9/22

RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITION TO EXPLORE THOMAS CHIMES

SS/JAR SET 9/5

PHILADELPHIA, PENN. — In spring 2007, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will present a comprehensive, 50-year retrospective exhibition devoted to the art of Thomas Chimes. On view from February 25–May 6, “Thomas Chimes: A Retrospective” will present approximately 75 paintings and works on paper created throughout the artist’s life. The first full-scale review of the artist’s work since 1986, it will bring together many previously unseen paintings, along with important biographical and archival materials such as sketchbooks and photographs, to provide a fresh look at Chimes’ life and work.

“We are delighted to present this long overdue examination of the career of a protean artist who has been long revered in Philadelphia and who has brought a unique voice and perspective to some of the most important artistic issues of the last half-century,” said Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This retrospective will offer our visitors an opportunity to consider the distinctive stages of Tom Chimes’ career as a whole and the full scope of his achievement.”

The exhibition will open with an examination of Chimes’ early landscapes and his first experiments with abstraction in the late 1950s. By the 1960s, Chimes had moved on to canvases that combined landscape imagery with specific symbols such as stars, ladders and crucifixes. Soon Chimes began making austere, finely crafted metal boxes, often incorporating small symbolic drawings, paintings or even hidden messages. Chimes’ mixed media constructions from the 1970s reflect strong affinity with the wit and eroticism of Duchamp’s machine imagery of the 1910s, as well as the poetic box constructions of Joseph Cornell.

The heart of the exhibition will consist of Chimes’ extensive series, from 1974 to 1978, of 48 intimate, sepia toned portraits of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century poets, novelists, playwrights and artists, including Edgar Allen Poe, James Joyce, Alfred Jarry and Marcel Duchamp. Each iconic portrait, reminiscent of a Nineteenth Century daguerreotype, is contained within an oversized wooden frame of the type constructed for some of the paintings of fellow Philadelphian Thomas Eakins, whose work Chimes greatly admired.

These panel paintings were directly inspired by the artist’s profound interest in the writings of Jarry, the iconoclastic French author of the notorious play Ubu Roi 1896, and one of the most revered literary figures in Chimes’ pantheon. For him, Jarry represented the spirit of continual transformation and Chimes was especially interested in the author’s invention of pataphysics, which Jarry defined as “the science of imaginary solutions,” and which the writer used to create an alternative universe.

The concluding section will feature the luminous white paintings that Chimes has been producing since the mid-1970s. These ethereal paintings are created through the application of layers of colored glaze worked into a white ground, which is then wiped away to leave only a glowing suggestion of figures and faces of Chimes’ subjects. In 1999, he began his latest series of paintings, which measure just 3 by 3 inches, and continue the artist’s interest in Jarry and portraiture. These works often take the form of medallions in which the French author is barely recognizable beneath the layers of paint that partially obscure his features.

Born in Philadelphia in 1921 and educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1939, Columbus University and the Art Students League in New York, 1946–48, Thomas Chimes is widely considered one of Philadelphia’s most important living artists. In 1975, his work was included in the Whitney Biennial and in the following year he was represented in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition “Three Centuries of American Art.”

His work is included in many major American museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., the Phoenix Art Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A fully illustrated 200-page catalog, published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will accompany the exhibition.