The Right to a Write-Off
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Citrin, who studied at the University of Illinois, the School of the Art Institute, and the American Academy of Art, says she made this kind of work for three or four years before moving on. “They were audacious for the time,” she says, “and they got noticed.” One was included in the Art Institute’s 1973 “Chicago and Vicinity” show; another–a checkerboard lid raised to expose a set of teeth about to chomp on a penis–helped shut down a Florida gallery. In Chicago this work was sold by dealers like Nancy Lurie and Deson-Zaks, but this year Citrin decided to give away some of the pieces she still had. She donated nine boxes, a stack of drawings, and assorted other work–about 40 pieces in all–to Highland Park’s Suburban Fine Arts Center for their annual benefit sale. In return she’ll get a tax deduction–for whatever the paint and materials cost her 30 years ago.
SFAC doesn’t have any van Goghs that it knows of this year, but it has 70 pieces by Uldis Krumins, a Latvian native who came to the United States when he was 20, graduated from the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago, and worked most of his life in the basement studio of his Wilmette home. His daughter, Mara Krumins, says major corporations regularly bought his large abstract paintings, landscapes, and prints for their collections, but in the last 15 years or so he had turned to more personal work, a series of vibrant acrylic figure studies. After his death last December she decided to donate dozens of the figurative works he’d given her. A row of them are mounted across the back wall of the SFAC gallery–nudes caught in a rich swath of light, glowing as if in late-day sun. Mara, also an artist, says she’ll be talking to an accountant; since they’re not her work she thinks she’ll be able to take some sort of write-off. Beginning today, August 19, the already low prices for the Citrins, Kruminses, and hundreds of other pieces at the Suburban Fine Arts Center’s sale drop 50 percent, and even that’s negotiable.
