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Synthetic Surrealism

Tea on Fur, Wet Fur on Lips

Parícutin became a sensation, particularly among scientists, but also among Mexico’s artists. Many of the country’s Surrealists made pilgrimages to the site. One of those reportedly enchanted by the scene was Remedios Varo, the Spanish painter who’d emigrated to Mexico in 1941. In The Flutist (1955), Varo includes, in the background, a craggy volcano partly obscured by a tumult of clouds rendered in murky jewel tones—sapphire, jade, topaz. Her roiling sky looks almost oxidized, the effect of decalcomania, a popular Surrealist technique in which material is pressed against wet paint and then quickly pulled away to leave behind a chance texture. The volcano is but one small feature in this richly imagined canvas, but it evokes the mix of nature, science, and something like the magic of the unknown that suffuses all of Varo’s work.

In “Science Fictions,” the Art Institute of Chicago presents more than 60 of Varo’s paintings and drawings, all made between 1955 and 1963, the year she died of a heart attack at 54. Long revered in Latin America, Varo has entered the canon more slowly in the United States. This is her first exhibition here in more than two decades. Like other female Surrealists, especially her friend and fellow émigré Leonora Carrington, who shares a similar animism and mystical iconography, Varo’s achievements are still being measured. This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.

The title of the exhibition alludes to Varo’s connoisseurship of science fiction, evinced by the volumes of Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury from her personal library that are on view. But the title also suggests the extent to which many of her paintings smudge the boundaries between science and the occult. In Creation of the Birds (1957), a humanoid owl paints a bird that takes flight off the page, perhaps animated by the starlight refracted through a prism in the owl’s hand. The paint is piped in via metal tubes connected to two nearby biomorphic green orbs, which are themselves fed by thin glass plumbing that zigzags through a portal in the wall. Sympathy (1955) depicts a similar transfer of life force. A figure who, like most of Varo’s characters, appears androgynous sits at a table and strokes an orange cat that’s seemingly in motion, simultaneously hypnotized and convulsed by its owner’s attention. A geometry of finely incised electrical currents crisscrosses the air, emanating from the human’s fingertips and flaming head. Both paintings conjure a moment of alchemy in which people call on wild talents or esoteric knowledge to transform their world.

Varo was twice a refugee: first from the Spanish Civil War, then again from the Nazi terror in Europe. As if dramatizing this exile, many of her paintings feature subjects in medias res, riding bicycles, as in Toward the Tower (1960), or piloting phantasmagoric wheeled-winged-finned contraptions, as in Caravan (1955), Discovery (1956), or Starship (1960). Homo Rodans (1959), a sculpture made of fish and poultry bones, purports to be the skeleton of a creature that balanced on a wheel rather than legs. Other works, such as Vagabond (1957), are portraits of rustic dandies who could have just clattered out of some fairytale’s primeval forest. Varo heightens the otherworldliness by giving her vagabond a disproportionate body—his torso is too long, his arm is too low—and by ensconcing him in a sort of wheeled cocoon that doubles as an architectural overcoat and a jury-rigged safehold. He peers out from behind wooden doors that swing open like a cupboard.

As with many Surrealists, Varo’s images evade description. They seem merely whimsical when summarized, but her technical perfection edges them toward sublimity. In person, her paintings can appear textured, corroded, or exquisitely detailed—sometimes all at once. As an adherent of chance and mysticism, Varo experimented with unconventional methods. She scratched fine lines into her canvases with quartz crystals, and she used soufflage, the Surrealist trick of blowing wet paint to create random patterns.

Yet, her work is also highly controlled and rehearsed. She began with full-scale sketches on translucent paper, called cartoons, which she then transferred to hardboard by covering the back of the paper with graphite and retracing the image. The exhibition includes several of these preparatory drawings along with their finished versions, offering revelatory before-and-after access to Varo’s artistic practice. Like Parícutin, Varo’s bewitching visions seemed to erupt from deep down—a psychic outflow that remains a wonder.

But for all their enigmas, Varo’s paintings have an internal logic and narrative potency. Her storytelling prowess is most ambitiously realized in a suite of three canvases from 1960–61. In Toward the Tower, a brood of doppelgänger blondes in tunics bicycle behind a mother superior figure. The central blonde doesn’t have the chloroformed expression of her sisters, and her coif is unkempt, suggesting she’s not completely brainwashed like the others. In Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961), thesame women occupy a partly open belfry, embroidering vast bolts of cloth that tumble forth from the tower and become the outlying landscape, pictured here in a skewed aerial view of spindly trees, Italianate towers, and seas that defy any horizon. In the last panel, The Escape (1961), our rogue blonde has fled and appears with another figure, perhaps a lover, cruising through a realm of brackish fog and jagged cliffs in a vehicle that resembles a bristly clamshell. The series, hung on the exhibition’s back wall, is a showstopping sequence, whether read as a feminist fantasy or a parable of artistic creation.

