The Magus of Masonite: Christina Ramberg’s Retrospective at the Art Institute

Chaos ruled Chicago for a week in August of 1968 during that year’s ill-fated Democratic National Convention. The unstoppable force of antiwar sentiment boiled over in large-scale protests, where it met the immovable object of Chicago’s imperious and belligerent police force. Deep in the city, a crowd gathered, eyes smeared with oil to ward off tear gas. But instead of preparing for battle like the rest of the city, they had amassed at the home of Art Institute curator James Speyer to witness a different, more solemn event: the marriage of two young artists and students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. One of those two was Christina Ramberg, whose wedding was, no doubt, a portent of her artistic output: she’d make a habit of invoking solemn beauty where it’s least expected. The retrospective of her work at the Art Institute—the first since the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society in 1988—is sure to inspire young artists possessing the creative fervor that she had.

Ramberg was born to an Army-officer father and a music-teacher mother in Kentucky. Her early childhood saw brief stints in Germany and Japan, the latter of which would leave an indelible impact. Throughout Ramberg’s childhood she possessed a tall frame—her sister Debbie remarked in an interview that “she was so much taller than all the boys”—and unusually large feet, for which she had to purchase shoes from specialized catalogs. Her uncommon physical traits led her to think a great deal about her own body and how she presented it, subjects central to her later oeuvre.

The tail end of Ramberg’s secondary education came in the northern Illinois town of Highwood, where she attended Highland Park High School. Her first encounter with the School of the Art Institute came after her junior year, when she attended a fateful summer class downtown, and from then on, SAIC became a home of sorts. There, in informal friend groups, she made first contact with the witty and unrestrained coterie of artists she eventually became a celebrated member of: the Chicago Imagists.

While it may seem miraculous to look back at the proliferation of cutting-edge representational work that emerged from SAIC in the late sixties, some of its causes are easily identifiable. Two faculty members were particularly influential: Ray Yoshida, a visual artist with a massive curio collection and a desire to cultivate “ideas that were not necessarily art school things”; and Whitney Halstead, a feminist professor of art history who championed the representational work of self-taught artists like Joseph Yoakum. The idea that everyday life was suitable breeding ground for great art was, while not completely institutionalized, a galvanizing presence which certain faculty members imparted to voracious students.

Chicago in the late sixties was by no means the modal artistic milieu. Provincial relative to the then-capital of modernism, New York, Chicago provided an environment that was carefree but not unserious. Somehow, in a time when the global world was unshakeable in its devotion to Great Men, a kind of egalitarianism emerged among Chicago’s artists. One Imagist, Sarah Canright, looks back on the fortuitous circumstance: “I don’t think we [women art students] had thought of ourselves as being an underclass, or disadvantaged, and we really weren’t. I honestly think that Chicago was unique in its gender equity at the time… It was a shock when I moved to New York to be taken less seriously, cut out of the dialogue.” Canright also speaks of the massively influential annual American Exhibit which took place at the Art Institute, in which James Speyer assembled the greatest hits of the national art scene. Stark juxtapositions resulted. Peter Saul’s grotesque and ridiculous figures hung next to the self-aggrandizing monochromes of Ellsworth Kelly. It became clear that no one narrative or style could be truly dominant. “There was no fixed aesthetic,” Canright remarks. “Things could change and they would change. It gave a kind of permission to be yourself.”

And that’s exactly what Ramberg did. Early in her career she used flat pictorial space—a convention then reserved for cerebral abstractions—to portray the intricacies of the female body. Her medium, too, was unconventional: she used acrylic paint on cheaply available Masonite. The retrospective’s most compelling representative of this period of Ramberg’s oeuvre is “Hair,” sixteen depictions of the backs of female heads Ramberg created in 1968. Her rendering of hair is convincing without being tangible, a quality which lends these images a breathtaking stillness. The flatness of her figures lends them an air of matter-of-factness that abstains from total objectivity. Even at such a formative moment in her career, Ramberg’s work was unique: the textures she rendered and the aura she conjured couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Stylistically, her work changed very little in the decades to come. “She was fully formed at a very young age,” recalls Canright. That’s not to say Ramberg’s work didn’t evolve—it did, as her paintings became larger and the arrangements of female bodies they depicted became more contrived. But the primary subject of her work and the facture with which she rendered it was selected at a very early point in her career. (Think of Mozart’s variations on the tune we know as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” A bare-bones melody is introduced, then morphed by progressively more drastic augmentations, but even in the bombastic late variations, the initial melody can be heard, clear as day.)

