That's right, I'm in Chicago for less than hours. Came out to see the Jim Nutt retrospective at the MCA, "Coming into Character." Scandalously, it is not traveling outside of the city -- through know fault of the show itself -- amazingly (or actually not, if you're familiar with recent programming decisions by other major museums), no other institution would take it. I'll keep it simple: If you can, go see this show. It's the best single-artist retrospective I've seen in a very very long time. Maybe since Dieter Roth at MoMA - PS1 in 2004. Watching Nutt tighten his focus to intensely rendered and detailed imagined portraits is riveting. These are paintings that can be looked at for hours -- worlds of brushwork exist within each area of these images. Every mark builds on the next, and the intersecting planes and surfaces build to multiple crescendos. Nutt is a real modern master, and one whose early language in the 1960s was highly involved with flat, comic-strip/advertising rendering. He's very far away from that now, though one can still see a bit of the diagramatic Gould grotesque in him if you squint just right.
Not that it's all culture here -- when I come to Chicago I roll with pal Ethan D'Ercole, who started me out with tacos, moved along to hot dogs, and finished off with deep dish pizza (the kind with the sauce on top, and, in a unique twist, a crust wrapped with carmelized cheese -- delightful).
Anyhow, it's a quick blog from me today, since I'm traveling and also in a food coma.
And your links:
* Amy Poodle on Batman Incorporated #4.
* This story is just sad, but obviously also infuriating and dangerous to the creators involved. Sad.
* This is fun: A bunch of prelim and promo art for Marvel's Strange Tales II.
* Bob Powell: A damn fine journeyman. Here's a 1944 war comic starring "The Spirit of '76".
On the site:
Tucker Stone on Jason Shiga's latest.
And with that, kind people, I go back to digesting.
