John Wilde - Mature Work

Mature Work

Drawing was Wilde’s boyhood means of visual expression and it remained the foundation on which the works of his sixty-year professional career were built. 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. He did, however, have a deep interest in and empathy for nature and its cycle of generation, growth, decay and death. Vegetables, plants and flowers, both wild and cultivated, and animals, especially birds, are the subjects of many of his paintings and drawings. 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. Often cryptic notes are included in drawings, from pseudo-Latin inscriptions of the early years to the intentionally didactic ten "Talking Drawings," of the early seventies, in which extensive monologues dominate the page, outlining solitary representations of himself performing daily chores such as raking (Madison Art Center). The human beings that enter his paintings are often nude, and often of the female sex. Writer Donna Gold described Wilde’s tendency to marry nature to the human figure in improbable ways in his painting, “To Make Strawberry Jam”:

“Wilde… paints an odalisque wrapped in tendrils of a strawberry plant, echoing Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’, veiled in her golden hair. A strawberry is what covers Wilde’s woman, but the strawberry she hugs to her breast is huge, half the size of her torso.”

The reference to the Renaissance painter Botticelli is apt. The art historical painting and drawing techniques that Wilde learned in James Watrous’s seminars give his work the look of something from fifteenth century Italy, and is further reflected in his lifelong admiration for the drawing discipline behind the works of North European Renaissance artists. The "Death and the Maiden" themes derived from the latter recur frequently through the seven decades of his output, as do highly crafted, reverent renderings of natural objects. But, according to curator Sara Krajewski,

“Surrealism best enables to represent the mind’s activity and the pervasive forces of sex and death. Bones, dead animals and scenes of decay serve as memento mori, symbolic reminders of one’s mortality. Naked women, or strangely mutated women-creatures, populate deep, dream-like landscapes. Frequently Wilde paints himself into a scene, as if to acknowledge that this is a world where he confronts his own fears and desires.”

A particularly notable example of this self mise en scene is the 1983-4, 9 1/2 ft long "The Great Autobiographical Silverpoint Drawing," in the Chicago Art Institute. 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. Though Wilde excels in small, intimate paintings and silver points, this work, meticulously drawn in the unforgiving silver point medium, is quite possibly the largest silver point ever made.

Another large silver point with Wilde amidst a memeto mori landscape was his "Muss Es Sein" (1979–81, operative word "was"). Though quite large in itself, it is only about a third of the size of the AIC leviathan. The work depicts the semi nude Wilde proxy in its familiar harlequin tights and a nude female sitting mid stage, almost lost amidst an entire field of animal skulls. They are looking away from the viewer at a double moon. Also extremely meticulously drawn in silver point, the work was photographed and then painted over with Wilde's typical cool transparent oil washes. The greenish gray finale is in the McClain Collection of the Chazen Museum on the UW campus, gift of Bill McClain.

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). The 52-inch-wide (1,300 mm) painting shows the artist, his turned back toward the viewer, gazing into the distance to his right at a fanciful, Renaissance-inspired landscape. The artist’s right arm is extended to measure the pointy-topped mountains ahead of him; in his left arm he cradles a drawing board. Classical ruins jut into the scene from the picture’s right edge. It seems perfectly normal to see the small figures of naked women cavorting among them. The artist’s figure forms a sort of magical border between this world and a more mundane reality. 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.

In fact, his 1995 "Wildeworld Revisited," another one of the most important examples of self inclusion, is a match/comparison piece to the MAM "Wisconsin Wildeworld" described above. 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. He now holds no drawing board, nor sighting tool, but is just looking and pointing with his back turned toward us. Most fortuitously this work has recently also been acquired by the MAM, to join its forerunner.

Such "Wilde World" or "Wilde View" depictions recur frequently in his work. 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. His interest in death and decay was continued in the mid eighties with a series of delicately, naturalistically drawn dead animals found around his rural retreat, entitled "R.O.A.E.D" (Remnants of An Early Death).

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. And there are many examples taken from originals in his sketchbooks of the forties, many of the latter reproduced in the 1984 Hamady publication noted below ("44 Wilde 1944"). Several large silverpoints gathering multiple heads from the wartime sketchbooks and multiple nudes from throughout his career were also executed around the turn of the century. And his large 2004 painting (60 in wide), "Myself in 1944 contemplating the Following 60 Years," collects many of these wartime images on a table under the gaze of a large headed Wilde leaning on the table edge, beneath a bright, cirrus-clouded, blue sky. Another retrospective example is the 1999 oil "Suggestions for Hot Weather Entertainment III," a remake of the 1947 drawing with watercolor "Further Suggestions for Hot Weather Entertainment: or the Relief of National Boredom or a Conclusive Argument Against Long Hair."

One of Wilde's most powerful revisited themes relates loosely to Gina, Duchess of Sanseverina, in Stendhal's "Charterhouse of Parma." His Sanseverinis (sic) began with such early masterpieces as "Further Festivities at the Contessa Sanseverini's" (1950–51) and "More Festivities at the Palazzo Sanaeverini" (1951–52). Placed in Classical/Renaissance settings, these cavorting-female celebrations are meticulously rendered, bright, sensuous, and surrealistically optimistic. 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. In the nineties he revisits Sanseverini again. "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. Finally, "A Grand Finale at the Contessa Severini's" (1996–97) presents a universal, aerial view of even more mostly female figures and animals in an extensive landscape of plain, sea, and mountains, panning from warm sunny left to cool moonlit right, in a canvass fully eight feet wide. In the evening-lit lower right two purplish Wilde figures with revolvers, related to works from the forties, deliberate between confusion and suicide. Myriads of animals, bimorphous figures, and toys and furnishings, many also reminiscent of earlier Wilde creations, intermingle amidst the female nudes. A plethora of sketches and drawings on charcoal paper related to the Sansavorini paintings of the nineties hale from this late-career revisit, some of which appear from time to time on the market.

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). His four piece "An Homage to Lorenzo Lotto" (I-IV), 1985, is based on Lotto's inscrutable "Allegory of Virtue and Vice" (1505) in the Kress Collection of the National Gallery in DC. Another group of admireds was the Pre Raphaelite Brethren, Wilde referencing them by name ("PRB") in drawings from mid career. 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. Though the whole may mark expression of respect as much as acknowledgment of influence, many of the referents obviously cut both ways.