John Wilde (artist)

John Wilde^[a] (December 12, 1919 – March 9, 2006) was an American painter, draughtsman, and printmaker from Wisconsin. He spent the majority of his life in his home state and taught at the The University of Wisconsin–Madison for over 35 years. Wilde is often associated with the Magic Realist and Surrealist art movements in the United States. His work frequently featured self-portraits set within fantastical, imaginative landscapes.^[2]

John Henry Wilde was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on December 12, 1919, the youngest of three children. One of John's older brothers, Leslie, would pursue a parallel career in the fine arts, turning to printmaking.^[3][4]

As a youth, Wilde met fellow Milwaukeean Karl Priebe, who later became a colleague in art and lifelong friend. While in high school, they both visited the Milwaukee studios of painters Santos Zingale and Alfred Sessler, upon which Wilde realized that his talent for drawing could lead to a viable career.^[5][6] A short time later, he began to study informally with Milwaukee painter Paul Lewis Clemens (1911–1992).^[7]

Wilde enrolled in the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1938, where he was influenced by the teachings of art historian Oskar Hagen on early Renaissance art.^[8] During his years as a student, Wilde also met local artist Marshall Glasier.^[9] Glasier's regular salons, hosted at his parents' home, became a gathering for students, faculty, and art aficionados in Madison. Wilde considered these occurrences to be "a kind of university within a university."^[10] Glazier and the young artists in his circle rejected the American Regionalist painting of the day, exemplified by the work of John Steuart Curry, the artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin from 1936 to 1946.^[11] They formed a loosely organized group that included Glasier, Wilde, Priebe, Sylvia Fein, Dudley Huppler, and Gertrude Abercrombie.^[12] The group of friends often met at Priebe's studio in Milwaukee and frequented the Chicago home of Abercrombie.^[13]

Another influence on Wilde's early career was art professor James Watrous. A draughtsman, muralist, mosaicist and art historian, Watrous taught many techniques, including silverpoint, which Wilde would adopt as one of his media of choice.^[14][15]

Wilde received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1942, and was drafted into the US Army shortly thereafter. He served with the Infantry Air Force and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).^[16] As an artist, he was assigned to produce drawings for the army venereal disease program, and map terrain models for intelligence.^[17] During this time, he kept a private journal.

In the journal's pictures and words, Wilde also documented his increasing feeling of hopelessness as his term of service stretched into years. In spite of his deepening depression, Wilde saw broader artistic possibilities in some of his journal sketches, working them up into larger drawings that he mailed to Dudley Huppler in Wisconsin.^[14]

Upon discharge from the Army in 1946, Wilde returned to the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he studied art history, graduating with a Master of Science from the School of Education. His thesis dealt with Surrealist artist Max Ernst, but Wilde later admitted that the thesis was also a statement against Abstract Expressionism.

Wilde described having a strong, instinctive love of drawing from an early age. He found this difficult to explain because it was not encouraged during his childhood and did not reflect his social or cultural surroundings.^[6] He nevertheless developed a lasting interest in nature, particularly the cycles of generation, growth, decay, and death.

Vegetables, plants, and flowers—both wild and cultivated—appear frequently in his paintings and drawings, as do animals, especially birds. Wilde also explored the human form, depicting it either in surreal contexts or through detailed anatomical studies.

Text appears frequently within Wilde’s drawings. In his early work, this included short notes or pseudo-Latin inscriptions. In the early 1970s, he created a series of ten works known as the “Talking drawings,” in which extended written passages occupy much of the page. These drawings often depict solitary figures representing Wilde engaged in everyday activities such as raking, with text functioning as an integral visual element (Madison Art Center).

The human figure is a recurring subject in Wilde’s paintings and drawings, often shown nude with female figures appearing frequently. Natural elements are also prominent, and Wilde regularly combined plant forms with the human body in unexpected ways.

Writer Donna Gold commented on this approach in her discussion of To Make Strawberry Jam, noting Wilde’s depiction of a female figure intertwined with strawberry plants in a composition recalling Renaissance imagery, substituting exaggerated natural forms for traditional symbols.

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 reoccur frequently through his output, as do highly crafted, reverent renderings of natural objects.

But, according to curator Sara Krajewski,

"Surrealism best enables [Wilde] 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."^[11]

A significant example of Wilde’s use of autobiographical imagery is The Great Autobiographical Silverpoint Drawing (1983–1984), a silverpoint work measuring approximately 9.5 feet (about 2.9 metres) in length and held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The drawing presents a recurring proxy figure for Wilde, shown nude and with three eyes, facing the viewer.

Behind the figure are rows of familiar figures, while the composition is divided between two contrasting elements: objects associated with the accumulated remnants of a long life on one side, and a large oak tree on the other. The work brings together themes of self-representation, memory, and the passage of time.

Although Wilde often worked on a smaller scale in both painting and silverpoint, this drawing is notable for applying a traditionally intimate medium to a large, panoramic format.^[6]

Another large silverpoint work in which Wilde appears within a memento mori landscape is Muss es sein (1979–1981). The drawing depicts a semi-nude figure representing Wilde, dressed in harlequin tights, alongside a nude female figure seated within a landscape filled with animal skulls. Both figures face away from the viewer toward a double moon.

