Christina Ramberg’s powerfully personal eroticism

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / The erotically charged art of Chicago Imagist painter Christina Ramberg (1946–1995), whose retrospective is currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, aligns chronologically with the second-wave feminism of the 1970s and 80s. Today’s third-wave feminists (some say it’s now fourth-wave) frequently disparage that incarnation of the movement for privileging white women’s worries, and worse, for its obliviousness to institutional misogyny. Fortunately, Art Institute curators Mark Pascale and Thea Liberty Nichols don’t try to pigeonhole Ramberg’s work into that framework. Although she considered herself a feminist, an aggrieved one she was not. Her art was personal, not political, and it doesn’t fit neatly into standardized versions of feminism. Remarkably, the artist found a way to mix together sharp and provocative subject matter about women’s desires with a classical, pristine aesthetic.

Ramberg was born in Kentucky, but her father was in the military and the family moved around until finally settling in Highwood, Illinois, when Ramberg was 16. She earned both her BA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied with, among others, the art historian and artist Whitney Halstead and the artist Ray Yoshida. Her artistic career lasted only a couple of decades; tragically, she died at 49 from a neurodegenerative disease after spending five years in an assisted living facility. Nevertheless, she managed to produce 135 paintings – more than half of them included in this exhibition – and countless drawings, sketchbooks, and studies. A skilled seamstress, she also made stunning wall-quilts as fine art, five of them exhibited here.

Only a slice of Ramberg’s rich extended archive is on display in this retrospective (more will be on view in a separate show at the Art Institute with the work of fellow Chicago artists Theodore Halkin, Barbara Rossi, and Evelyn Statsinger from May 11 through August 26), but even this sampling offers insights into her complicated and subtle psychology. It includes scrapbooks with clippings of comics and tackily sexy lingerie ads lifted from Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues, diaries assiduously detailing her personal and artistic life (surprisingly, she took great pleasure from daily domesticity), photograph and slide collections, hairdo and wig ads, medical illustrations (some rather gruesome), and cut-out pornographic images. Ramberg also had a collection of dolls, most soft and handmade, some of which appear as a wall installation.

Drawing aesthetic inspiration not only from prurient “low art” but also from the “high art” she saw first-hand at the Art Institute and on a few trips abroad, Ramberg developed an eclectic taste. Her passion for Léger shows up in several paintings with volumetric forms. Her favorite artists include the naïve French painters Henri Rousseau and Camille Bombois and fifteenth-century Sienese painters, but she also admired Navajo blankets, African art, Indian miniatures, and Japanese prints. The most beautiful quilt in the exhibition, an abstract, totemic work (Untitled [1], 1989), is made from kimono fabric purchased on a visit to Japan. Like many of the artists dubbed “Chicago Imagists,” Ramberg bought work from the outsider artists Joseph Yoakum (1891–1972) and Lee Godie (1908–94), the latter having famously hawked her drawings on the steps of the Institute.

In 1968, while still an undergraduate, Ramberg purchased several small, square Masonite panels at a super-sale price at the school store. She sanded the surfaces to an eggshell-finish and then painted them with matte acrylic. She relied on this technique in rendering almost every subsequent painting. Hair, a multi-paneled work produced for her BA thesis exhibition, consists of 16 acrylic-on-Masonite square panels, each containing an image of the back of a woman’s head with one or two hands (it’s not always clear to whom they belong) patting and arranging her coiffed hair. Jim Nutt admired the work so much he introduced it to Don Baum, curator at the then-storefront Hyde Park Art Center. There she was included in the 1968 four-person exhibition “False Image” with fellow classmates Philip Hanson—whom she married the same year—Roger Brown, and Eleanor Dube.

Career-wise, Ramberg hit the ground running. By the time she finished her MFA, she’d been in twelve group exhibitions and participated in the São Paulo Biennial. She and Hanson became professors in the painting and drawing department at the School of the Art Institute, and from 1985 to 1989 Ramberg served as its first female chair. Meanwhile, her exhibitions proceeded apace. In 1975, she began showing with the Phillis Kind Gallery, first in Chicago and then in New York, and she continually participated in group shows until she could no longer work. The artist also exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney, the ICA in Philadelphia, as well as abroad. In 1988, her work was the subject of a retrospective at the University of Chicago Renaissance Society.

Ramberg’s main concern – obsession is a better word – is female eroticism, or more precisely, female eroticism expressed as women’s fixations on such things as hands, hair, hairdos, women’s shoes, women’s clothing (especially lingerie), and fabric and lace patterns. Her images, many of which are torsos, function as visual synecdoches – that is, stand-ins for women themselves. Things are deformed, broken, confined, and constrained by cloth or lace, or simply by the way a figure is cropped. On the rare occasions that involve faces, they’re masked or covered. 

Although Ramberg’s work can verge on the pornographic and fetishistic, it never crosses into that terrain. To see it as either is to fail to understand that her paintings are about those things, but not the things themselves. To see them as ironic commentary is also wrongheaded, for it misses out on her frank, open, non-judgmental exploration of the vexing ways in which the male gaze molds women’s erotic longings, hers included. Ramberg’s point is that the gaze compels women to internalize the male point of view about female eroticism and make it their own. Her art makes a forceful case. Its apotheosis, eerily reminiscent of every pregnant woman’s worst nightmare, shows up in such torso pictures such as Hearing, Black ‘N’ Blue Jacket, and Simultaneous Emergence, where female shapes harbor small male homunculi or “give birth” to them.

Ramberg’s depictions of limbs seemingly amputated and bandaged, or her cropped images of women’s bodies dressed in pinching lingerie and contorted as if they are being held down, are troubling. But she configures everything so ingeniously and imaginatively, applies paint so lovingly and meticulously, and selects muted grays, blacks, rusty browns, and pink-tinged beiges that are so alluring, that any disturbance is fleeting. As an abstract painter, I see these aesthetic attributes of her work as equal to, if not more important than, the images themselves.

In the 2013 documentary film, Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, Ramberg said her paintings “could be a little bit pornographic, hands feeling, caressing, masturbating the body” and that there were also “implications of rape.” These are edgy thoughts, to be sure, but the crucial words to keep in mind are “a little bit.”  Elsewhere, she also said that as a child she would watch as her mother, dressing to go out, pulled on a “merry widow” corset that pushed up her breasts and squeezed in her waist. She saw this as her mother attempting to transform body into the kind men wanted and found it both “fascinating” and “awful.” It’s reasonable to speculate that this precocious early puzzlement was the source for the uncanny beauty and candor of her paintings. 

“Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective,” Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL. Through August 11, 2024.

“Four Chicago Artists: Theodore Halkin, Evelyn Statsinger, Barbara Rossi, and Christina Ramberg,” Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL. May 11 through August 26, 2024.

About the author: Laurie Fendrich is professor emerita of fine arts at Hofstra University and a Guggenheim-award-winning painter who writes both art criticism and fiction. She is a member of the organization American Abstract Artists and is represented by Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles.