This post was originally published on artnews.com
Arthur “Art” Green, a key Imagist painter and original member of the Hairy Who?, Chicago’s electrifying answer to Pop Art, died at the age of 83 on April 14. The news was announced by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, which represented him.
Green broke into the art world consciousness in the mid-1960s in a riot of color, wit, and outrage alongside five fellow recent graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who exhibited together under the moniker “the Hairy Who”.
While New York Pop artists like Andy Warhol approached this era of Postwar prosperity with a distant mix of disdain and indulgence, Green and his cohort resonated with its grotesque contradictions: the relentless cheer of American advertising amid its oppression of Black Americans, the American military’s interventions in South East Asia, and the Western midcentury industrial boom predicated by war.
At the time, Chicago lacked an art scene with the national prestige of New York, but that seemed to work in Green’s favor. The Hairy Who? preferred humorous, hallucinatory interpretations of the times that riffed on art history—from Surrealism and Art Brut to Mayan and Aztec sculpture, to advertising conventions and the city’s architectural amalgam of Art Deco, prairie, and neoclassicism. The subjects of their paintings were unruly and oddly formed, but recognizably a human invention. Exhibition-making was treated much the same, with strange swaths of wallpaper, oversize price tags, and a complementary comic book made specially for each show.
The Hairy Who?—also comprising James Falconer, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum—exhibited together from only 1966 to ’69, but they collectively created a formidable legacy in the greater Chicago Imagist movement of which Green was also at the vanguard.
Garth Greenan Gallery wrote in its statement that Green’s “legacy lives on in his playful and paradoxical paintings, and in the generation of artists shaped by his decades of dedicated teaching.”
The statement added, “Throughout his prolific career, Green developed a rich personal iconography. His paintings were populated with archetypal, totemic images of ice cream cones, wood grain patterns, billowing flames, and perfectly polished fingernails.”
Arthur Green was born in 1941, in Frankfort, Indiana. His father was a civil engineer at work on the railroad and his mother an expert quilter. The heady car culture of midcentury America, with its edge of futurism, had a great impact on the young Green. He initially aspired to be an industrial designer, but after enrolling in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago changed his studies to graphic design—only to again find the school’s program lacking and transferred for the final time to its painting department.
Green graduated in 1965 and, like many of artists of his generation, was drawn to the most recent, totemic American art form, Abstract Expression, and its inspirations. But Green’s preoccupations ultimately skewed towards metaphysics over form, as exemplified by the work of René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, both of whom are represented in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection.
Swiftly, Green established a personal iconography that took obvious queues from Surrealism; several of his works from 1969 feature a waffle cone topped whose perfect, creamy swirl is entrapped in a fiery, mechanical configuration. The painting Immoderate Abstention, from the same year, depicts a life-size pair of scissors whose finger holes seem distorted in distress as they, too, observe a literal industrial boom.
Amid the Imagist movement of the 1970s and ’80s, his subjects became increasingly, intricately stratified and graphically outlined in a manner reminiscent of stained glass. Luminous ornamentation, too, recalled the Art Deco jewels of Chicago—and his mother’s quilts.
One of his most enduring fascinations, the Necker cube, a visual illusion where a two-dimensional cube is perceived as a three-dimensional object with two potential spatial orientations, was encountered in his mother’s craft. “I was intrigued by the possibilities of simultaneously representing all sides of a rotating cube,” he wrote. “I incorporated tiling patterns of unfolded cubes along with the hypercube in my work.”
By the end of his life, Green had mastered the making of visual cacophony that still adhered to his internal logic. Ken Johnson, reviewing a 2009 exhibition of Green’s work for the New York Times, wrote that “Green’s paintings conflate contradictory illusions to visually gripping, mind-stretching effect.”
Green summed up his ambition as making art that “hit you in the eyes.”
Green’s work has been exhibited worldwide and is held in the collections of museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.