St. Anthony Pleasure Park

Phil Hanson etched a group of “pleasure park” subjects between 1967 and 1968. They started as landscapes populated with architectural follies that also resemble the bizarre structures imagined by Roger Brown and Art Green, two fellow Chicago Imagists Hanson met studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (See Smart Museum 2001.170, 2000.9.) Like them, he may also have been inspired by imagery from Riverview, a popular amusement park in Chicago that was shuttered in 1967. In the later prints he crossed the theme of amusement with the inferno of hell by turning harmless follies into phantasmagoria animated by monsters.

Hanson offers up an image of temptation and threatened punishment. The legend of Saint Anthony taunted by monsters during his secluded life in the desert has been depicted by many artists, including the Northern Renaissance master Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450s‒1516). Hanson is probably referring to Bosch, who Surrealists in 1920s and 1930s Paris took for a kindred spirit because of his depictions of nightmarish creatures and scenarios. The pictorial space—depicted as a vertical flat landscape—follows a medieval conception of space that preceded the establishment of perspectival laws in western art. (See also Roger Brown and Art Green: 2001.576, 2001.181.)