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Photography in Fragments

Two Books about Art History Examine a Discipline in Crisis

Dillon begins with semantic negotiations. “How to describe, as a writer, the relation it seemed the artists had with their chosen and not chosen—what is the word? Talismans? Tastes? Sympathies? Familiars? Superstitions? Affinities,” he writes. He describes affinity as “something like but unlike critical interest, which has its own excitements but remains too often at the level of knowledge, analysis, conclusions, at worst the total boredom of having opinions.” Dillon’s brand of affinity goes deeper than the internet’s algorithmic recommendations, and is more authentic than the manufactured kinships trumpeted in marketing collateral. Affinity, he writes, is like fascination, but not. It’s a less sentimental sibling to appreciation: a term with the same bloodline but a different character. It’s beyond aesthetics. It’s impermanent. Ultimately, it’s not even thinkable—a “mode of dumb fascination.” Elsewhere in the book, he describes the attempt to anatomize affinity as “stupid” and “idiotic.” His thematic playground here is the gap between how art transfixes us and our inability to articulate that transfixion. (T.J. Clark’s 2006 book on Poussin, The Sight of Death, shares such language; he wonders if only “the physical, literal, dumb” act of looking can satisfy the mind.)   

It’s risky to structure a book as a kind of Wunderkammer—what if it dissipates into its own eclecticism?—and riskier still to feature artists who have been embalmed by decades of analysis. But Dillon’s accretive method is itself a textual demonstration of affinity that helps his various subjects cohere. Artists who have their own chapter reappear in chapters about others: William Klein is invoked alongside Arbus and the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada; Claude Cahun is mentioned in connection to Dora Maar and Francesca Woodman. Chapters succeed each other in subtle embellishment, echoing or annotating earlier themes. In the first essay, for example, Dillon considers Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, the first book in English to present observations made with a microscope. “Among the better-known illustrations in the first edition of 1665 are those showing a fly’s many-faceted eye, the starry shapes of ice crystals and a prodigious bristling fold-out flea,” Dillon writes. This is followed by a chapter on Louis Daguerre’s Vue du boulevard du Temple (ca. 1838), a photograph of a Paris street that’s believed to be the first to depict living people: the smudged apparitions of a man and his boot polisher. Nothing links these two works except an analogy that Dillon leaves implicit: Just as a microscope reveals the invisible world around us, so can a photograph illuminate what we typically ignore.  

This understated approach is typical of Dillon. He writes atmospherically and impressionistically rather than critically. Here is how he describes a photo of dancer Loie Fuller: “She looks like a primitive aircraft coming apart, a soft disintegrated Blériot.” About the elderly subject of a 1970s Eggleston photo, whose particolored dress clashes with the floral cushion she sits on, he writes: “She holds onto her cigarette as if she might disappear amid all this patterned excess.” In Arbus’s ensemble of outcasts and misfits he discerns an “aristocratic distance”—an apt phrase whose accuracy doesn’t evoke any one image but the whole dispassionate vantage of Arbus’s work. 

As befits a book conceived during the pandemic, Affinities is introspective and fitfully elegiac, even as it seeks communion. In his chapter on Vue du boulevard du Temple, Dillion recalls walking around London during the spring of 2020. He notes “a category of city person who seemed suddenly more visible than before”—fellow housebound Londoners out for a stroll who, like Daguerre’s phantasmal figures from nearly two centuries earlier, are rendered newly vivid by their circumstances. A chapter about the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, a monument in London whose plaques record stories of ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others, begins as another pandemic scene before taking a more philosophical turn. “The things a nation may conceal from itself inside an idea of heroism,” Dillon muses, noting that many would-be plaques on the monument remain blank. Elisions, often conceptual, recur throughout the book, most pointedly in the final chapter, which lists “images that are not mentioned and do not appear in this book, but will not leave the mind.” (Among the missing: French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s depiction of his cat catching a ball; filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroid of his wife and their dog standing by a fence in Russia.) 

These missing images parallel one of the book’s subtexts: artists’ oblique and unacknowledged relationship to modernism, which Dillon defines broadly as the aesthetic tendency toward ambiguity and formal experimentation. He suggests that the 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron might be considered a modernist, her blurred portraits and tableaux vivant representing “a deliberate effort to capture something evanescent but particular.” The French photographer and filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who made lyrical documentaries about aquatic life, is another modernist, one who attends “to tiny spines on the rostrum of a shrimp with the abstracting eye that Karl Blossfeldt brought to fiddlehead ferns or László Moholy-Nagy to the geometry of a city street.” (Note how gracefully Dillon posits additional affinities.) If part of Dillon’s project is to reclaim or excavate lineages of modernism, then another definition of affinity emerges. To be modern is to connect one thing to another. Affinity is connection; affinity is modern.   

