse ...
,
[Wright Museum of Ar]
Paul Lamantia
Collection. Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College. Retrieved May 20, 2021. among others.
In 1984, he was recognized with the
Art Institute of Chicago's Logan Prize.
References
External links
Paul Lamantia official websitePaul Lamantia, Artists Oral History Archive, Art Institute of Chicago Interview with Linda L. Kramer and Sandra Binion, 2010.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lamantia, Paul
21st-century American painters
Artists from Chicago
School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
American male painters
1938 births
Living people
Painters from Illinois
Culture of Chicago