Paul Lamantia

During this time, he discovered and was inspired by Dr. Hans Prinzhorn's 1922 book, Artistry of the Mentally Ill—a key influence on Jean Dubuffet's Art Brut—which emphasized the unconscious, hallucinations, and interior reality.

Lamantia became known for his obsessive drawings through group exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), and Art Institute.

Paul Christopher Lamantia (born 1938) is an American visual artist, known for paintings and drawings that explore dark psychosexual imagery.

Lamantia was born Walter Zombek in Chicago, Illinois in 1938, and adopted by Joseph and Nellie Lamantia at age two.

His early visual education included underground comics, museum trips with his mother, his father's collection of 1940s soft-core porn and girlie culture novelties, and a 14-week scholarship he won to study drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago.

As a teenager, he studied under advertising artist Jules Zinni, intending to become a commercial illustrator.

Between 1957–9, he attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago, learning figure drawing from artist-illustrator William Mosby, and worked as an advertising graphic designer, before enlisting in the U.S. Army Reserves in 1960.

In the service, his caricature skills came to light and he painted sixteen murals at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri and Fort Riley, Kansas.

After his service, Lamantia took night classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and resumed advertising work, but soon elected to pursue a fine art career.

He studied at SAIC with professors Ray Yoshida, Whitney Halstead and Vera Burdick, and was a contemporary of the Chicago Imagists.

He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and emerged in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the larger group of artists known as the Chicago Imagists.

Lamantia often depicts surreal, distorted figures in transgressive scenarios, rendered in a formally structured, dizzying patterns, line and high-key color; he has been influenced by Expressionism, High Renaissance and Baroque art, and psychoanalytic theory.

Art historian Robert Cozzolino suggests his work implies imply multiple levels of meaning: allegories of lust, confessional hallucinations about sexual anxiety, visions from an altered state.

Critic Dennis Adrian called him "a Chicago maverick" whose work "challenges and wrenches" the limits of acceptability and taste, while Franz Schulze described him as one of the city's "most brutal and coldly expressionist" figurative artists.

Lamantia first gained notoriety in the 1960s for his unfiltered, high-energy drawings.

Lamantia exhibited in shows at the city's key poles of artistic influence, the Art Institute of Chicago ("Chicago and Vicinity," 1962, 1964, 1965) and the Illinois Institute of Technology ("The Sunken City Rises," 1964; "Phalanx," 1965).

In 1964, after taking additional education courses at the University of Chicago, he earned a BFA, followed by an MFA in 1968.

In addition to his art career, Lamantia taught art in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from 1966 to 1993.

After retiring from CPS, he continued to teach workshops and courses and lecture at institutions including SAIC, Columbia College, International Academy of Design and Technology, Loyola University, Harry S. Truman College, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and Cincinnati Art Museum.

His art is informed by travels he and his wife, Sheryl R. Johnson, have undertaken to thirty-four countries, including China, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Nepal, Russia, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey, and many throughout Europe.

Critical consensus on Lamantia's art centers around four aspects, its: 1) "high voltage" emotional impact; 2) pushing of form and subject matter to aesthetic and psychological extremes; 3) meticulous, expressive technique; and 4) outsider status beyond mainstream critical categories, which has led some to classify him as an Art brut artist.

By the early 1970s, critics suggested that his more controlled and deliberately composed paintings had caught up in terms of freedom of invention and integration of feeling and execution.

In monumental works, he depicted surreal, ambiguously-sexed figures and groups—sirens, buxom temptresses, leather-clad dominatrixes, voyeurs, and mutant beasts—undergoing dizzying transformations into giant insects, plant-like forms and horrific organic conglomerations, while engaged in discomfiting, sometimes predatory sexual dramas.

In these paintings, faces, skin, sinuous legs, torpedo breasts, muscles and organs blend or morph into invented anatomies of snapping jaws, sprouting eyes, bird beaks, claws, tentacles and machine, while skin, makeup, masking, tattooing, scarring and costuming become indistinguishable, rendering interpretation compellingly ambiguous, for many critics.

In 1972, Jean Dubuffet took notice of Lamantia's work, eventually exchanging work with him and hosting him in Paris.

In 1972, Dennis Adrian described it as "harsh and hysterical" and "profoundly shocking"; four decades later, Margaret Hawkins called it "manic, roiling, chaotic, terrifying, and maybe terrified" work that "seethe[s] with sticky, undiluted id."

Lamantia's work reflects a wide consumption of art history, drawing inspiration from Expressionist and Surrealist "automatism", masters such as Titian and Rubens, Outsider art and Cubism, the Chicago "Monster Roster" school and Peter Saul, comic artists Robert Crumb and Basil Wolverton, as well as Freudian and Jungian theories of the unconscious.

In terms of chronology and psychology, critics write that he "hovers at the edge" of the Chicago Imagists, sharing themes of sex, aggression, and psychological menace and a tendency towards vernacular expression.

In works such as Cancellation (1974–5) and Night Language 2 (1977), Lamantia set his scenes in garish, compressed domestic interiors that recall the harrowing rooms of Francis Bacon and Max Beckmann.

Critics described the work as a tangle of bewildering abstract patterns, high-key color, frenzied line and strong contour, with contradictory forms that lacked a focal point or orientation to distinguish figure from ground.

Simultaneously, they noted a clear level of formal structural integrity deriving from what Franz Schulze called Lamantia's "controlled wildness" and his absorption of classical genre compositions of female nudes in interiors from Titian to Matisse.

In subsequent years, Lamantia showed in regular solo exhibitions at Zaks Gallery (1977–2000), and was featured in shows at the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1975), School of the Art Institute ("Visions", 1976), Crocker Art Museum ("The Chicago Connection", 1976–7, traveling), Smithsonian Institution ("Chicago Currents," 1979–80, traveling), Artists Space, New York ("Recent Art from Chicago," 1986), Figge Art Museum ("Chicago Imagism: A 25-Year Survey," 1994), and MCA Chicago ("Art in Chicago 1945–1995").

In the 1980s, critics observed that Lamantia's paintings, while thematically as unnerving as ever, became leaner, more painterly and open, and reminiscent of Willem de Kooning's savage "Woman" paintings.

Works from Whisper (1980) to Blood Love (1993) featured a subdued, finessed palette of whites, light yellows, pastels and deep purples, that enhanced the rhythms of streamlined, Baroque compositions employing illusionistic, theatrical space.

Lamantia attracted early attention from artist Jean Dubuffet and has been recognized with retrospectives at the Koehnline Museum of Art (2016), Loyola University (2002) and the Hyde Park Art Center (1982), and reviews in national art publications and major newspapers.

His work has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and sits in their permanent collections, as well as those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Milwaukee Art Museum, among many.

Lamantia lives and works in Chicago.

In the historical volume, Art in Chicago (2018), curator Robert Cozzolino suggests his peripherality—as with Chicagoans Linda Kramer and Robert Lostutter—results partly from not exhibiting under the "Hairy Who" or similar banners, but mainly, from his more thematically startling and ferocious depictions of socially transgressive sexuality.

Critics Peter Frank and Hawkins concur, describing his work as rawer than the Imagists, with cartooniness a "wrapper for something scarier, less aesthetic and polite."

Writer-gallerist John Corbett identified Lamantia as a "psychosexual outlaw, making utterly original work with one foot inside and one outside the Imagist camp."