Corbett vs. Dempsey

Robert Amft has been painting, making sculptures and taking photographs in Chicago since the 1930s, when he was a favorite student of Francis Chapin (and studied with Albert Krehbiel, Boris Anisfeld, and Louis Ritman) at the School of the Art Institute. But Amft is a bona fide original, an artist with a deft sense of humor and a highly personal visual language. His work represents a sort of "missing link" between the midwest regionalists, social realists and European-minded postimpressionists on one hand and subsequent generations of Chicago imagists on the other. Because of his age - he's just turned 88 - his initial artistic colleagues were all associated with the waning years of modernism in Chicago, but Amft was busy pursuing certain ideas that set him apart from other '40s and '50s painters and sculptors, and aspects of his early work vividly presage tendencies associated with the members of the Hairy Who, the False Image and other post-60s Chicago artists. Critic Franz Schulze has written that before the mid-60s, Chicago artists used art-historical reference in a way that was "both serious and unironic in intent," and further that the "celebration and mimicking of naive, so-called 'outsider' art is a preoccupation of later Chicagoans, hardly of the 1950s group."

Russell Bowman has also noted later imagists' "interest in gritty urban sources, popular art, and the work of untrained artists" as distinct from earlier generations, including the so-called "Monster Roster." Robert Amft is a glaring exception to these rules-of-thumb. Amft's work directly out of school, in the early '40s, was expressionistic and loose, like the monsters would be ten years hence, but also playful, funny, self-referential, absurd, and gently ironic, like the imagists fifteen years after that, and his work was, contrary to Schulze's dictum, directly influenced by his interest in self-taught painters, an activity primed by Amft's encounter with Sidney Janis' book They Taught Themselves in 1942. (Note that this was nine years before Jean Dubuffet's influential 1951 art brut presentation at the Chicago Arts Club.) Some years later, on a fishing trip to Wisconsin, Amft met and befriended self-taught artist Fred Smith, and Amft's marvelous photos of Smith's concrete sculptures are widely circulated, as are his documents of other Wisconsin self-taught artists.Amft's immersion in the world of self-taught artists is highly unusual for this period, particularly combined as it is with a highly refined color sensibility and an encyclopedic knowledge of American and European painting traditions.

In the middle '40s, Amft spent a concentrated period as a surrealist, during which he made some undeniably bizarre and rich canvases, often based on the landscape of New Orleans, where he lived and taught in 1947-48. Amft's paintings in these first two decades were, as well, sometimes ensconsed in a complicated commentary on art history; he did wildly revamped versions of pieces by Picasso and Van Gogh, loaded with irony but also designed as loving tributes, and this practice continued into his middle-period, which unlike his early work was widely exhibited and reviewed around Chicago and elsewhere. Another unusual feature of Amft's paintings before 1950 was his development of the compilation painting. Partially conceived as a composition problem and partially as space-saving device for a cramped apartment, these "best of" canvases compiled several of Amft's favorite of his own extant paintings into the space of a single picture, reconciling the heterogeneous images and blending them into a unified composition, but leaving surreal contrasts in scale, style and perspective. Some ten or so of these unusual pieces, which serve as a sort of personal registry of the importance of some of his work to the artist, still exist.

Since the late '50s Amft has often worked serially. His many years as a professional designer lent his painting after the late '40s a more architectural quality - his astonishing gridlike midwest landscapes, which were shown in New York in the late '50s, startlingly anticipate the repetitions, patterns and stylizations of Roger Brown. In the '60s, as other painters began to investigate outsider art and ironic humor, Amft took his explorations even deeper into such terrain, creating classic pieces (like his most famous, "Head," from the mid-70s, which uses a very large image of Mona Lisa, a cigarette dangling casually from her lips), some of them slickly painted using airbrush and stencils. Amft's work as a sculptor expanded dramatically after the 1960s, as well, and he continues to make incredible assembleges - always figural, often animal - forged out of discarded objects. Amft has explored unusual approaches to photography (using prisms and handmade lens attachments) and over the last decade he has created an astonishing corpus of erotic watercolors, the explicitness of which is countered (and accented) by the lushness of his technique. Only a limited part of Amft's vast oeuvre is presented on this website; please contact Corbett vs. Dempsey for information on additional paintings, sculptures, photographs, prints and drawings.