Ed Paschke; NY Times obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
Ed Paschke, Painter, 65, Dies; Pop Artist With Dark Vision
By ROBERTA SMITH
Ed Paschke, a well-known Chicago painter whose neon colors,
zombielike figures, acid-toned Kool-Aid formalism and love
of urban subcultures brought a distinctively dark vision to
Pop Art, died on Thursday at his home in Chicago. He was 65.
The cause was heart failure, said his son, Marc.
Along with Jim Nutt, Peter Saul and to some extent Ed
Ruscha, Mr. Paschke was an artist whose contribution to the
art of his time was somewhat obscured by his distance from
New York. As with Paul Klee's assimilation of Cubism, his
version of Pop Art proved that an art movement's ideas need
not weaken as they spread outward.Like Mr. Nutt, Mr. Paschke
was associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists
whose intensely mannered figurative styles borrowed from
popular culture, outsider art and Surrealism. But Mr.
Paschke was alone among them in basing his images on
photographs culled from television, newspaper and magazines.
One of the first artists to paint using an opaque projector,
he was crucially influenced by the photo-based paintings of
Andy Warhol, whom he considered the most important of all
postwar artists. This admiration had an indelible effect on
his best-known student, Jeff Koons.
In a telephone interview yesterday, Mr. Koons, who studied
with Mr. Paschke at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago and worked as his studio assistant, said:"Ed Paschke
taught me what it meant to be a professional artist. His
paintings are like drugs, but in a good way: they are among
the strongest physical images that I've ever seen. They
affect you neurologically."
A lanky man with a courtly, self-deprecating manner, Mr.
Paschke was considered an outstanding teacher. He had taught
at Northwestern University in the department of art theory
and practice since 1976.
Edward Francis Paschke Jr. was born in Chicago in 1939, and
seems to have been an instinctive urbanite; as a child, he
itched to get back to the city whenever his father's varied
career took the family to the suburbs or briefly to a farm
in Wisconsin. His early art influences included the
caricatures his father drew on letters home from Europe
while serving in the occupation forces immediately after
World War II.
After excelling at art and athletics in high school, where
he contributed cartoons to the school paper, he earned a
bachelor of fine arts degree from the Art Institute of
Chicago in 1961. His first serious employment as an artist
was illustrating fiction and nonfiction for Playboy
magazine, which he did intermittently until 1989.
Mr. Paschke's encounters with the margins of American life
were varied and formative. In the early 1960's he spent time
in New York filming people he found "bizarre and
interesting" in bars in Harlem or on the Lower East Side,
usually in exchange for a drink. In Chicago he visited bars
and nightclubs in different neighborhoods in a car full of
jackets, changing clothes according to the clientele.
Attempting to avoid the draft, he worked as an aide in a
psychiatric center, which he said "left a great mark on my
soul." While serving in the Army in Louisana from 1962 to
1964, he was part of a detail that tracked AWOL soldiers
throughout the backcountry of the South.
His early paintings focused on movie stars, wrestlers and
circus freaks of all kinds, their appearances exaggerated by
illustrational precision, strange textures and inharmonious
colors. He painted Marilyn Monroe as a green-faced accordion
player and Claudette Colbert as a tattooed lady. As he
developed, identifiable personalities gave way to blank
faces and silhouettes. These were not so much images as
afterimages that seemed to have burned through one scrimlike
layer of color to reveal another. His surfaces were further
defined by horizontal bands, staticky patterns and flitting
lines of color that reflected an attention to electronic
media. His brooding fluorescent tones, often painted over
black grounds, kept pace with the palette of color video
exploited by artists from Bruce Nauman to Matthew Barney. I
In the last 15 years of his life Mr. Paschke reworked his
layers and voids of color into portraits of George
Washington, Adolf Hitler, Elvis Presley, Abraham Lincoln and
Osama bin Laden. Mr. Paschke's work is in the collections of
major museums in the United States and abroad. He had his
first solo show at the Deson-Zaks Gallery in Chicago in 1970
and his first New York show at Hundred Acres in SoHo in
1971. From 1977 to 1996 he exhibited regularly with the
Phyllis Kind Gallery, in both Chicago and New York. The
first retrospective of his work was at the Pompidou Center
in 1989. His most recent exhibitions were in September and
October at the Maya Polsky Gallery in Chicago and the
Galerie Darthea Speyer in Paris.
In addition to his son Marc, of San Francisco, Mr. Paschke
is survived by his mother, Waldrine of Grand Rapids, Mich.;
his wife, Nancy, and his daughter, Sharon, of Chicago; and
one granddaughter.