John Corbett has admired the Chicago harbor scenes of James Bolivar Needham since seeing them in a retrospective a decade ago. “I thought they were lovely, kind of gritty,” Corbett recalls. Rich, small-scale representations of the city’s industrial waterways as they were a century ago, the paintings have the complexity of Persian miniatures, he says, with the three-dimensional feel of sculpture. “They are very tactile, and that tactility is a little rough and expressionistic. It makes you want to see the other side, to understand them as an object.”
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Little is known about Needham–a black painter, he was born in Ontario and came to Chicago in 1867, while still in his teens–and Corbett felt the monograms offered some insight. “They’re a really lovely, integral part of his work,” he says. “Here’s the artist on the other side, taking some care, very delicately and beautifully marking the back of it. That tells you something.”
The exhibit, which opened last week and runs through August, offers a nonlinear historical survey of painting in Chicago, dating back to 1842. To avoid stylistic generalizations based on region and era, Corbett and Dempsey arranged the paintings by theme, including cityscape/landscape, art in social spaces, figurative painting, and abstraction. “We tried not to be extradogmatic. Chicago really typified a lot of different things going on at the same time,” Corbett says. “We don’t think there’s a Chicago school of painting.”
The work of midcentury artist Robert Nickle, known for making intimate abstract collages out of colorful scraps of paper and other city debris, is also represented among the versos. On the back of each collage, he affixed a small photo of himself taken on the day he finished the piece. “They seem to me like passport photographs,” says Corbett. “‘Here I am. These are my papers.’”
