Giotto in Chicago

The relation between artist and critic can be perilous. Roger Brown was not shy about lambasting critics of his or his friends’ work, loosely grouped under the name Chicago Imagism. Here two prominent Chicago art critics—Franz Schulze (who coined “Chicago Imagism” to distinguish a midwestern figurative trend from Abstract Expressionism in New York in the 1950s) and Alan Artner—receive a tongue-lashing from “Giotto.” Brown also produced a variation of the print and the text in a 1981 painting, Giotto and His Friends: Getting Even (private collection).

By referring to the fresco cycle in the Arena chapel by the Italian master Giotto (1267‒1337), a now canonical work of sequential art that was experimental in its own time, Brown drew parallels between the so-called “Italian primitives” of the early Renaissance, who preceded the establishment of perspectival laws in western painting, and his own cohort of Chicago primitives. By finding their own individual expression in a vernacular language, like modern-day comic art, he asserted their work, like Giotto’s, didn’t require mediation to be understood. Interestingly, Brown inscribed this print to a sympathetic Chicago critic and collector, Dennis Adrian: “One who makes it all worthwhile.” (See also Smart Museum 1997.79.)