In addition to serving as an emblem of Ramberg’s stylistic niche, “Hair” exemplifies an experimental tendency of hers. Compositionally, the images in “Hair” are quite similar: the back of a woman’s head is shown. A hand reaches toward the hair. Repeat sixteen times. There are, however, slight variations. Much like a scientist would, Ramberg calculatedly alters select variables: hair color (black, brown, or both), hairstyle (straight/curly, short/long, homogenous/polymorphous), and the direction by which each hand approaches (down from the left side, up from the right side, etc.). By simply tweaking these formal traits, Ramberg is able to achieve a remarkable variety of sensation in viewers. For instance, the fourth entry (black; straight, long, homogenous; up from the right side) holds the ordinary intimacy of a self-care routine while the fourteenth (both; straight, long, polymorphous; straight from the right side) seems to color the viewer as an intrusive voyeur. The many pages of Ramberg’s notebook drawings portray obtrusive garments and impossibly contorted limbs undergoing the same slight visual modifications, showcasing the uncannily economical method by which she could alter a picture’s content. “[Her drawings are] a great way to talk about how content comes out of form,” remarks Rebecca Shore, a student and lifelong friend of Ramberg. “With Christina’s work you can say… be interested in something visual, but then play with it and see how the content changes.”

After he’d successfully promoted the group of six Chicago Imagists known as the Hairy Who, Don Baum, the director of the Hyde Park Art Center, was hungry for a new crop of artists. In 1968 he platformed a group dubbed the False Image, consisting of Ramberg, Philip Hanson (her newlywed husband), Roger Brown and Eleanor Dube. The show provided crucial affirmation of the visual path Ramberg was going down—it made her realize that “there was a place for us in the world,” she said in an interview. Propelled by the momentum of her HPAC show, she springboarded into the seventies with a new level of creative zeal.

Her figurative output of the early seventies consists of female subjects in profile or from behind, usually pictured from the bottom of the head to the top of the knees. Each woman’s skin is an ethereal off-white—similar to the uniform white skin tone used in Japanese figure paintings—and their bodies are adorned in elaborate garments. Ramberg’s fixation on clothing had to do with an oft-cited childhood experience: “I can remember sitting in my mother’s room watching her getting dressed for public appearances. She would wear these—I guess that they are called ‘Merry Widow’—and I can remember being stunned by how it transformed her body, how it pushed up her breasts and slendered down her waist… I think the paintings have a lot to do with this, with watching and realizing that a lot of these undergarments totally transform a woman’s body. Watching my mother getting dressed I used to think that this is what men want women to look like, she’s transforming herself into the kind of body men want. I thought it was fascinating… In some ways, I thought it was awful.” Traces of this formative experience are palpable in her “Black Widow” of 1971, which depicts a ponytailed woman whose face has been obscured in the process of putting on or taking off an abdominal garment. She wears the same “Merry Widow” corset a young Ramberg had seen her mother don. Ramberg’s paintings in this vein are frequently interpreted through a feminist perspective: by depicting the expectations our society places solely upon women—skinny waists, plump breasts, magnificent hairdos—in such an abject, dispassionate way, these constraints are revealed to be utterly ridiculous.

