Art: Here Come the Monsters

While abstract expressionism rules the cash register in Manhattan’s prospering art galleries, young artists across the land are turning back to images—but with a difference. The classical tradition, reasserted in the Renaissance, has always been that people are beautiful, at least in art. The new imagemakers dispute that. Their figures are human, but horrible. The horror school has its center in Chicago, is staffed by an earnest, loose-knit and surprisingly well-adjusted handful of Art Institute graduates.

¶Oldest and best known is scholarly, affable George Cohen, 40, whose The Serpent Chooses Adam and Eve caused something of a sensation at last year’s Carnegie International. In that, as in most of his canvases, Cohen combined deliberately clumsy, pictographic painting with collage, pasting in a round mirror and a hank of Eve’s hair. Mirrors, he explains, “are the supreme illusion; they mock both the viewer and the painting.” Cohen teaches at Northwestern University, talks well about other men’s art but bogs down when it comes to his own nightmarish visions. “I begin with something only half formed,” he says, waving his hands. “I believe that in painting, you just have to step off.”

¶ Fred Berger, 35, works in an advertising studio, paints snarling heads that seem embedded in rock. His purpose: “To show man as a creature who is at once magnificent and terrifying.”

¶ Cosmo Campoli, 37, a former factory worker, sculpts creatures swollen almost out of recognition. His sculptures of women in the act of giving birth are brutally explicit; his Prodigal Son is a head bursting with dim regrets. “I want my sculpture to exist—really exist,” he once wrote. “I want it to holler when it’s being threatened by neutral surroundings.” His wife, winsome Kathryn Carloye, does small terra-cotta bas-reliefs consisting of ranks of tiny skulls, with things growing from them. She has to keep them small, she says, because her two small children have her on the run most of the time.

¶ Leon Golub, 37, paints men in pain. His views are frontal and direct: lumpish, lacerated heads with dull yellow catlike eyes. His technique—layer on layer of colored lacquer, chipped, gouged and pumiced—gives the effect of eroded sculpture come hauntingly to life. They resemble certain Romanesque statues Golub saw while on a trip to Italy, but he claims never to “look back” or dissect. “Other painters are tearing man apart, but not me. I’m giving him a monumental image. I want man to survive.”

The Chicago monster artists will be conspicuous in an exhibition being readied for fall by Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, to be billed as “The New Images of Man.” From Chicago, at least, it appears that man is not looking good.