Press
ART: REVIEWS Exhibit highlights Chicago artist Hahn’s winged work from 1950s
[By Alan G. Artner Tribune art critic Published May 27, 2005]
The Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery is dedicated to the big picture of art in Chicago during the 20th Century by rediscovering figures who have not been accorded places in our few written histories.
Several of the artists died in oblivion and are in the process of exhumation. But Walter Hahn, the primary interest in a current three-person exhibition, is very much alive, pursuing long-held involvement with Asian culture and making collages he has yet to show.
Most of Hahn’s paintings and drawings on exhibit are from the 1950s, before he settled in New York. And they are worth seeing largely because of whom he knew (H.C. Westermann, Leon Golub) and who exerted influence (Paul Klee, Milton Avery).
However, after Hahn won a Prix de Rome in 1955, he embarked on a number of mythological works in which we watch him become more clearly his own man. The winged serpent pictures, sometimes edging into pure abstraction, are both personal and arresting. They visually stand on their own, requiring little of the written merit by association that the gallery likes to do. Shortly after the mythic pieces, Hahn apparently withdrew from the art world to become, among other things, an American master of the Japanese tea ceremony. His is a fascinating sensibility.
Works by Frank Vavruska and Frank Peterson from the same period flesh out the exhibition and unfortunately, it feels like that’s all they’re doing.
At 1120 N. Ashland Ave. 773-278-1664.