John Wilde, 86, Painter Of Surreal Comic Images
Hyfler/Rosner
March 18, 2006 Saturday
Ken Johnson
John Wilde, 86, Painter Of Surreal Comic Images
http://www.spanierman.com/wilde/wilde030099_m.htm
http://www.spanierman.com/wilde/wilde_john_040198c_m.htm
http://www.news.wisc.edu/3298.html
(The New York Times example was more...staid.)
John Wilde, an American surrealist associated with the Magic
Realist school of painting, whose fantastic, darkly humorous
images brought him fame far beyond his native Wisconsin,
died on March 9 at his home in Cooksville. He was 86.
The cause was cancer, said his dealer, Tory Folliard of the
Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee.
Mr. Wilde (pronounced WILL-dee) dedicated his six-decade
career to painting, with an exacting touch, narratives
involving grotesque, doll-like people in otherworldly
situations. He was inspired partly by Salvador Dali and
partly by Northern Renaissance masters like Bosch and
Grunewald.
Mr. Wilde often painted himself into his pictures, giving
himself a weirdly oversized and misshapen head. He also
created intensely detailed, colorful and mysteriously
glowing still lifes.
Although he lived his whole life in Wisconsin -- except for
a wartime stint in the Army -- Mr. Wilde rejected the
regionalism of artists like Grant Wood and John Steuart
Curry. Instead he became part of a loose community of
like-minded Midwesterners -- including Marshall Glasier, his
teacher at the University of Wisconsin, and the
Chicago-based fantasy painter Gertrude Abercrombie -- who
advocated idiosyncratic and freely imaginative forms of
expression. His paintings also relate to those of New
York-based Magic Realists like Paul Cadmus and George
Tooker. For Mr. Wilde's solo exhibition in New York at the
Edwin Hewitt Gallery in 1950, the ballet impresario Lincoln
Kirstein, a friend of Cadmus and the New York Magic
Realists, wrote the brochure text.
Paintings by Mr. Wilde were included in ''Surrealism USA,''
a major exhibition at the National Academy Museum in New
York last year. Currently two shows of Mr. Wilde's works are
on view: at Spanierman Gallery in New York and at Tory
Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee.
John Henry Wilde was born on Dec. 12, 1919, in Milwaukee. He
studied art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and
served as an artist in the Army from 1942 to 1946, producing
drawings for its venereal disease prevention program and
maps and terrain models for intelligence.
After the war, Mr. Wilde returned to the University of
Wisconsin, where he earned a master's degree in art history
with a thesis on Max Ernst. He began teaching studio art at
the University of Wisconsin in 1948 and continued to do so
until his retirement in 1982.
Mr. Wilde's first wife, Helen, died in 1966. He is survived
by his second wife, Shirley, his children Jonathan and
Phoebe Wilde, and his stepchildren Robert, Dorian and
Rinalda Grilley.