John Wilde
While in high school Wilde visited the Milwaukee studios of Santos Zingale (1908–1999)[2] and Alfred Sessler (1901–1963)[3] and realized that his own talent for drawing could lead to a viable career.
Glazier and the young artists in his circle rejected the American Regionalist painting of the day, which was exemplified by the work of John Steuart Curry, who was artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin from 1936 to 1946.
[9] The group of friends often met at Karl Priebe's studio in Milwaukee and frequented the Chicago home of Gertrude Abercrombie, whose gatherings of artists and jazz musicians were legendary.
[12] During this time he kept a private journal that he filled with self-portraits, fantastic and macabre scenes and written reflections on the Army, an institution he despised for its regimentation and bureaucracy.
In spite of his deepening depression, Wilde saw broader artistic possibilities in some of his journal sketches, working them up into larger drawings that he mailed to Dudley Huppler in Wisconsin.
[13] According to art historian Robert Cozzolino, in his later career Wilde returned "dozens of times" to the unsettling themes and situations that he first explored in his wartime journal.
Wilde’s self-described “deep instinctive love of drawing” was a source of puzzlement to him; as a child he was not encouraged in it, nor could he see anything in his social or cultural environment that led to it.
And, more than all, he always returned to the human form, whether invoking the whimsy of surreal situations or regaling in the complex and graceful discipline of fine anatomical drawing, of which Wilde is virtually nonpareil in his century.
It depicts the usual Wilde-proxy now nude and triple-eyed, looking out at the viewer in front of rows of familiar figures, with the detritus of a life long-lived on one side and an immense Oak Tree on the other.
Also extremely meticulously drawn in silver point, the work was photographed and then painted over with Wilde's typical cool transparent oil washes.
An earlier example of Wilde putting himself into his painting is “Wisconsin Wildeworld,” subtitled “Provincia, Naturlica and Classicum” in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM).
To his proxy’s left, Wilde laid out the staid lines of a small town residential avenue, complete with elderly frame houses and a tree-lined walk along which fully clothed Midwesterners stroll.
Maintaining the same dimensions, the scenario is even more advanced in its state of destruction, with warmer colors in a more barren scene, a cooler toned, graying, semi nude, aged Wilde, not measuring the world stage confidently as before, but pointing tentatively to a dark, cloudy, world-suffocating brown-orange vortex in the sky.
Other recurrent themes include complex female-populated nocturnal festivities (see Sanseverini discussion below), seasonal still-lives, polymorphous "Ladybirds," and curious entanglements of natural botanical forms with female nudes, such as Gold exemplifies above.
More recently, primarily from the eighties and nineties, his occasional "Reconsidereds" and related retrospective compositions are paintings revisiting specific works from his earlier decades, especially sketchbooks and drawings for the forties.
But the 1966 revisit, "Nighttime Festivities at the Contessa Sanseverini's," not only includes more densely collected, ashen-toned, less mobile female nudes, but also predatory dogs among them and victims' eviscerated corpses, all before an eerily nocturnal, sylvan setting.
"Still Further Festivities at the Contessa Sanseverini's" (1991) now is more ethereal with even more figures which now are atmospherically backlit, mildly turning or dancing, on a plain littered with beach balls instead of vicious canines, all while eight graceful ladies cavort or float in the sunrise sky above.
Myriads of animals, bimorphous figures, and toys and furnishings, many also reminiscent of earlier Wilde creations, intermingle amidst the female nudes.
In keeping with his historical orientation in teaching (see below), Wilde also painted homages to favorite artists from the past in his last couple decades, especially in the middle eighties; artists such as Piero di Cosimo, particularly his "Perseus Rescuing Andromeda," and works of the Englishman Richard Dadd, Aachen-born Alfred Rethal and other Germans Otto Runge, Otto Dix, and Max Ernst, Switzerland's Arnold Böcklin, and friends Julia Thecla and Gertrude Abercrombie (1985–87).
In an even more specific homage, his 1998 painting "My Art Targets," presents facsimile signatures of 38 favorite artists on a light green background, all around a smallish, wobbly, red, white, and blue heart.
Citations include Durer, Uccello, Urs Graf, Baldung Gruen, Altdorfer, Brueghel, Watteau, Ingres, Messonnier (sic), Eakins, Homer, Cezanne, Puvis, Dix, Di Chirico, and Ernst, among 22 others.
[17] However, he did no teaching, other than rare class visits to his studio, and Wilde held silent disdain for both Bohrod and Curry, believing the intensity of his surreal world more vital (and risk-taking) than their more straightforward simplicity, and the craft of his drawing discipline more demanding than theirs.
In fact, despite his edgy themes, as a life drawing teacher Wilde taught very traditionally, using the model primarily for long poses and expecting close watching and high discipline from students.
Portraying the many valued former students ("all good apples") as it did, both the poster and show provided further evidence of the extent and quality of Wilde's educational legacy.
Though not enamored of printmaking, feeling it lacked the intimate subtlety of drawing, Wilde was eventually engaged by a number of colleagues to venture into the field over the last third of his career.
Under the imprimatur of his own Perishable Press (founded in 1964), Hamady worked with a number of contemporary writers and artists to create editions that are "literary, visual, typographic and aethetic exploration[s] of the potential of the book.
Wilde also produced around 20 oils based on Hamady's personal journals from the mid eighties, 12 of which are reproduced in the 1992 publication "Nineteen Eighty-five: The Twelve Months," mentioned above.
