Jim Nutt: Shouldn’t We Be More Careful, currently at David Nolan Gallery, offers an all-too-rare exposure to the acerbic and piquant portrait drawings of this contemporary master. In Nutt’s recent linear graphite “portraits,” his spare but provocatively expressive markings on cold-pressed paper distill the essential attributes of his fictitious models. A single diagonal or a fading squiggle—crisp yet plain; lucid yet affectionate—can evoke after-images or impressions as telling as they are unsparing, in which the artist’s technical mastery becomes revelatory. 

Since the late 1980s, Nutt has honed a reductive, nearly minimalist approach to portraiture: his drawn lines feel deliberate, incremental, and incisive, each commanding its own quasi-narrative arc as variable pressures increase in intensity or lighten into ephemeral traces. And while these depictions of three-quarter busts are anything but likenesses of real people or even records of perceptual experiences, they suggest affinities with a wide range of historical portraiture whether Netherlandish or Northern Italian Renaissance or in modernist works that are more abstract. Although Nutt’s drawings may recall Matisse’s elegant figures, Paul Klee’s infantilized fantasies, aspects of Picasso’s wide-ranging imagery, or even Alex Katz’s life drawings, they are unique. It is hard to think of any other artist, whether past or recent, who attains Nutt’s fastidiousness or painstaking precision, wherein each mark incrementally but firmly amplifies countenance. Nutt’s portraits impact one like “neutron bombs,” in Carroll Dunham’s inimitable phrase. They “detonate” cultural commentary and artistic category and remain pictures “impossible to map within the terrain of contemporary figurative painting.” 

In this exhibition, Nutt’s portraits are hung side by side at regular intervals in two large rooms connected by a narrow hallway, while two peek out eerily from alcoves. Seeing these nineteen three-quarter portraits—all untitled—is like walking through a mise en abyme of iterative, achingly delectable, if somewhat disturbing personalities. In Untitled (2022), for example, Nutt presses down on the cross-hatched helmet-like “bob” of the hair, its checked “reveals” at right countered by tighter crossings at left. As in several of Nutt’s drawings, the hairlines create a pyramid shape seemingly forced wide at its base by eyebrows, one a single line pushed left, the other an off-kilter, shaded-in arch that increases in size toward the right. Whether mismatched or paired, Nutt renders eyebrows as gestural riffs, smoothed and shaded, that hover over narrowed or crazed or canny eyes that follow one around the room. And the shaped facial elements that gingerly caress or darkly assert themselves—as with the contour of the ear or the ponderous, if free-floating, bun—further enhance the austere expressiveness of the image. At times, Nutt’s “buns” can spawn and swell to enormous size, nearly overbalancing the hairdo from which they sprout, as in Untitled (2023).

Such force of intention inevitably conditions the detailed way we are at first impelled to look at these images, in which each shape, direction, and angle seems generated by its near neighbor. The challenge for the viewer is to pull oneself away from the very close looking Nutt’s artistry compels, to release one’s eye from those intricately crisscrossed and rollicking lines, and to see the whole visage as Nutt might understand it, as a framed “environment” (Nutt’s word) within which his perseverations are, as he tells it, always “under threat” of an erasure. At the same time, what emerges from this funhouse of staring visages is the uncanny sense that Nutt has also captured something of ourselves. 

In fact, these images resonate with Nutt’s varied experience with portraiture over forty years. Back in the 1960s, they were preceded by sardonic riffs on the comic book/consumer advertising aesthetic of his Hairy Who years. And during the later 1960s and early 1970s, when the label Chicago Imagist was slapped onto Nutt and other figurative artists, he was creating aggressively vulgar, scatological theater pieces, which were spiced with a Punch-and-Judy violence, wherein full-bodied actors sprouted or wielded penises, hanging pudenda, and multiple plunging and twisted breasts. No matter that those actors had engaged in obscene, if exuberant, sexual taunting counterpointed by an impish Greek chorus version of them played out in vignettes on the main stage. The throughline remains Nutt’s insistent framing, whether via curtained proscenium arches, or—as in these current portraits—cropped geometries. The ovoid contours that circumscribe eyes, nose, mouth, and ears or the retro “bobs” and protruding buns in the present works, delimit the flattened space within which Nutt bears down on the “formal means” in much the same way he described Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters (1565, Metropolitan Museum of Art) or El Greco’s The Assumption of the Virgin(1577–79, Art Institute of Chicago): as “use [of] formal means to express the narrative of the painting.” Looking, then, at Nutt’s formal decisions, we track a similar narrative progression in his triumphant feats of part-by-part graphic handling. 