And while this is a valid interpretation—works like “Black Widow” and “Waiting Lady” undeniably reveal certain garments to be agents of female subjection rather than empowerment—it can’t be the sole lens through which these works are viewed. The clothing of these women has been painted with the utmost care and attention to detail. Painstaking ornaments have been included: in “Black Widow,” a beaded necklace hangs around the subject’s neck, a delicate embroidered rose lies on the front of her corset, and a tadpole pattern can be seen in the pellucid lace which coats her torso. Figures painted with such precision and sensuality are clearly meant to impart a greater truth, one of the kind you can’t state in a sentence with an endpoint. (Canright mentioned that Ramberg’s language was almost solely visual: “I honestly don’t know how comfortable she would’ve been as a young person describing what she was doing [in her art].” And who could blame her? The upfrontness of her paintings is untranslatable into conventional forms of language.) Viewing these works, you’ll likely be speechless. “Christina’s work is profoundly still… It’s like a meditation, almost,” observes Canright. They are flat, small, and ask nothing of you but to look. When you oblige, you’ll be taken aback by how beautiful something completely devoid of presumption can be.

The mid-seventies brought significant developments in Ramberg’s artistic output. She eschewed her previous anatomically plausible figures in favor of more schematic illustrations of the human body. These new torsos were stripped of ornamentation and thrown against bleak gray backgrounds with entire limbs missing. This shift likely had to do with the first of two pregnancies during the seventies, which tragically ended in a stillbirth.

“Tight Hipped” and “Gloved” of 1974 use only two surfaces—lustrous hair and black lace—to constitute their central figures. Even then, these textures don’t appear where you would expect. The subject of the former is shown with shoulders, forearms, spine, buttocks and thighs covered with taut rows of hair while the rest of its torso, legs and arms are rendered with lace-covered skin—what sort of human would appear this way? Is this thing alive? These figures can’t answer your pleas, either. The distal parts of their arms possess no hands, and no head lies on top of their shoulders. If portraits by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon appear morbid because they depict discernibly human forms with such hatred or lust that they seem to become amorphous amoebic blobs, Ramberg’s method in these paintings is exactly the reverse: her figures don’t possess the features necessary to be plainly identified as human, but are painted with such carefree detachment that we almost forget how innately grotesque they are.

1976 saw Ramberg give birth to her and Phil Hanson’s first (and only) son, Alexander. In ensuing paintings, her figures were no longer malformed, but recognizably feminine. Many even show a neck and head emerging from the subject’s shoulders, something that would’ve been unthinkable a couple years prior. In paintings like “Schizophrenic Discovery,” only half of the subject is painted with anatomical accuracy, while the other consists of sharp fragments of a wooden chair. It’s possible Ramberg’s pregnancies—one of which ended in heartbreak, the other in a thriving baby boy—are represented in the contrasting halves of this subject. (Another of her paintings depicting a half-constituted figure is titled “Hereditary Uncertainty,” more directly suggesting a link between this visual motif and her childbearing experience.)

Familial worries assailed Ramberg during the late seventies. It was during this time that she and Phil stopped living together. Though the two remained lifelong friends, their separation no doubt prompted a great deal of mental turbulence for Ramberg. In the face of this adversity, her paintings were remarkably bright. Her previously muted palette saw the introduction of bright blues and luminous reds. The figural works Ramberg produced in the late seventies—in which a myriad of textures and objects constitute her subjects—are arguably the most visually stimulating paintings she ever created.

The subject of “Sedimentary Disturbance” is composed of, among other things, a burnt sienna jacket, some ribbed fabric from a green sweater, fragments of a wooden chair, and three distinct patterns of black lace. The flesh-and-blood human around which much of her previous work revolved is now absent. All that demarcates these figures are eclectic mixes of clothing. Ramberg had long taken an interest in rendering the impossible. One of her exercises as a teacher at SAIC asked students to create “drawings of objects in which the function is denied.” For instance, “How would a comb that cannot untangle hair look?” Her inclination toward absurd, inexplicable imagery is clearly at work in these paintings: their subject is patently ridiculous—jumbles of garments could obviously never gain consciousness as they appear to here—but they’re rendered with such earnest care that we can’t help but see ourselves in them.

