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.
