Lot 219
Provenance:
Derek Eller Gallery, New York
Lot Essay:
Executed in 1966, Karl Wirsum’s Untitled (Study for Gilateen) is a fully
realized and inventive preliminary drawing in ink, ballpoint pen and colored pencil for his later 1968 painting Gilateen that was included in the final canonical Hairy Who exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art at Dupont Center in Washington DC in 1969. The final version was significantly acquired out of the show by fellow Hairy Whoer Gladys Nilsson and remains in the collection of her and her husband, Jim Nutt, who was also an important member of the artistic band. The drawing presently on offer depicts a yellow-skinned, orange-haired humanoid in profile, with a pink and blue muzzle apparatus about the mouth, a vibratory rainbow eyeball and a psychedelic-patterned hat fit for a lizard king, all with Wirsum’s hallmark graphic lines and high-key unmodulated colors. The figure, while handling a small, green-stemmed pink pipe packed with green and pink embers that appear wackier than your run-of-the-mill tobacco, is buffeted by stylized yellow and black clouds of smoke echoing his silhouette.
The title of the work is a clever portmanteau of a gila monster and teenager—a play on words forming a slangy homophone for the beheading device made infamous during the French Revolution, the guillotine. During this era of his work and beyond, Wirsum often drew inspiration from the monster movies of his youth, as is seen in his contemporaneous Conrad Veidt series. For this drawing, it is likely that the 1957 film I Was a Teenage Werewolf is being referenced. Meanwhile, the final Gilateen (1968) ended up with a more reptilian edge, something of a more colorful juvenile creature from the black lagoon, with scales, gills and all furthering the link to the monster matinees that so fascinated the artist.
Wirsum was notoriously a health nut and a staunch advocate of clean living; so, it is not a stretch to surmise that the drawing was a tongue-in-muzzle warning to the counterculture youth of the day about the dissociative dangers of cannabis consumption that could leave one feeling like their head had been cut off from their body: a temporary self inflicted guillotining. From a process standpoint, it is worth noting that drawing was a daily exercise for Wirsum and was his preferred form of expression where he felt most connected to the creative force and was free to be his most imaginative—features superbly on display in this stellar example. Wirsum was clearly fully in control of all his faculties when producing this dynamic and energic drawing— his head firmly on his shoulders