But affinity is also, finally, a mood, as Dillon concedes. And the mood is intimate in two back-to-back chapters—the most moving in the book—that look outside the canon toward more workaday, even vernacular, imagery. In the first, Dillon considers a press photograph of a charismatic Christian congregation, shot in Dublin in the 1980s or ’90s. “Their faces compose a selection of mundane ecstasies, such as I know well from certain churches of my childhood,” he writes. His mother, plagued by depression and, later, a fatal autoimmune disorder, belonged to just such a congregation, a “rapt sorority of the unwell and the unhappy.” Dillon recognizes his mother’s ghost in the faces of these middle-aged pilgrims, one of whom offers her hands in a gesture that’s either beseeching or quizzical. In the following chapter, he writes about his aunt, whose paranoid grievances against her neighbors culminated in a series of reconnaissance snapshots taken around her property: of hedges, doors, windows. “You can pursue vigilance and attention into a kind of fugue state, almost hallucinatory,” Dillon writes. He’s referring to his aunt, but the line has a cautionary tone, self-conscious and chastened.  

That tone recurs a few pages later, when Dillon confesses a suspicion that “nothing I write pursues an argument or is built to convince. Instead, I simply get into a mood about the thing I am meant to be writing about, and pursue that mood until it is exhausted or has filled the space it was meant to fill.” He’s right, of course, but he’s in good company: Wayne Koestenbaum, Maggie Nelson, Walter Benjamin, and, most emphatically, Roland Barthes all share Dillon’s dilatory, memoiristic method. Like those writers, Dillon revitalizes images by respecting their inherent ambiguities and enigmas rather than seeking to resolve them. (One more quote: Dillon calls the work of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi “a domestic photography, dedicated to an infinity of small things, impossibly tender and exposed.”) Dillon is acutely sensitive to the subfrequency of his chosen images, and he regards them with curiosity and sympathetic scrutiny.  

In one of the book’s late chapters, he writes about the final TV interview that British dramatist Dennis Potter did, in 1994, shortly after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Potter remarks that impending death has made the world almost hyperreal—more radiant, more fully itself. Dillon achieves a similar miracle in these pages, the “mundane miracle of looking,” as he calls it. The images he contemplates become sharper and stranger, aligned in myriad inscrutable ways to each other and to the world. It’s an irreducible process that’s finally beyond our understanding but impossible to resist—something, perhaps, like love.  

“The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930,” an exhibition at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, seeks to underscore that fact on a grand scale. The show was intended to be a single blockbuster survey until the pandemic forced the curators—a team of 23 scholars led by Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis—to split it into two parts. The first half gathers some 100 works in various media from multiple (predominantly Western) countries; the second, larger installment, which will add more artists from the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia into the mix, opens at Wrightwood in 2025.

As its lofty title indicates, the exhibition begins with the troublesome word itself. Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny is credited with coining the term homosexual in 1869 to denote a distinct group of people rather than a behavior. The word had legal and medical implications that were more useful for bureaucrats than the general public. But by the late 19th century, when British physician Havelock Ellis and writer John Addington Symonds wrote Sexual Inversion, their landmark study of homosexuality, the term was in wider vogue. Conceptually, “The First Homosexuals” aims to examine how the nascent word and its attendant identity filtered into and influenced visual art throughout the following decades. Did such work intimate or envision a self-awareness that written language could not?

The answers offered here are mixed. In some ways, the exhibition’s incompleteness hampers its impact. The six decades charted provide a temporal constraint without narrative cohesion, a deficiency that even the overtly editorializing wall text can’t remedy. Instead of facilitating an aesthetic interplay and organic dialogue among the selected works, the curators opt for a curiously anthropological approach. This is reflected in the exhibition design: each small room, painted a distinct color and connected to others by archways that evoke Stein’s or Barney’s bohemian salons, showcases one of nine thematic categories: “Before Homosexuality,” “Archetypes,” “Desire,” “Past and Future,” “Public and Private,” “Colonizing,” “Between Genders,” “Pose,” and “Couples.” Work is hung nonchronologically, so there’s no sense of continuity or progression, just diligent eclecticism.

That’s not to say there aren’t gems on view. British painter Duncan Grant’s Bathers by the Pond (1920–21), a scene of languorous male sunbathers rendered in stippled paint and earthy tones, inspires reverie. American painter Charles Demuth’s Eight O’Clock (Early Morning), 1917, is a tender watercolor in which two men—one sitting dejectedly in pajamas, the other standing imploringly in underclothes—share a moment of ambiguous domesticity while another (nude) man washes his face at a sink in the background. Bath House Study (no date), a drawing in black chalk by Swedish artist Eugène Jansson (1862–1915), depicts an almost geometric configuration of nude men, each suspended in his own erotic lull—a tableau that wouldn’t be out of place in the late 20th-century oeuvres of Americans Patrick Angus or John Burton Harter.

