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.
