Ed Paschke Memorial Service
This twelve-minute excerpt of the Ed Paschke Memorial Video highlights a few of the speakers who remember the Northwestern University Professor, artist, husband, and father Ed Paschke. It documents the Memorial Service held in honor of Ed on February 1, 2005 at Alice Millar Chapel and the reception that followed at Scott Hall.
Ed Paschke was born in 1939 on the Northwest side of Chicago. His childhood interest in animation and cartoons led him toward a career in art. As a student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago he was influenced by many artists featured in the Museum's special exhibitions, in particular the work of Gauguin, Picasso and Seurat. Although Paschke's interests leaned towards representational imagery, he learned to paint based on the principles of abstraction and expressionism. Paschke received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1961. After graduation he held a string of unusual jobs, including working as a psychiatric aide and selling spot illustrations to Playboy magazine (where twenty-eight of his illustrations have been published from 1962 through 1989). Drafted into the Army in 1962, Paschke spent two years illustrating weapons-training aids and pursuing AWOL soldiers in Louisiana. Following a brief trip to Europe, Paschke returned to Chicago and in 1965 took a job at the Wilding Studio with a team of draftsmen rendering a map to be used in training astronauts for the Apollo moon mission. Paschke then began work for Silvestri, a display company, painting a Piranesi-style scene on the temporary façade around the first-floor window of the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Department Store. By 1967 Paschke quit working to devote his time to paint, and on the GI Bill, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute, receiving his MFA degree in 1970.
Between his graduate and undergraduate work Paschke traveled and worked a variety of jobs amassing the experiences that would shape his artistic style. During a brief period in New York, he was exposed to Pop Art philosophy and began to incorporate elements of this style borrowing images directly from the print media and other elements of popular culture. Themes of violence, aggression, and physical incongruity prevail in his work of this period. Returning to Chicago in 1968 he exhibited with other artists whose work, like Paschke's, shared references to non-Western and surrealist art, appropriated images from popular culture and employed brilliant color throughout a busy and carefully worked surface. Known collectively as the Imagists, their work attracted attention both regionally and nationally.
Paschke's work of the 1970's reflects society's subculture as the artist replaced images from the print media with images derived from the electronic media. In Paschke's most recent work, he enlarges scale to a grand proportion and includes images of such well-known figures as George Washington, Elvis Presley, and Mona Lisa. His work reveals a powerful interaction between humanity and technology capable of shaping perception at the most fundamental level.Paschke is regarded as one of the foremost “Imagistsâ€â€”a name created by critic and historian Franz Schulze to define the punchy, Surrealistic, pop culture—informed, figurative art that emerged in Chicago from the middle of the 1960s to the early 1970s.
"Ed was at the center of the Imagist movement in Chicago but always pursued a somewhat separate course," said Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the former curator at the Art Institute of Chicago who in 1989 gave Paschke a full-scale retrospective that traveled to Paris. "One of the things I always loved about him was how comfortable he was in his own skin, in his work and in his place in the world."
Paschke's first solo exhibition in Chicago was in 1970; four years later he had his first show in Paris, at the Darthea Speyer Gallery, by whom he continued to be represented. He returned from the opening of a new exhibition there weeks ago. It was a relationship unusual among Chicago artists who matured in the 1960s. When his retrospective appeared at the Pompidou Center in 1990, he already had a broad following.
"He was an important image-maker internationally," said Lynne Warren, curator at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. "Many people perhaps don't realize how forward-looking he was. He took from many sources: the American vernacular, comic book imagery and so on. So many things that now are important to a younger generation he was doing all along, in fascinating canvases with powerful color."
Strong as Paschke's early canvases were, in the late 1970s he began to have doubts about them, feeling they made a sensational first impression, then diminished in impact. This led him to a radically different look, less photographic than electronic. It was as if the dramatic interactions took place on irregularly functioning video screens that flattened or dissolved parts of the images, adding various sorts of interference. This suggested that, unlike some acclaimed artists, Paschke always moved forward.
Ed Paschke Biography:
Born in Chicago, IL
BFA The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
MFA The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Public collections:
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Weatherspoon Art Center, North Carolina
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Musee d'Art Moderne Nationale, Paris
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Art Institute of Chicago
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma
Selected Exhibitions:
1999
The American Century, Whitney Museum of America Art & Vaknin Schwartz New York & Atlanta Ed Paschke: New Works, Maya Polsky Gallery Chicago, IL
1998
Ed Paschke, Galerie Darthea Speyer Paris, France Ed Paschke Prints, Anchor Graphics Chicago, IL Nurturing Visions, New York, Montana, Illinois
1997
Ed Paschke, Maya Polsky Gallery Chicago, IL INSA Gallery Seoul, Korea Gallery Ciocca Milan, Italy Parallel Visions, Museum of Art & Archeology University of Missouri, MO
1996
Phyllis Kind Gallery New York
1995
Selections from Permanent Collection, Whitney Museum New York, NY Chicago Imagism, Davenport Museum Davenport, IA
1989 - 1990
Ed Paschke Retrospective, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, France Ed Paschke Retrospective, The Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL
Please check out these links:
Ed Paschke's website
Information on Adria (1988) found at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Maya Polsky Gallery
Printworks Gallery
Ed's wikipedia biography
Ed's obituary