Other works here allude to deeper cultural currents. A wall of archival photos documents the Elisarion, a neo-religious temple that poet and artist Elisàr von Kupffer built in Switzerland with his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer. These images—some of which feature men in makeshift crowns and sarongs striking poses in nature—evoke the utopian spirit that infused transatlantic queer life in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as embodied by, for example, American poet Walt Whitman and his British counterpart, Edward Carpenter. Growing Strength (1904), an imposing oil painting by the German artist Sascha Schneider, portrays a seasoned bodybuilder appraising the biceps of a young acolyte—a precursor to the physique magazines and “cult of the body” that defined gay life in midcentury and beyond.

To its credit, the show also looks beyond a strictly male or Anglophone conception of homosexuality. Carte de visite photographs by the Norwegian couple Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg show the women dressed as men, or in more androgynous garb. Likewise, photos by Alice Austen, one of the first American women to shoot pictures outside the studio, capture playful, if covert, moments of lesbian sociality. Paintings and scrolls by Japanese and Chinese artists, several of whom are unknown, offer the show’s most explicitly erotic interludes, as in one print illustrating a sinuous mixed-sex orgy. Elsewhere, an unknown photographer depicts two Black actors, one in drag, dancing the cakewalk in Paris at the turn of the century. Louis Lumière’s silent film clip Le Cake-Walk au Nouveau Cirque (1903), the oldest known recording of a drag performance, plays on a nearby monitor. Even more than a century later, the footage of entertainers enacting a dance that originated among enslaved people radiates a haunting jubilance that is both carefree and tainted by the bigotries of its time.

A handful of pieces feel adrift. American painter Romaine Brooks’s 1912 portrait of the Italian nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sober likeness in Brooks’s characteristic gray palette, is a puzzling choice. (D’Annunzio, an infamous womanizer, was not homosexual, and he looms in joyless hauteur over the room.) A Brooks self-portrait—or one of her many portraits of female contemporaries—would have been a stronger choice. With three paintings on view, the Canadian artist Florence Carlyle is allotted more wall space than her elegant but otherwise dull portraits of women merit. And the show’s “Colonizing” section, which tries to explore how Western attitudes toward homosexuality diverged from those of Indigenous and Eastern populations, is undercooked. Wilhelm von Gloeden, the German photographer who decamped to Italy to stage pastoral fantasies with nude Sicilian boys, is included here, although his role as a colonizer is debatable.

Ultimately, the exhibition has the tone of a sociology textbook: serious, pedantic, often more stately than intoxicating. The very premise feels misconceived. It is not as if 1869 were a eureka moment that launched queer artists, en masse, into careers of self-representation. Increasing secularism, urbanization, and mass media did more to define homosexual identity than did the invention of the word itself, yet those realities remain either unexplored or oblique here. Instead of tracing a back channel story of modernism, the curators deliver a jumbled Wunderkammer. For a show that takes pains to frame homosexuality as fluid, the thematic layout comes off as rigid and delimiting. Here’s hoping the second installment loosens up.

“Psychopathia Sexualis,” recently on view at Iceberg Projects in Chicago, was Spare’s first solo exhibition in North America. It was an especially pungent debut amid the trigger warnings and pandemic-induced body horror of our moment. Named after German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 study of sexual pathology, the show presented a folio of forty-four untitled pencil drawings that illustrate a cornucopia of perversions—bestiality, coprophagia, urolagnia, name your pleasure—along with stock-in-trade like fellatio. The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University acquired the folio in 1963, under somewhat murky circumstances, and it remained unheralded until now.

There’s speculation that a kinkster couple commissioned the work in the early 1920s. The result features a cast of phantasmagoric characters: satyrs, horned men, figures caught between genders or species, nightmarish penis-shaped creatures. The human bodies in Spare’s work are overripe and unmanicured. They occupy vacant space that’s indistinguishable as interior or landscape, although vestiges of erased lines are sometimes visible. A vague air of pestilence dominates, underscored by the cankered faces and copious runoff of semen, vomit, feces, and urine. If Spare’s erotic vignettes recall those of precursors such as Belgian Symbolist Félicien Rops, Hungarian painter Mihály Zichy, and French illustrator Martin van Maële, his fixation on excretion and physical degradation is singular in its extremism.

Austin Osman Spare, Untitled, ca. 1921-22,
pencil on paper, 17 by 14 inches.

All of this grotesquerie is exuberant. Spare’s figures are soiled revelers, captive gluttons, and dead-eyed hedonists, daring the viewer to condemn their bacchanal. In one drawing, three misshapen, golem-like creatures urinate on a voluptuous woman lounging below. Her eyes are closed in relish, and the sinuous streams of urine form a kind of pedestal around her. She seems imported from a Rubens canvas, as if Spare were taking the piss out of art historical beauty standards. Similarly, in another drawing, a figure who resembles Spare—his tousled hair a trademark—is bent over, defecating onto two figures preoccupied with their own masturbatory idyll.