Nutt’s lines are always “under threat” of erasure, as he tells it. Nutt teases out character through his artistic process: everything is relational. For example, within the circumscribed arena of Untitled (2023) the exquisite tension arising from the angled lines of the cheek, the nose, and the raised eyebrow is nearly poignant, pushed and pulled as each is. And the vertical parallel lines, their bulbous joint pulled gently left by two stacked curves meant to indicate a nostril, ends in an exquisite teardrop-shaped groove that quietly meets an immovable upper lip. The formal virtuosity of such a drawing is remarkable.  

To describe these works in merely formal terms, however, does not account for their uncanniness. Quizzical and exacting, their expressions bring one up short. So much so that the answer to Nutt’s rhetorical query, “Shouldn’t we be more careful?” (a title Nutt gave to a 1977 painting) is as opened-ended as the white ground on which Nutt leaves his indelible traces. To answer “Yes, one should,” merely prompts the follow-up, “But, how?” Nutt will never tell. 

Jim Nutt’s painting and drawing go totally against the grain of internationally celebrated postwar American art. His independence and the fiercely self-reliant artistic ambition that has fueled his work have yet to receive the widespread recognition they have long deserved. The gap between what I believe is Nutt’s accomplishment and the attention he has received was on my mind when I saw the exhibition Jim Nutt: Shouldn’t We Be More Careful? at David Nolan Gallery, the artist’s first show of new work in New York in more than a decade. Using graphite and paper, Nutt makes drawings that resemble nothing else that I have seen.

The exhibition includes 19 contour drawings of a woman’s head, all in graphite on toothed paper and dated from the last two years (none larger than 15 by 14 inches). The press release explains:

While sometimes compared to Ingres or Picasso, Jim’s portraits have focussed on a single figure’s head since 1987. His graphite explorations on paper are mostly to find just the right portrait that will be chosen for the next painting. Fortunately for us, Jim makes a number of drawings until that decision is made, after which there are no more drawings made till the painting is complete. 

Nutt has meticulously pared down his heads as if determined to discover just how few lines he needs to make a distinctive image. The obvious association is with the cartoonist whose goal is to arrive at a simple, unmistakable image, such as Mickey Mouse, rendered as minimally as possible. As I marveled at the economy of Nutt’s lines, and how each one seems to have been made without hesitation, I was unexpectedly reminded of Japanese ink painting. In ink painting, you can neither erase nor revise the mark. By choosing an unforgiving surface, such as Plexiglas in the early 1960s and toothed paper in these recent drawings, and making irrevocable marks, Nutt enters a territory few American artists have dared to go. In this regard, his portraits share something with Jasper Johns’s ink-on-plastic drawings.

Nutt started the drawings on view when he turned 80. Always a fastidious and inventive artist, he found a way to demand even more of himself. This is what makes him a great artist whose work remains challenging. Having received critical acclaim and institutional support, he could have initiated a mode of production that enabled him to make variations, but he didn’t. It is a level of independence that the art world is not used to celebrating.

Nutt’s portraits seem partially influenced by his familiarity with a wide range of portraiture, from 13th-century Italian art to early modern masters, such as Amedeo Modigliani, without devolving into parody or quotation. In two untitled drawings dated 2022 and 2023, the head faces right and tilts slightly downward. The angle echoes Berlinghiero’s “Madonna and Child” (possibly 1230s) in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of only two paintings that are verified as the artist’s. One of the striking things about Berlinghiero’s painting is the Madonna’s androgynous appearance.

The androgyny we encounter in Nutt’s recent portrait drawings, as noted in the press release, resonates with our times and discussions about gender and identity, but never directly comments on them. One of the issues these drawings raise is how we determine an individual’s identity. From the outline of the hair to the nose and eyes, each feature is clearly and individually articulated, so that any notion of symmetry we might have about the face is completely rejected. While the eyes are closely related in the earlier drawing, they are positioned at different angles. In the later drawing, Nutt draws two distinct eyes, a semi-circle containing a circle with a dot in the middle and a circle with a dot in the middle. The eyebrows are also completely different from each other. Although the parts fit together and coalesce into a portrait, they do not become symmetrical. 

The tension between the whole image and the specific shapes speaks to the multiplicity of identities individuals adhere to. We are our many parts and we are more than that. There is nothing eccentric about these masterful, enigmatic drawings. 

They look at you from behind inscrutable eyes, aloof and moderately annoyed, jawlines jutting like ice floes. The faces are at once classically familiar and deeply strange, like Northern Renaissance portraiture pushed through a Cubist sieve, Hans Memling’s “Portrait of Barbara van Vlaendenbergh” worked over with a tire iron.

The artist Jim Nutt has been making a version of this imagined portrait for the last 40 years, a mode that has dominated his practice. It is in fact his entire practice, the only variable being whether he’s working in paint or pencil, an extended inquiry into form that has yet to be exhausted. They reappear again across 19 graphite drawings on view at David Nolan Gallery, the first show of new work by Nutt in New York in over a decade, though time rarely enters into his pictures. His women never age, never seem to dislodge from a midcentury stylistic amber: all wearing smart up-dos, all clad in demure clothing.

“Jim Nutt: Shouldn’t We Be More Careful?” at David Nolan Gallery, New York (September 6 through October 14): Jim Nutt may have been one of the founders of the “Hairy Who”—the group of six “Chicago Imagists” who emerged from the Art Institute in the 1960s with an aggressive, comic, and sometimes grotesque representational style—but his paintings over the years have become closely shaved. Opening this week at David Nolan Gallery, “Shouldn’t We Be More Careful?,” an exhibition of twenty-three of Nutt’s latest works on paper, reveals the sharpness of his cutting blade. Returning to the same strange figure he has drawn since the 1980s, Nutt here conveys a maximum of emotion with a minimum of line, all drawn with laser precision. —JP

For wealthy tourists in early-nineteenth-century Rome, it was de rigueur to visit Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to have one’s portrait drawn. Such works were mere bread and butter for an artist who preferred to be known as a history painter in the grand manner, yet the subtlety and brilliance with which he anatomized these affluent nonentities continues to astonish. “Shouldn’t We Be More Careful?”—Jim Nutt’s first New York exhibition since 2010—suggested that he, too, is regularly sought out by strangers in search of portraits. The main difference is that Nutt’s visitors are imaginary. As for the results—and I hope it is understood that I am not exaggerating when I say this—Nutt’s drawings are as breathtakingly taut and nuanced as those of his august precursor in the art of capturing human presence through incisive line and ultra-restrained shade.

The show comprised nineteen works in graphite on paper, all Untitled and with dimensions of either fifteen by fourteen inches or thirteen inches square, created between 2022 and 2023. The gallerist told me that Nutt took up this project when one painting in progress began stretching out its time in the studio over a period of years. Each drawing depicts the head and shoulders of a different female-presenting subject—in one, from 2022, a forearm and a very peculiar hand asserted themselves to support a squarish chin. Although something distinctly alien is seen in that hand (really more a kind of backward-attached paw with four spider-leggy fingers stuck on, one of which stretches around to meet a stubby thumb in an incongruous OK sign), the work’s truly conspicuous feature is the nose, an astonishing construction as dimensionally convoluted as anything post-Cubist Picasso could have invented, with an elongated nostril seemingly pulling away from the organ’s wobbly front plane, which ends in a cleft that more than anything else recalls a shapely miniature rump. It’s a reminder of why Giacometti considered the rendering of a nose “an abominable undertaking.” And yet the contour that describes all of this is so graceful—as tender as it is incisive. Oh, and did I mention that bun at the bottom of her coif, where Nutt’s line suddenly goes all soft and hushed? It resembles a cauliflower made of cumulus clouds.

One of the most affecting of the drawings, from 2023, showed a head slightly turned to the right, though her eyes peer left. And what eyes! One dark, one light, they belong to two different faces altogether; the disconnect between them creates a questioning expression. I think she wonders how we like her hair, with its Johnsian cross-hatchings of delicately variegated tone. But she disagrees with herself about what she reads in the gaze of her beholder, who lacks the advantages as well as the disadvantages of having two different kinds of eyes pointing in opposing directions. I wish I could make her understand that we are just as flummoxed as she is. How can such unnatural inventions as these oddly assembled heads be so evocative of human feeling, even as they are so blatant in their artifice? To the extent that the expressions on these faces are legible, they are most often wary, guarded, delphically ambiguous—never open or frank. And yet I have never felt as close to Nutt’s art as I did to these remarkable drawings.