Celebrating a local master of the ‘pugnacious human scene’

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"Urban Saint," 2001, by Robert Donley

Updated: October 6, 2011 5:18PM

The early 1960s in Chicago was a heady (pun intended) time for artists. The psychedelia that permeated rock music was leaking into other aesthetic areas and Chicago’s visual art was reflecting that influence in a big way. The Hairy Who-style Imagists threw themselves into it with reckless abandon, creating paintings that contained bright, saturated colors and surrealistic figuration exhibiting explicit sexual freedom.

While not all of the Chicago’s figurative artists immersed themselves completely into that movement, some of them — like Robert Donley — toyed with it from a safe distance. In fact, most of the many figures crammed into Donley’s paintings are seen from just that vantage point: a cool, safe distance.

A teacher at DePaul University for 33 years and chair of the art department there for a dozen of them, Donley was an abiding presence on the Chicago art scene, yet he remains little known to the greater art world. “Robert Donley: Urban Voices” opening at Harper College hopes in its own small way to rectify that situation.

Art of the crowd

Donley’s paintings from the
late 1950s and early ’60s were minimalist works that often explored abstract, circular forms. After segueing into a brief period of figurative expressionism in the late ’60s, he embarked upon an approach that would remain with him into the present: the exploration of masses of tiny figures packed into expansive landscapes or cityscapes.

“My style matured in the early ’70s and was associated with the Chicago Imagists,” reported Donley, who now lives in Portland, Oregon. “I feel my later work is more related to the realist fantasy image. My work has been involved with many themes: nature, history, war, urban life, people, and at present, nature again — dealing with the Northwest Coast area.”

After retiring, he relocated to Portland three years ago to be closer to his grandchildren.

Jason Peot of Elmhurst, a sculpture professor at Harper College and the curator of “Robert Donley: Urban Voices,” recalled: “Robert Donley was the chair of the art department and one of my first professors in 1990 at DePaul University, where I took a couple of his classes. Part of the reason I like his work is because of my own history with it. He was fascinating to me both as a professor and as a professional role model of a working artist. I started over time to see the value of the work.”

When asked whom he might consider his own role model in the art world, Donley replied, “I don’t have any heroes in art, but my interest is in the history of art.”

Teeming scenes

Indeed, his work has been compared to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and fellow Chicagoan Roger Brown, but John Russell of the New York Times probably came up with the best description of his work: “Imagine the Bayeux Tapestry seen through the wrong end of a telescope, and you will have an approximate idea of the teeming and endlessly pugnacious human scene that Robert Donley sets before us ... It has the fascinaion of perpetual motion.”

Peot curated the show as a mini-survey of work from the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s.

“I wanted to focus on his Chicago years,” said Peot. “There are eight paintings in the show spanning 30 years. The most recent piece is from 2008 and he did this one just before moving. I do see some evolution in format and compositional structure, going from the early work that is more spatially flat to later work that is deeper in perspective and sometimes takes almost a birds-eye view. His style now is less dense.

“I also see changes in how he’s orienting buildings and clusters of human figures. The city surrounds people or people surround buildings. The most recent paintings have fewer figures. Sometimes the layout of streets is more in focus and other times grid goes out and away from you. Other times things are thrown forward as if on a projection screen. Over time, space gets deeper, broader and more open.”

Donley’s art rewards close study.

“His work is beautifully painted and contains many layers of meaning.” said Peot. “He’s one of the most underrated artists to come out of Chicago and certainly deserves to be more known.”