Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders.
- excerpt from Carl Sandburg, “Chicago” (1916)
[A]ll the really good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.
- Grant Wood
John Knudsen (1938-2014) is an urban Regionalist for the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. The artist’s paintings and prints, with their Midwestern cityscapes, enchant with a childlike sense of discovery. His metropolitan worlds are packed with the minutest of details—ubiquitous trains, trucks, cars, signage, smokestacks, cranes, water towers and, finally, people—so that one cannot fully absorb a Knudsen in a single glance, but must revisit the work again and again. Each examination offers new revelations that delight the viewer; close scrutiny reveals a plethora of unexpected discoveries. Although they do not attempt topographical accuracy, Knudsen’s prints and paintings are replete with knowing references to the Windy City apparent to those familiar with Chicago terrain he depicts: the (formerly named) Sears Tower, a Morton Salt sign, the Palmer House, CTA busses and the familiar Lake Street “L” station, a Bears logo on a water tower, Marshal (sic) Fields (now Macy’s). Fittingly, recurring regional motifs are occasionally paired with that most patriotic of national symbols, the American flag, as in Sears Tower and American Flag (2010) and Sunrise (2008). Knudsen resided in Michigan, Iowa, and Chicago at various times of his life, and his Midwestern roots run deep. Indeed, Knudsen’s paintings and prints celebrate the American Midwest, and Chicago in particular, as a lively hub for commerce and industry, the core of the country and the foundation on which it rests. The Midwestern city, Knudsen tells us, is what makes America America.
Like the Regionalists of the 1930’s, who championed the Midwest as the “backbone” of America, and like his spiritual and artistic predecessor Grant Wood (an artist also associated with Iowa and Chicago), Knudsen paints the Midwest with a nostalgic brush, using simplified representation divorced of the heady abstraction or conceptualism of more “intellectually-minded” contemporaries. Critically, Knudsen focuses not on rolling farms, apple orchards, Gothic farmhouses, and no-nonsense country folk; simplified, rectilinear skyscrapers and train cars have substituted for Wood’s organic, cotton-ball shaped trees. As much as Knudsen may have admired the tough authenticity of the city in reality, these are not dingy industrial scenes; in Knudsen’s hands the urban site becomes colorful, bright, bustling with vitality, litter-free. Etchings like A Working Day (n.d.) and Steel City (1995), with their lack of color, are admittedly grittier, with their rising pillars of smoke rendered in shades of gray, but even here, streets are free of debris, buildings rendered without peeling paint, train cars sans graffiti.
A central work of this exhibition, a large oil painting titled High School Days (1986), typifies Knudsen’s optimism in the Midwestern city. A crowded but structured cityscape fills the picture space. A dense vertical network of brightly-colored skyscrapers and smokestacks serve as a base for myriad towers of variegated smoke swirling neatly upwards into a dappled and stippled sky. An “L” train stretches lengthwise along the entirety of the bottom of the composition, while the sagging lines of telephone wires and the cranes’ zigzag patterns energize the composition. The peaceful diversity of the city’s occupants on the “L” track below, with their multiplicity of races and ethnicities, ages, and occupations, mirrors this rhythmic, vibrant, and orderedurban landscape. This is Knudsen’s Chicago as transformed by his brush: exciting, busy, and diverse, but also clean, crimeless, even sanitized.
Several prints in the exhibition bridge the divide between the urban and the countryside. In Deer Crossing (1999), the industrial and the commercial, as signified by telephone wires and a freight train, intrude into the rural domain. A locomotive rumbles through a pastoral but visually raucous landscape comprising farmhouses, trees, rolling hills, birds, and a flock of unruffled deer, one of whom looks up inquisitively at the passing mechanical marvel with its conspicuously emblazoned boxcars. In Rattling the China (2002), a tranquil, domestic cottage scene is again interrupted by a train, this time a fast-moving C.P. Rail with its conductors visible in the windows. While the title refers to an argument between the artist and his wife, it also slyly alludes to the engine-produced “earthquake” that disrupts the couple and shakes the lamp, shelved teacups, and numerous sets of forks and spoons. While the couple’s idyllic teatime in front of the fireplace has been temporarily stalled, and the cat on the rug somewhat discomfited, the interjection of the industrial into the natural realm still confers an idealized depiction of their symbiotic co-existence.
