Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [34]
When the Maxwell Street Market was finally shut down in the late 1990s (there’s a new, more sanitized version now a few blocks east), Guinan was devastated. “I thought it was the end of the world,” he recalls. “They’re destroying what’s lovely about the city all for what? For condos.” This has become a theme for Guinan, a city disappearing, but he’s been saying it now for thirty years and so one begins to wonder if that isn’t simply the nature of urban landscapes, that they shift and erode over time. Guinan soon discovered the bars on Clark Street, what was then Skid Row, and then the taverns in Wicker Park, including Rite Liquors.
In the interim, Guinan was discovered by a French art dealer, Albert Loeb, who saw three of Guinan’s paintings at an art show in Switzerland. “It was a total surprise,” recalls Loeb. “It was realism. The first person I thought of was Courbet.” Gustave Courbet was a nineteenth-century French painter who, in an age when most art was idealized and historical, drew everyday villagers, in Courbet’s words, “as nature made them, without corrections.” (I mentioned to Guinan the comparison, and he laughed. His work does mirror Courbet’s, he said, except that the revolutionary Courbet saw his renderings as a political statement, which Guinan says “seems silly today.”) When Loeb contacted Guinan, it turned out that Guinan had only five other paintings. Over the years, he had burned everything else. “I just figured I wasn’t going anywhere,” he says.
Loeb sold one of his first Guinans to François Mitterrand, who was the head of the Socialist Party at the time and who bought a portrait of Emile sitting in his apartment by a space heater. Guinan’s paintings have since been purchased by museums in Lyon, Grenoble, and Paris. The French diplomatic corps display Guinan’s paintings in their embassies around the world. Two French filmmakers have made documentaries of Guinan; one of them, titled Division Street, filmed Guinan at Rite Liquors. Most recently, the actor Johnny Depp, who lives in France, stumbled upon Guinan’s work and purchased a portrait of a one-legged prostitute sitting at a bar called the J.N.L. (It was one of the rare occasions on which Guinan didn’t get his subject’s name; he ran out of money to pay her for her time.) Even Guinan’s biggest collector, Allison Davis, a Chicago developer, discovered Guinan during a vacation in Paris.
In Chicago, he’s essentially unknown. Unnoticed. Like an invisible man, he likes to say, citing the moniker penned by a local reporter. Only three Chicagoans own Guinan’s work. He has never had an exhibition here. Even with an occasional story over the years in the local press about Guinan, recognition for his work in the city has been elusive at best. When in the mid-1990s, for instance, the Museum of Contemporary Art held a show of Chicago artists, Guinan wasn’t included. And despite efforts by Loeb, no Chicago art dealer has ever represented him. When asked about this neglect, Guinan will let out an exaggerated sigh. He’ll quote the only American review he’s ever received, from the former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, who wrote, “He strikes this observer as an artist of distinctly limited gifts who makes his impression primarily on the basis of his timely and dramatic subject matter.” The review appeared in 1972, and yet Guinan knows it by heart. I asked a local gallery owner, Alice Adam, why she thought he hadn’t found a place here. “Well, have you ever met him?” she replied. “He’s sort of a hermit, a bit of a loner. He’s bitter. I don’t think he pushes enough.” A former gallery owner suggested that he’s too self-denigrating.
Guinan seems