Spare’s line has a calligraphic subtlety and a lithe vigor that troubles distinctions between clothing, bodies, and bodily fluids. Forms dissolve and coalesce, as in another drawing in which a mass of ruined faces that bring to mind Honoré Daumier’s caricatures swells toward a winged vagina cruising overhead. This outcrop of men is rendered with such gestural intensity that it could well be an example of Spare’s automatic drawing, in which lines roil in feverish elaboration.

The sequence of depravity was momentarily calmed in a grid of nine drawings that depict either couples or solo models. These images feel starkly modern, even as they hint, however vulgarly, at romantic idealism. In one scene, a man poses with his arm behind his head, miming ancient statuary, while a curvaceous woman clings to him. The man’s oversize penis penetrates her, although the mood isn’t sexual. It’s as if the couple’s genitals are engaged in their own mindless tasks. Throughout these drawings, there’s a sense of instinct taking over, of figures relieving themselves in every way imaginable, sometimes experiencing pleasure, at other times only fulfilling a dull commitment to physical necessity. This wild, startling show was as much an illustration of carnal satisfaction as an exercise in arousal: of desire, disgust, pity, and fascination.

Fitzpatrick is a self-taught artist who grew up in a large Irish Catholic family. His résumé includes stints as a tattooist, bartender, and boxer, and he still moonlights as an actor. The exhibition’s name derives from the street where Fitzpatrick’s studio is located, near Humboldt Park. From the earliest work on view (a 1994 etching) through the most recent mixed-media collages (the bulk of the show), Fitzpatrick has mined the same visual vocabulary drawn from comic books, holy cards, tattoo art, vintage matchbooks, and midcentury ads. He can also sometimes resemble a distant heir to the Chicago Imagists, whose exuberance and sardonic humor he shares. A published poet, Fitzpatrick occasionally garnishes his work with snippets of portentous verse: “On Western Avenue, / the bird of last things / awaits the final night / of lillies grown in / a bloody red garden,” reads a stanza from Holy Ghost of Western Avenue #2 (2020).

Tony Fitzpatrick, Holy Ghost of Western Avenue #2, 2020, watercolor, ink, gouache, colored pencil, and ephemera on paper, 11 by 14 inches.

In these and most other recent works, matchbook covers advertising defunct Chicago businesses do double duty as a border and a visual chorus. Humboldt Park Winter Juncos (I, Apostle of This Radiant Place, Cast My Bread on Your Water), from 2021, features a stamp-size ad for the Edgewater Beach Hotel, a luxury playland on the shores of Lake Michigan that was demolished in 1971. The ghosts in Fitzpatrick’s work are architectural and cultural.

Perhaps to offset this spectral quality, Fitzpatrick also populates his pictures with vibrant portraits of creatures whose regal scale dwarfs the surrounding mélange. While many of the works—roughly the first half of the show—were produced in the past two years, and some, such as The Plague Angel, from 2020, obliquely acknowledge the pandemic, they are dominated by animals rather than people. The collages incorporate quirky headlines about locusts and murder hornets, or monumentalize birds against a debris field of retro iconography. In Humboldt Park Winter Woodpecker (Among the Spirits), the eponymous bird is perched among an intricate bricolage of musical notes, jaunty skulls, a raven, a scorpion, and stock illustrations of men and women that could have been clipped from postwar catalogues. The mood of sinister schmaltz is central to Fitzpatrick’s aesthetic; every reference is so self-aware that even allusions to murder, drugs, or other weighty fare feel cheeky. Likewise, in Humboldt Park Tern (Longing for the Sea), the presentation is both ennobling and kitschy, with the namesake seabird surrounded by a similar explosion of skulls, flowers, kitten heads, and cartoon characters. In mythology, birds are emissaries from the afterlife; Fitzpatrick’s birds, framed against litter of long-gone Americana, look as though they’re here to remind us that nothing lasts forever.

The collages are so rambunctious, and their gridded compositions so meticulously choreographed, that viewers must get close to experience their tactility. But the closer one gets to the art, the farther away this jazzy, all-nite, gin-and-tonic version of Chicago seems. If the exhibition’s title invites thinking of Fitzpatrick as the Jesus of Western Avenue, then he is a self-appointed savior, redeeming Chicago from encroaching banality by insisting on its dynamism. The show isn’t a critique of gentrification but a seductive, idiosyncratic Baedeker that suggests we might still find a bygone city lit by the Technicolor glow of cocktail bars and beachfront hotels, a city of louche pleasures and casual vice. It’s no accident that much of the period Fitzpatrick preserves here roughly coincides with his childhood in the 1960s. Nostalgia is a kind of escapism, and so is his art.