The work was executed in silverpoint, photographed, and later overpainted with thin, transparent oil washes, resulting in a muted green-gray surface. The finished painting is part of the McClain Collection at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison, as a gift of William McClain.

An early example of Wilde placing himself within his work is Wisconsin Wildeworld (1955), subtitled Provincia, Naturlica and Classicum, in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum.^[b] The painting measures 52 inches (about 130 cm) in width and depicts a proxy figure for Wilde shown from behind, looking toward a Renaissance-inspired landscape.

The figure extends his right arm toward pointed mountains and holds a drawing board under his left arm. Classical ruins appear along the right edge of the composition, populated by small nude figures. To the left, the scene shifts to a Midwestern residential street with modest houses and a tree-lined sidewalk, where fully clothed pedestrians walk. The work contrasts an imaginative, classical setting with a contemporary, everyday environment.

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, seminude, 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. This work has recently also been acquired by the MAM, to join its forerunner.

Motifs such as "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. 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. 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."

Wilde repeatedly returned to a group of works loosely inspired by Gina, Duchess of Sanseverina, a character in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. The theme first appeared in the early 1950s in paintings such as Further Festivities at the Contessa Sanseverini’s (1950–51) and More Festivities at the Palazzo Sanseverini (1951–52), which depict groups of women in classical or Renaissance-style settings with a bright, dreamlike tone.

In Nighttime Festivities at the Contessa Sanseverini’s (1966), the subject takes on a darker mood, with more crowded, subdued figures alongside predatory animals and dead bodies in a nighttime forest setting. Wilde revisited the theme in the 1990s with Still Further Festivities at the Contessa Sanseverini’s (1991), in which the imagery becomes lighter and more atmospheric, showing softly lit figures across an open landscape and in the sky.

The cycle concludes with A Grand Finale at the Contessa Severini’s (1996–97), a panoramic painting nearly eight feet wide depicting an expansive landscape populated by numerous figures, animals, and objects drawn from earlier work, including two figures resembling the artist holding revolvers. Preparatory sketches and drawings related to the later Sanseverini works also survive, some of which appear on the art 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 admirers 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.

Wilde taught drawing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as of 1948 until his retirement in 1982 as the Alfred Sessler Distinguished Professor of Art, a title he had been awarded in 1968.^[18][19] He was one of a number of artists who began to teach at the University after WWII, including printmakers Alfred Sessler (1909–1963) and Warrington Colescott (1921–2018), painter Gibson Byrd (1923–2002), and glass artist Harvey Littleton (1922–2013).^[c][20]

Wilde's teaching methods included exercises like life drawing and critical writing, which appeared traditional to some of his fellow academics. Some of his notable students included book illustrator Nancy Ekholm Burkert (born 1933), multimedia artist Bruce Nauman (born 1941),^[21] and painter and film director Wynn Chamberlain (1927–2014).^[22]

In October 1989, seven years into his retirement, Wilde headed a group exhibit at Garver Gallery, Madison, with 17 of his former students. He designed the exhibition poster based on a silverpoint print depicting each participant as an apple-head appearing in the horizon. Both the poster and show provided helped cement Wilde's educational legacy.

Though he considered that printmaking lacked the subtlety of drawing, Wilde was eventually convinced by a number of colleagues to experiment with different techniques and media late in his career. His first prints, which included etchings and lithographs, were created between 1974 and 1977 in collaboration with Stephen J. Weitz, who was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison at the time.

Among Wilde's important collaborators were book artist Walter Hamady, a fellow faculty member at the university, with whom he published several books between 1971 and 2001;^[23][24] Warrington Colescott, whose publishing house in Hollandale, Wisconsin, issued Wilde's series 7 Kiefers and 8 Russets; Harvey Littleton, whose studios in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, published three Wilde vitreographs: The Kiss (1996), Portrait of Joan (1996), and Three Trees (1998); Tandem Press at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for Wildeview II (1985); and Andrew Balkin, with whom Wilde worked on an aquatint and Dry point design for the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Portfolio (2001).

Wilde was elected to the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1982 and to the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1993.^[25] He was also honored as the Alfred Sessler Distinguished Professor of Art, University of Wisconsin Art Department.

Wilde's artwork is in the collections of museums throughout the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.^[26] In his home state of Wisconsin, Wilde is represented by work in many collections, including the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Racine Art Museum, and the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin.

John Wilde and his wife Helen had two children, Jonathan and Phoebe Wilde. After Helen's death in 1966, Wilde married the former Shirley Grilley. His stepchildren are Robert, Dorian and Rinalda Grilley.^[25] He lived in or near Evansville and Cooksville, Rock County, Wisconsin most of his adult life. The Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee has represented John Wilde since 1993 and his estate since 2015.^[27]

• Wolff, Theodore F. (1999). Wildeworld: The Art of John Wilde. Madison, WI: Elvehjem Museum of Art. ISBN 978-1555951597.
• Levy, Hannah Heidi (2004). Famous Wisconsin Artists and Architects. Oregon, WI: Badger Books. ISBN 978-1932542127.
• Cozzolino, Robert (2005). With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940-1965. Madison, WI: Elvehjem Museum of Art. ISBN 978-0932900005.
• Duncan, Michael (2006). "Heretics of the Heartland". Art in America. 94 (2). Penske Media Corporation: 98–103.