John Corbett describes the artwork on display at “Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago”—an exhibit he cocurated that opens this weekend at the Smart Museum—as “a howling, terrified, introspective whorl of penetrating angst and disoriented subjectivity.” Elsewhere in his essay Corbett proposes Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty” as the theme music for the show, and that song title is as apt a description as it gets.
Most of the members of the Monster Roster studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and were profoundly influenced by Kathleen Blackshear, who told them to go to the Field Museum and draw Oceanic and Native American artifacts. According to the exhibition catalogue, this was an unheard-of practice in the 40s and 50s, because at the time such work was considered “primitive” and merely ethnographic. Having witnessed what modern, evolved civilization was capable of, these artists looked to the distant past for refuge. Unlike the abstract expressionists in New York and on the west coast, the Monster Roster’s art remained mostly figurative. They found kinship with European artists like Jean Dubuffet, whose influential talk “Anticultural Positions” many of them had attended. Dubuffet advocated for a raw “un-art” inspired by the work of the untaught, the naive, and the insane. The goal was to get beyond or around intellect, to tap into a purer essence of feeling and being.
