My Fungoids

The title of this drawing suggests it is a self-portrait of the artist as a grotesque character. Completed while Art Green was still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, it features a central image, symmetrical composition, a format the artist favored at the time. He was impressed by the paintings of British artist Francis Bacon (1909‒1992), exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964, which featured portraits of popes and head studies with similar severe facial deformations. The surprising addition of giant anonymous fingers, like puppet masters opening and closing giant zippers, increases the puzzling relationship between figure and ground in the overall composition. The idea of the artifice of illusion in painting as the subject matter of painting preoccupied him at about this time, in a similar vein to Surrealist René Magritte (1898‒1967). This drawing all but announces his growing desire to address the viewers of his work viscerally (“to be grotesque and unmanageable” in his own words) and to stage for them the unresolvable tensions between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space in figurative painting. In later works, the zippers are replaced by illusory ties that serve to hold more complex and ambiguous imagery together. (See Smart Museum 2001.576, 1992.21.)