In an era when attention is fractured into multiple platforms and diffused by multiple media, the singularity of Jim Nutt’s artistic vision stands out: for twenty-plus years—as was made evident in a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago—Nutt has been deliberately and meticulously absorbed with painting the female face. Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character, as curator Lynne Warren clarified both in her selections and in the accompanying text, was not a traditional retrospective. Though the exhibition included works from over forty-five years of Nutt’s painting career, providing viewers with an overview of the more diversely experimental and ribald past in Nutt’s practice, its predominant focus was on the past twenty, to fresh and engrossing effect. Nutt does not paint identifiable subjects; rather, these are portraits of imaginary women. As such, they are not about the painted subject as much as they are about the visual dynamics of portraiture itself.

Nutt is best known as part of a group of Chicago-based artists who achieved notoriety in the 1960s as “the Hairy Who,” which involved bright, bawdy takes on pop cultural imagery and irreverent exhibition methods. Nutt’s work was no exception: with the crisp linearity of cartoons and commercial signage he depicted monstrous, bio-morphic figures, populating the space around them with found imagery (e.g., catalog underwear ads) and, occasionally, found objects. In Cotton Mouth (1968), a grinning fool whose face is a burgeoning green blob topped by a black pompadour bares literal cotton-ball teeth, which press up against the Plexiglas surface of the painting. By choosing to paint on Plexiglas via a precise front-to-back method, Nutt could juxtapose uniform fields of color beneath its glossy surface.

Exhibition text accompanying Summer Salt (1970), a clear window shade painted in similar fashion, indicated that beyond an engagement with the polished finish of commercial signage, Nutt was interested in the historical method of “hinterglasmalerei”—or literally painting on the back of glass. With the examples shown from this period, it was also evident that Nutt has long been concerned with how the image is framed. For example, in a rare male portrait in filmic black and white, A He Haw (1968, or similarly, Hee-Man from 1969), the bright yellow frame, rounded on the corners, evokes an “etch-a-sketch” toy, complete with cryptic lettering (“haw haw,” “eeek,” “Johnny Wazzit”) and skull “logo.” The newer portraits are surrounded by more restrained and un-adorned complementary planes of color, but it is nevertheless clear that these frames are also integral to the work, contributing to their iconicity.

Nutt’s choice of subject matter is so consistent that one is led to ask: why women?—especially as regards the images from the past twenty years, which are exclusively feminine. There is no readily apparent answer (and it seems that Nutt himself is not forthcoming), but if we think of these as portraits of painting itself rather than of individuals, one might hypothesize that Nutt simply started with the female face and never needed to move past it, so rich are its possibilities for his chosen medium. Many of the formal traits of these figures point to a keen awareness of the history of Western painting—from Jan van Eyck to Hans Holbein to Pablo Picasso (certainly those noses evoke similar cross-hatched facsimiles in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907))—wherein the female portrait plays a significant role. Far from aspiring to a universal ideal of womanhood—and hearkening back to the grotesqueries seen in Nutt’s earlier comic-inspired figures—these faces stretch and morph, the immense parti-color noses drawing the viewer in, impossible concavities within glowing planar facades. Indeed, especially with regard to this light-filled quality, it is a shame that the exhibition is not traveling. Though the accompanying catalogue provides very good reproductions of the works, it in no way compensates for what is lost in translation: the interior light that softly illuminates each face. I am not the first to liken these paintings to Northern Medieval and Renaissance portraiture (Warren, for example, does so in her catalogue essay), but the comparison is apt. There is something saintly about a figure like Loop (1988), whose long articulated fingers (seemingly holding a relic of her own hair) are reminiscent of the hands of a Rogier van der Weyden virgin or a Buddha in blessing. The gazes of these women as well look askance, are directed inward or toward some vague middle distance. In rare instances when they address viewers directly (e.g., Gulf from 1991), a disjuncture in the positioning of the eyes—one up, one down—prevents them from forming a direct gaze.

Nutt’s painterly fixations reward close, even obsessive, looking: in a work like Plumb (2004), for instance, the cross-hatch technique (achieved with a very small brush) lends the facial landscape a lively texture (again inaccessible in reproduction). The figure’s neck emerges out of a thicket of fine fibers or leaves from a colorfully patterned, yet oddly featureless, clothing-body-ground. The tiny, round right eye appears to be lifting away from the nose, pulling the face up in a contortion that is nevertheless balanced by the gravitational pull of a curious pendant of hair that dominates the right-hand side of the painting (and perhaps provides the title in its capacity as plumb/balance). As in each of these paintings, the nose draws viewers into the pictorial space, its nostrils independent of each other, one attached to the inverted cone of the nose itself, one pulling up on the quizzical mouth. I should mention that many of these details are also wonderfully comic; a single willful hair growing from a knob on the top of the figure’s head is made even more delightful in contrast to the serious intensity of her left-eyed lilac gaze. None of it makes sense on its own, but the painting is so well resolved that it conceives of a kind of rationale unto itself.

A densely packed pendant exhibition entitled Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion, curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, demonstrated the breadth of Nutt’s influence, in terms of portraiture, eroticism, non-art or commercial sources, as well as an ongoing concern with form and (dare I say) craftsmanship. Objects on view came predominantly from the MCA Chicago’s permanent collection and provided a means of dialogue between Nutt’s work and that of fellow Chicagoans Peter Saul, Suellen Rocca, and Gladys Nilsson as well as younger artists as varied as Mike Kelley, Chris Ware, and Richard Rezac. Quotes from artists represented throughout further underscored Nutt’s capacity to evoke admiration without inspiring mimicry. The Companion succeeded in convincing viewers that Nutt has been influential in U.S. art and that there are many connections to be made between his work and diverse contemporary practices, but the sheer number of works present also tended to defeat viewer attention.

The catalogue for Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character is well-illustrated, offering full-page color reproductions of most of the works on exhibit. In a series of short essays, Warren situates Nutt in terms of his historical influences and his own continuing influence, Jennifer R. Gross addresses his role as a portraitist, and Alexi Worth puzzles over the anonymity—the “unlikeness”—of Nutt’s subjects. A list of selected exhibitions and select bibliography are also included, indicating that Nutt has been a constant presence in the U.S. art world since the 1960s.

Refreshingly, Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character offered only a limited number of didactic panels that provided basic technical and historical background (more detailed discussions of the work were also available through smartphone technology and online). As stated in a quote from art historian and critic Dennis Adrian included in an introductory panel to A Jim Nutt Companion: “these figures constitute a frequent reiteration of the idea that seeing is a way of thinking.” Nutt’s method narrows viewer focus, bringing awareness to the minutiae of visual thought. These imaginary women both constitute and inspire meditation on painted female portraiture; walking through the galleries, engaging with the subtle idiosyncrasies in each face, viewers are not left wondering who they are as much as how they came to be. Nutt’s practice of the past twenty years is a compelling argument for scrupulous painting and for slow looking.