Knudsen’s paintings, in particular, pulse with vibrancy, movement, and activity in a mosaic of brightly colored rectilinear forms— vertical skyscrapers and thin smokestacks, horizontal train cars, “L” tracks, and signs. Brilliant hues, simplified forms, and stacked perspective, all reminiscent of untrained or outsider art, are organized within essentially grid-like compositions that unify the artist’s work across the varied painting and printmaking mediums he practiced, examples of which are included in this retrospective.
But while suggestive of “naïve” or folk art, Knudsen’s “untrained” aesthetic is anything but. Knudsen studied painting and printmaking at Luther College and the University of Iowa, where he earned his MFA degree. He furthered his studies in printmaking in the renowned atelier of Stanley William Hayter in Paris. In 1967, he became the first professor at William Rainey Harper College, located in a Chicago suburb, launching the art department there. Yet like many formally trained Western artists, Knudsen appears to have understood the potential for direct expressivity in the art of the “primitive” and of children. Indeed, Knudsen openly professed an affinity for such sensibilities: in an interview with his son, Knudsen named American folk artists John Kane, Joseph Pickett, Bill Traylor, and Emma Jean Cady as specific influences on his work.
Characteristic of this ostensibly “untutored” style is Bunny Bread (2001), a three-dimensional painted relief that suggests both folk art and Joseph Cornell’s assemblage shadow boxes, the latter of which he almost certainly would have seen at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Indeed, Joseph Cornell was a self-taught artist, although his work has subsequently been canonized). A parade of whimsical, childlike rabbit heads embellish the top, sides, and front of the deep frame, while inside, a painted tableau of variously projecting and textured forms (some of which rise from the painted support like sprayed-on plaster) and found objects combine to replicate a nonliteral geography of Chicago. A neatly typefaced, preprinted label counters the wobbly hand-painted lettering and uneven lines that delineate countless windowpanes. Found objects, such as a small paintbrush with a frazzled tip, are affixed to the painted surface. Knudsen spent some of his childhood growing up in Chicago. It is no wonder, then, that Bunny Bread’s bright, solid colors, inexact lines, and playful forms synthesize to construct a fantastical, charming, and reassuring Midwestern metropolis made all the more nostalgic by its “naive” style.
Despite his “primitive” aesthetic, Knudsen’s style is deceivingly sophisticated, especially in its referents. While Depression-era Regionalists like Grant Wood eschewed European influences and its un-American pretentiousness, Knudsen embraced it. Knudsen’s work contains Old World references ranging from Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse to Paul Gauguin and the German Expressionist group Die Brücke, who were in turn inspired by the uncensored, immediately expressive art forms of Africa and Oceania. Woodcuts such as Five Nudes (1997), in which five women (with five corresponding cats) eat pizza and drink wine in an interior, update the European tradition of the classical nude while recalling the work of Henri Matisse. A self-portrait shop sign entitled Postcard (2005) displays the bold, jagged forms, high value contrast, and deliberately crude carving of the African-inspired Die Brücke, although, crucially, it is devoid of their pessimistic view of modern, urban life. And not all of his non-European influences were arrived at second-hand, since the gridded structures of Knudsen’s cityscapes may even find parallels in the Non-Western rugs he saw as a child and collected as an adult: “[a]s a young boy, John Knudsen used to sprawl out on one of his aunt’s Oriental rugs and pretend its geometric patterns were streets for his toy cars.” Knudsen’s reinvention of Regionalism, then, is an apparent paradox: the local is informed by the global.
Ultimately, however, one must turn back from this long list of intercontinental influences toward the local. In 1968 and again in 1971, Knudsen exhibited work in the Art Institute’s annual juried “Artists of Chicago and Vicinity” exhibitions. In this important regional competition, his work was shown alongside the likes of Ed Paschke, Karl Wirsum, and Roger Brown. These contemporaries, who brought Chicago art to national attention and whose work was also figurative, could not have escaped Knudsen’s notice, and relationships with Brown’s work can be noted in Knudsen’s frequently silhouetted forms of train, bus, and taxi occupants within geometric framing windows.
“John A. Knudsen: Retrospective” affords a unique investigation into the intricate, whimsical, metropolitan worlds of John Knudsen, where nostalgic optimism for the urbanscapes of the American heartland take center stage. Knudsen’s reinterpretation of Depression-era Regionalism celebrates manmade environments over the agricultural and replaces a previously insular style with a more outward-looking set of sophisticated artistic references. In Knudsen’s oeuvre, the skyline replaces the agricultural, and Chicago becomes the new icon of Americana, the new American Gothic.
Karen Patterson is a Professor of Art History at Harper College.