Fitzpatrick has said this will be his final museum show; perhaps like those birds in Humboldt Park, he knows when it’s time to move on.

Jim Nutt, a fellow Chicago artist, and one of many influenced by his predecessor’s enigmatic oeuvre, once categorized Yoakum’s work as “exciting to ponder [but] difficult to describe.” That difficulty is two-pronged. The first issue is Yoakum’s disorienting style. His landscapes (named after real places, sometimes misspelled) typically occupy one visual plane, in which mountains, a ribbon of empty highway, and stands of conifers might coexist in woozy harmony. Cliffs drift and sway, more flamelike than earthlike, even as their striations draw attention to geologic time. In the undated Mt Colbart of Nome Alaska, for example, the mountains resemble veiny ziggurats with apertures in which improbable layers of alpine forests jostle. In Weeping Pebble of Sirrea Range in Virginia Park Nevada (1967), a prairie dog or other desert creature is almost as tall as a nearby cactus; a flower is as big as a tree. In Yoakum’s world, scale is more poetic than spatial.

The second difficulty is the mismatch between a work’s title and what it represents. As a runaway teen, Yoakum worked for traveling circuses, and he said he’d set foot on every continent except Antarctica. His landscapes are a fabulist’s enjambments in which memory meets invention. Arabian Desert Near Sudi Arabia (1964) includes verdant pockets of trees and weeds not native to that region. Ground Floor of Grand Canyon Colorado River Near Arizona State Line, from the same year, features two houses and a derrick nestled inside a womb-like cavity in the canyon’s rock wall, an unreal scene that merges domesticity with craggy wilderness. Yoakum’s unpeopled geography isn’t severe, though. Its dynamism is the result of his fluid line, the hashmarks and shadings that deepen the animated quality of his compositions, and the subtle vibrancy of his palette, which, from afar, can lead the drawings to be mistaken for watercolors.

Joseph E. Yoakum, Beulah Dudley 1st Negro Woman to Win Golff Record in Year 1927, stamped 1970, felt-tip pen, ballpoint pen, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 11 ¾ by 9 in.

Yet, for all their wonders, Yoakum’s landscapes are best appreciated in moderation. A roomful can start to feel repetitive, dulling the idiosyncrasies of individual works. “What I Saw” offers relief in the form of Yoakum’s portraits and figurative drawings. These pieces, mostly busts, also complicate Yoakum’s fraught relationship with race. His father claimed Cherokee blood while his mother was a Black woman born into slavery. Yoakum often portrayed himself as Navajo (or “Nava-joe,” his portmanteau), largely because he feared being exploited as a Black artist, even as he drew admiring portraits of Black luminaries such as Nat King Cole. In Ella Fitzgerald Moovie Star (1966), Yoakum based his depiction of the jazz singer on a white model from an illustrated Breck shampoo ad. Maybe the source material was easier for Yoakum to trace than a photograph of Fitzgerald. Or maybe he was offering his own subliminal commentary on race, as could be the case in his 1969 drawing of the Black boxer Jack Johnson, whose figure is dwarfed by the totemic profile of the white challenger Jess Willard, who beat Johnson to become the world heavyweight champion in 1915.

“What I Saw” is an invigorating exhibition of an American original. Yoakum’s art, which he called a “spiritual unfoldment,” has exemplified the visionary tradition; this show recenters his formal and stylistic ingenuity. While some artists share aspects of his style—Georgia O’Keeffe could finesse landscape into supple abstraction, Marguerite Zorach aspired to a single visual plane, and a number of folk or “outsider” artists toy with relative scale—few so energetically mediate imagination and place, and with such conviction. A Chicago professor once told Yoakum that he’d never seen mountains in Iowa that looked like those the artist drew. Yoakum replied, “Well, that was because you never looked.”

Darkness dominates the composition and separates the painting’s two male couples. Formally, the negative space enforces the antithesis implied by the title. Thematically, it suggests that the divide between reality and fiction is more like a deep metaphysical ditch. At left, two soldiers are softly spotlit. One holds his crotch while the other pantomimes an embrace, subverting his uniformed masculinity. (Intentionally or not, the soldiers allude to the prior year’s military coup that installed the Greek junta, though Tsarouchis often painted servicemen with homoerotic reverence.) To American eyes, they may appear punch-drunk, but they’re more likely performing the Zeibekiko, a Greek folk dance of improvised self-expression. This dance was a motif of Tsarouchis’s work from the mid-1930s, when he first witnessed it, until his death. For him, it provided an embodied link to Greek history, which he elsewhere evokes through references to the country’s rich traditions of mythology, shadow theater, and costuming.

