MADISON, WI.- The art and friendships of the American artists Gertrude Abercrombie, Sylvia Fein, Marshall Glasier, Dudley Huppler, Karl Priebe, and John Wilde. The show will include 104 works of art dating between 1940 and 1965. A selection of archival material—sketchbooks, postcards with original drawings, letters, photographs, and scrapbooks—will also be included. The exhibition, which will be the first intensive study of this close-knit group, will explore the artistic and personal relationships they shared. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will provide insight into a figurative branch of postwar American modernism that has been often neglected in favor of abstract expressionism. The exhibition is being organized for the Elvehjem Museum of Art by guest curator Robert Cozzolino.

This intellectual circle of six artists convened informally in Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois during the early 1940s to visit one another’s studios, area museums and galleries and participate in salons for drawing sessions, discussion, and music. Viewed separately, these artists seem rather disparate, but together there is an extraordinary, sometimes subtle, “ensemble” character. As a group, Abercrombie, Fein, Glasier, Huppler, Priebe, and Wilde concerned themselves with the body, issues of identity, psychology, and the wonder of nature in order to reflect on the state of the world and their own lives. They maintained an interest in craft, carefully studied traditional techniques, but tried to develop an iconography that expressed the complexity of modern life. Charismatic, intellectually curious, and with broad interests these artists formed the core of their cities’ cultural life. Musicians such as Harry Partch, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, or Max Roach sought them out and remained friends. In Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago their gatherings attracted young professors, musicians, activists, writers, and inspired novels. They exhibited throughout the United States and in New York gained friends and supporters that included George Grosz, Lincoln Kirstein, George Platt Lynes, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Carl van Vechten, and Andy Warhol.

Although this group originated in the Midwest, they shared these concerns with other artists of their generation working throughout the country. They were inspired by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century northern European and Italian art, but drew on the visual language of surrealism in combination with other styles, an approach often called “magic realism.” This term did not relate to an actual movement and was rejected by many artists and became a term of convenience used by curators and critics in the 1940s to describe “individuals” not associated with modernist movements. This exhibition explores the modern aspects of the artists labeled “magic realists” by focusing on this close group of friends. While they shared a sense of craft and interest in reviving older painting formulas the subject matter and intellectual sources of this group is rooted in the twentieth-century. Many of this group exhibited with and associated with other so-called magic realists Peter Blume, Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Bernard Perlin, or George Tooker, artists who cited similar inspiration and whose work shares formal similarities. The artists included in With Friends influenced a generation of younger artists working with irreverent subject matter, personal iconography, and issues of the body and sexuality such as The Hairy Who or Chicago Imagists. Despite their Midwestern roots they had ties to New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and exhibited widely. Many were influential teachers, widely respected by peers and students.