In 1984, Ramberg visited Japan on a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, her first trip to the country since her childhood sojourn. One of her greatest finds there came in Kyoto, where she bought a great amount of striped kimono fabric. This purchase didn’t serve her painterly work, which she had then grown frustrated with: “Wt [what] is wrong with current ptgs [paintings]?” she asked herself in her journal, where she castigated them as “distant” and “removed.” Instead, the fabric fueled her latest artistic endeavor: quilting. With friend and one-time student Rebecca Shore, Ramberg had embraced the craft to get away from the pressure that came with the painterly medium: “Unlike the painting world, where individuality and originality is a big part of how painting gets evaluated—that kind of weight was really lifted in the way that we approached making quilts,” reminisces Shore. Quilting may have lifted the burden of individuality, but that’s not to say Ramberg’s fertile sensibility didn’t manage to shine through in her quilts.

“Charlie Kreiner Quilt” is a standout work for the incongruous variety of patterns and hues seen throughout the piece. It contains twelve square-shaped blocks, each of which encloses an elaborate X-like pattern—Ramberg’s lifelong ability to assemble eclectic textures into a predetermined form, a skill especially apparent in her late figural paintings, is plainly on display here. “Japanese Showcase,” which was presumably made using the aforementioned kimono fabric, contains twenty blocks of a more stripped-down “X” motif. One might expect this work to feel different than those of Ramberg’s painterly oeuvre, but the two share an aura of tangible comfort. Both seem utterly discontent with meeting the viewer in the middle, opting rather to embrace them—in her quilts through the warmth they’re meant to provide, and in her paintings with a sensual and humanistic facture.

Ramberg’s frustration with her paintings culminated in a series of radically new “satellite paintings.” Monochromatic and rigidly diagrammatic, they represented her first painterly forays outside of figuration. Though ambitious, it’s hard not to see them as tragic in light of the events they preceded. In the mid-to-late eighties, Ramberg’s behavior became erratic. Phil Hanson recalls, “Christina began having problems. People would call, and she couldn’t really talk, so she’d say she was tired and had to lie down. Once in the middle of a meeting with the president at SAIC, she had to lie down. Everyone knew something was off.” On a trip to São Paulo with Rebecca Shore for a showing of some Chicago artists’ quilts, Shore recalls that Ramberg “was acting very bizarre and difficult.” Eventually, her mother Norma persuaded her to admit herself to a hospital for observation. A month later, a diagnosis came. It was Pick’s disease: a progressive form of dementia which affects a younger segment of the population than Alzheimer’s. A life sentence. Soon, Ramberg wasn’t able to take care of herself. Phil Hanson took her in, but soon he, too, wasn’t able to perform the tasks she required. In 1995, she passed away in a dementia-care facility at the age of forty-nine.

Given what followed their production, many wonder if the stylistic change seen in Ramberg’s “satellite paintings” is attributable to the onset of the disease. “They don’t have the level of patience that it took to make the kind of details that were in her earlier paintings,” notes Shore. Seeing as I’m a journalist and not a neurologist, I can’t offer an opinion on that front. I can, however, attest to the poignancy of the muted lines and obsessively arranged shapes with which she rendered radio towers and satellite dishes. It’s as if the creative, order-seeking parts of her mind were fighting to be seen, before their dying embers were extinguished at last. A couple words of advice for curious viewers: first, for the love of God, do not look at these as traditional abstract paintings, which are essentially the fulfillment of a theoretical framework. Ramberg was concerned with visual phenomena and the ways in which they can be ordered, constricted and made to contradict themselves, not the brainy principles the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg busied themselves with. (As Canright boldly asserts of the Imagists, “We weren’t theoretical. We didn’t have a theory.”) Second, bring some tissues. You’ll need them.

In her brief career, Ramberg explored a fruitful range of themes, pictorial and social, in the multiple mediums in which she worked. While we can’t help but mourn what could have been if she hadn’t been taken from us so prematurely, the Art Institute’s retrospective makes apparent what a miracle her existence was in the first place. Let us celebrate this brilliant mind.

“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan, on view through August 11.