October 22, 2005 Through January 8, 2006
At The Fogg Art Museum (more about the Fogg)

Patricia and William Utermohlen, London, 2005. Photo: Donald Loze.

Born in Philadelphia in 1933, William Utermohlen trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. In 1962 he settled in London, and apart from several years of teaching at Amherst College, he has spent his career there. Along with artists like R. B. Kitaj and David Hockney, he participated in the pop-inflected renewal of figurative painting in London in the 1960s. His ambitious canvases blend mythology and world events into a contemporary kind of history painting.

In 1995 Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. His work had already begun to change. The careful observation and crisp handling he had cultivated for decades yielded to spatial distortion and rough textures. His self-portraits are both an index of and a reflection on the progress of his disease. As such they form a unique medical document while raising difficult questions of expression, realism, intention, and control in the making of art. They also stand as powerful works in their own right.

Organized by Harry Cooper, curator of modern art. This presentation of six paintings and six works on paper is made possible by the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair.