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By Root 228 0

and smoked and sketched at taverns around the city. He painted prostitutes and junkies, recent immigrants and blues singers. And he ventured out into the streets as well. He met an aging jazz piano player, Emile, who because of his musical prowess was known as the King of Clark Street; one of Guinan’s paintings is of Emile sitting in his home, shoulders hunched, stomach flabby, playing his piano naked. Another of his subjects was Sister Carrie, an evangelist, who could usually be found at the Maxwell Street Market on Sunday mornings, jumping and shaking as she sang and banged on her tambourine. He captured people riding the El, sleeping and gazing out the window. He painted two boys climbing out of Lake Michigan under the shimmering light of street lamps. There’s one painting in which, like voyeurs, we peek through the windows of the Fine Arts Building downtown, watching lithe young ballerinas in leotards and tutus practicing their routines. He drew a portrait of Mike, who ran a small dry cleaners that had become a neighborhood gathering spot, and he painted the women who used the back of Mike’s shop to clean vegetables. He sketched the regal-looking African-American poet Margaret Danner, and boxing night at the Union League Club, where men in white shirts and ties and women in evening gowns watch young black and Hispanic men pummel each other to the mat.

Guinan does everything from small pencil sketches to large oils, some of which sell for as much as sixty thousand dollars. Taken together, his work, which has been compared to Edward Hopper’s, comprises an astonishing collective portrait of the city. Where Hopper painted with strong, luminous colors, Guinan’s work is muted and filled with extraordinary detail. In one portrait of Sister Carrie at her home, you can make out the mismatched, makeshift drapes covering the window and the ripped, layered linoleum on the floor. Dressed in her white domestic’s uniform from the hotel where she worked, Sister Carrie sits erect in a fragile-looking wooden chair, her tambourine in her lap. You can sense her economic struggles and her strong bearing. The International Herald Tribune once wrote that Guinan portrays “a world of desolate dignity.” An art dealer I spoke with said of Guinan’s work that it feels familiar—not the artistry, but the people and places. There’s an intimacy about his portraits that lets you feel that you know, or think you know, his subjects.

Guinan’s work, as you might have gathered, is quite popular, although not in Chicago, where he’s virtually unknown. But in France.

Guinan is originally from upstate New York and served a three-year peacetime stint in the army in Tripoli and Ankara as a radio operator. There, he fancied himself a Toulouse-Lautrec and sketched local peasants, imitating Toulouse-Lautrec’s nervous brush strokes, which he later abandoned for a more disciplined, naturalistic style. He arrived in Chicago in 1959 to attend the School of the Art Institute, and a friend took him to Maxwell Street, an introduction that altered his life. Maxwell Street may have been one of the most exhilarating, industrious, and productive open street bazaars in the world. Begun in 1874 by Jewish merchants (in the same neighborhood as Manny’s), it gradually became a hodgepodge collection of Jews, Mexicans, and African-Americans. (In its later years, the kids I knew from the West Side referred to it as Jewtown, even though by then most of the merchants were black.) On Sunday mornings, blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf played on the sidewalks, plugging their amps into the adjacent apartment buildings. Old men sold weathered National Geographic magazines, used picture frames, rusted tools, and assorted hardware such as nails and screws. On occasion, you could find new clothes and phonographs, though it was best not to ask where they came from. Samuel and Raymond Popeil, who eventually went on to invent the Veg-O-Matic and the Pocket Fisherman, honed their salesmanship techniques at Maxwell Street by hawking kitchenware. Street vendors barbecued Polish