Indeed, at the opposite end of this canvas are two other men in theatrical attire—namely, the feathered belts Tsarouchis designed for a 1962 production of Aristophanes’s The Birds, an ancient comedy in which birds establish a utopia in the sky. One man holds up a mirror—or perhaps an empty frame—to the other, underscoring the work’s paradoxes of artifice and representation. Do these two figures enjoy the freedom denied their counterparts? Perhaps the soldiers actually represent the “theatre” of the title, modeling discipline and toughness but, as Tsarouchis signals, capable of grace when no one is watching.

“Dancing in Real Life” is on view through July 31. 

You don’t need to know this biography to appreciate Quinn’s art, but once you do, his disfigured portraits take on psychic heft. As his exhibition at Rhona Hoffman (all works 2019 or 2020) demonstrated, Quinn chases existential themes—time, memory, the slipperiness of identity—in an inventive style that riffs on Cubism, Expressionism, and collage. If Quinn’s jumbled faces recall Francis Bacon’s, or if his voluptuous mouths evoke those in Wangechi Mutu’s work, that’s part of their recombinant allure. He ransacks fashion magazines, family photos, the internet, and other sources for material that he then remixes into composite portraits. Instead of being representational, Quinn’s art is dense and suggestive, conjuring people whose moods change depending on the viewer’s own.

Although Quinn’s faces look collaged, they’re actually made with oil, paint stick, gouache, and pastel, usually against a plain colored background. He works intuitively but methodically, without preliminary sketches, rendering his source material on canvas with no particular subject in mind. The final pictures suggest the results of an exquisite-corpse-like approach, whereby a number of people each slap a random element—an eye, a backwards chin—wherever they choose. Other artists might easily botch such a style, but Quinn achieves a graceful disorder that conveys unexpected emotion. In Hard to Believe She’s A Mom, Now, a cloud of black hair fills the frame and surrounds a cinched face marked by luscious lips, a patchwork nose, and a single sultry eye. At twelve by nine inches, the work invites intimacy. Its tone could read as tender, stoic, or erotic—an ambiguity that underlies most of Quinn’s portraits.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn: Hard To Believe She’s A Mom, Now, 2020, black charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, oil pastel, oil paint, and paint stick on paper, 12 by 9 inches; at Rhona Hoffman.

That ambiguity often resolves into dignity. In Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place, a man regards the viewer straight-on, his face a jigsaw of misaligned features and inflated lips. Despite this dissonant appearance, something about the man’s staring eye and upright posture commands respect. A Good Man, whose bearded subject lacks discernible eyes but who has that familiar overripe mouth, imparts a similar sense of pride or indomitability. Lights Out, a portrait of a young black girl, feels more melancholy, perhaps because the subject’s eyes are partially obscured with daubs of paint, and the overall palette is more earthen and subdued. That Moment with Mr. Laws portrays an older man in a sweater and collared shirt, his mouth resembling a crooked cut of beef, and his face looking almost inside out with its raw colors and glistening contusions.

At their best, Quinn’s portraits achieve a disjunctive clarity, the shattered faces appearing to belong to whole people. He pulled off this magic trick most dramatically in the exhibition’s two largest works. The three-by-three-foot Apple of Her Eye depicts a man in a leather jacket posed against a mucus-green backdrop. The lower half of his face is a turtleneck of meat that swallows the upper half, which is a riot of smudged colors with an earlike orifice. The other large-scale work, From There to Here, is a diptych, its two panels framed separately. The left-hand one features a man whose face recalls a bulldog’s, and whose outfit is rather flamboyant: boxing glove, floppy-brimmed fedora, silk pants, and a fur stole. The right-hand image is smaller (sixteen by thirteen inches) and shows a grayscale silhouette representing the shadow of the adjacent colorful character. This work is perhaps a metaphor for Quinn’s split life, his own incongruous before and after.

For those familiar with Davis’s performances in the queer and punk clubs of LA in the late 1970s and ’80s, her presence in a major American art museum may be surprising. She has made a career of skewering institutions of all kinds, and calls herself a “societal threat.” But Davis’s growing recognition today makes sense. In a political moment riven by dogmatism, her work subverting categories of race and gender is freshly urgent. The flamboyant artist (who, one imagines, might be given to embellishment) has said that she was born intersex to a forty-five-year-old Creole-Choctaw mother and a twenty-one-year-old Mexican-American Jewish father who had a one-night stand under a table at a Ray Charles concert at the Hollywood Palladium. She named herself after Angela Davis. Since the 1970s, identity has been at the core of her videos, zines, performances, and visual art. She offers pointed, often parodic takedowns of conservatism and white supremacy.

For all its charisma, The White to Be Angry is a ham-fisted vehicle for Davis’s talents. In 1998, her speed metal band Pedro, Muriel, and Esther (PME) released an album, also titled The White to Be Angry, and the nineteen-minute video feels more like a companion piece than like a cohesive statement of its own. Indeed, the curators described the video as a “visual album,” perhaps because PME songs play over each section. At the end of one scene, Davis even spray-paints “PME” on a bedsheet, underscoring the video’s connection to her band.

The video is a collage of original vignettes and appropriated broadcast footage, with a frame narrative concerning a young skinhead in LA troubled by his secret queer desires. In the opening scene, his mother chows Doritos while spewing racist diatribes. Confederate flags and swastikas crowd the walls around them. We see a newspaper on a table featuring Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s face. In subsequent scenes, Davis’s skinhead assaults a gay man (portrayed as a campy coquette) whom he passes on the street and invites back home. At the end, he picks up a fellow skinhead at a leather bar and the two watch TV, tense with barely controlled homoeroticism.

Still from Vaginal Davis’s video installation The White to Be Angry, 1999, 19 minutes, 22 seconds; at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Between the sequences of this narrative, Davis creates the effect of channel-surfing. There are snippets of televangelist programs, soap operas, “America’s Most Wanted,” and the sitcom “Moesha,” among other shows. There are also three longer interludes presented as the films of notable directors. The first, titled Riche Jewish Husband, is a spoof on Woody Allen that includes a part in which actors dance to a punk rendition of “Hava Nagila.” The second, Homosexual Is Criminal, is attributed to the gay horror writer Clive Barker and follows a pair of thrill killers as they torture and murder their way across LA. The third, Beggars of Life, is a more carefree valentine to Davis’s friends, and is credited to the gay filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. These sections are occasionally amusing but don’t add up to much.

From the outset, Davis’s caricature of right-wing extremism undermines the video’s potential to take genuine risks. When overripe satire is the default mode, critique becomes entertainment, and reinforces the status quo Davis ostensibly rejects. In The White to Be Angry, the disconnected films-within-the-film and detritus of ’90s mass media produce a dissonant mood that matches the soundtrack. Davis’s lampooning of hypocritical bigots feels tacked-on, however, and has all the subtlety of a Nazi salute. The themes of The White to Be Angry are always relevant, but their execution here is muddled. Davis’s video is as beautiful as a xerox, but not nearly as clear.

This article appears under the title “Vaginal Davis” in the April 2020 issue, pp. 85–86.

But he also continued to make creative work. Stephen Daiter’s recent exhibition featured unseen prints from Sterling’s archive and demonstrated what a versatile photographer he was. The images—all of them black-and-white and most of them untitled and from the 1950s—showcased Sterling’s strengths as well as his shortcomings. He was formally adventurous in his experiments with motion blur, light, and double exposure, yet so promiscuous in style and subject that he seemed to recycle the visual techniques of his era rather than stake out his own themes. His ability to synthesize the innovations of America’s postwar photographic vanguard sensitively and dramatically may have been his greatest gift.

In his documentary work, Sterling adapted the social realist tradition of Walker Evans to the new urban underclass. In a photograph not on view but reproduced in the catalogue, three young black boys stroll down a blighted city street, a junked mattress leaning against a building and a shred of newspaper littering the foreground. A black laborer in overalls and an engineer’s cap approaches the boys, the image implying a head-on collision between innocence and experience. A kind of companion photo displayed in the exhibition shows three young black girls clutching each other and screaming at the camera gleefully or in mock fright. The white curtain in the window behind them is askew, and the glass reflects a chunk of Sterling’s silhouette—the photographer insinuating himself into the image in much the way that Lee Friedlander went on to do in the subsequent decades.

Joseph Sterling: South State St. – Chicago – in fog, ca. 1956, gelatin silver print, 7 5/8 by 7 7/8 inches; at Stephen Daiter.

Generally, though, Sterling seems more imitative than prescient. There’s a hint of Helen Levitt in his unsentimental portrayals of children adrift in the city. His attentiveness to textures and architectural ruin recalls Aaron Siskind, one of his teachers at the Institute of Design. In Sterling’s abstracted, almost calligraphic prints from the 1980s and ’90s, four of which were in this show, there are traces of another teacher, Harry Callahan. And in his nighttime street portraits of often solitary figures, there’s a mood similar to that found in the work of Robert Frank. Even Sterling’s subtle sense of humor calls to mind, say, Leon Levinstein’s.

This show suggested that if Sterling wasn’t an innovator himself, he did master the visual grammar of his time to produce work of exceptional variety and skill. Some prints highlighted his technical artistry especially well. A pair of photograms—camera-less images made by placing objects directly on light-sensitive material and then exposing the combinations to light—attested to Sterling’s minimalist sense of composition. Examples from his “Motion Series,” from the late 1950s, revealed a fascination with the lyrical possibilities of light. These blurred images of cityscapes and cars were, ironically, the clearest expression of Sterling’s oblique, restless style.   

This article appears under the title “Joseph Sterling” in the February 2020 issue, pp. 91–92.