John Wilde

As an undergraduate in art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wilde met the artist Marshall Glasier (1902–1989).

While in high school Wilde visited the Milwaukee studios of Santos Zingale (1908–1999) and Alfred Sessler (1901–1963) and realized that his own talent for drawing could lead to a viable career.

Another influence on Wilde’s early career was an art professor at the University of Wisconsin, James S. Watrous (1908–1999).

A draughtsman, muralist, mosaicist and art historian, Watrous taught ‘old master’ methods of drawing and painting using the materials and techniques of European painting and drawing from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.

He taught his students how to make their own inks, chalks and crayons from materials found in nature, how to craft reed and quill pens and how to prepare grounds for metal point drawing, including silver point, the medium in which Wilde became a modern master.

Wilde took Watrous's lessons to heart, poring over recipes for oil mediums and eventually formulating a secret mixture for use in his own work.

Soon after this he began informal study with Milwaukee painter Paul Clemens (1911–1992).

As a youth he met Karl Priebe (1914–1976) who later became Wilde's colleague in art and a life-long friend.

John Wilde (December 12, 1919 – March 9, 2006, pronounced "WILL-dee") was a painter, draughtsman and printmaker of fantastic imagery.

Born near Milwaukee, Wilde lived most of his life in Wisconsin, save for service in the U.S. Army during World War II.

He received bachelor and master degrees in art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught for some 35 years.

Wilde was associated with the Magic Realism movement and Surrealism in the United States.

His darkly humorous figurative imagery often included self-portraits through which he interacted with the people, animals and surreal objects that populate his fantasy world.

The youngest of three boys born to Emil and Mathilda Wilde, John Henry Wilde was born near Milwaukee, Wisconsin on December 12, 1919.

The dissenters coalesced into a loosely organized group that included Glasier, Wilde, Sylvia Fein (b. 1919) and Dudley Huppler (1917–1988) in Madison, Wisconsin; Karl Priebe (1914–1976) in Milwaukee and Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) in Chicago.

Wilde also met and married fellow art student Helen Ashman (1919–1966) in 1942.

The group of friends often met at Karl Priebe's studio in Milwaukee and frequented the Chicago home of Gertrude Abercrombie, whose gatherings of artists and jazz musicians were legendary.

In the late 1930s Glasier studied at the Art Students League but found it difficult in Depression-era New York to make his way an artist.

He returned to the home of his youth in Madison, where he lived with his parents for the next twenty years, setting up his art studio in the attic of their house.

According to Wilde, Glasier became “the hub of—the catalyst for—the most exciting art event Madison had experienced…” Although Glasier was not connected with the university, the casual salons he regularly hosted at his parents’ home where a gathering place for students, faculty and “other Madison personalities” who wanted to discuss contemporary literature, art and music.

Glazier and the young artists in his circle rejected the American Regionalist painting of the day, which was exemplified by the work of John Steuart Curry, who was artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin from 1936 to 1946.

Wilde received his bachelor of science degree 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).

As an artist he was assigned to produce drawings for the army venereal disease program and maps and terrain models for intelligence.

During this time he kept a private journal that he filled with self-portraits, fantastic and macabre scenes and written reflections on the Army, an institution he despised for its regimentation and bureaucracy.

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.

According to art historian Robert Cozzolino, in his later career Wilde returned "dozens of times" to the unsettling themes and situations that he first explored in his wartime journal.

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 was ostensibly about the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, but Wilde later admitted that the thesis was also a statement of protest against Abstract Expressionism.

Drawing was Wilde’s boyhood means of visual expression and it remained the foundation on which the works of his sixty-year professional career were built.

Wilde’s self-described “deep instinctive love of drawing” was a source of puzzlement to him; as a child he was not encouraged in it, nor could he see anything in his social or cultural environment that led to it.

He did, however, have a deep interest in and empathy for nature and its cycle of generation, growth, decay and death.

Vegetables, plants and flowers, both wild and cultivated, and animals, especially birds, are the subjects of many of his paintings and drawings.

And, more than all, he always returned to the human form, whether invoking the whimsy of surreal situations or regaling in the complex and graceful discipline of fine anatomical drawing, of which Wilde is virtually nonpareil in his century.

Often cryptic notes are included in drawings, from pseudo-Latin inscriptions of the early years to the intentionally didactic ten "Talking Drawings," of the early seventies, in which extensive monologues dominate the page, outlining solitary representations of himself performing daily chores such as raking (Madison Art Center).

The human beings that enter his paintings are often nude, and often of the female sex.

Writer Donna Gold described Wilde’s tendency to marry nature to the human figure in improbable ways in his painting, “To Make Strawberry Jam”:

"“Wilde… paints an odalisque wrapped in tendrils of a strawberry plant, echoing Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’, veiled in her golden hair. A strawberry is what covers Wilde’s woman, but the strawberry she hugs to her breast is huge, half the size of her torso.”"

The reference to the Renaissance painter Botticelli is apt. 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.