William Charles Utermohlen (December 5, 1933 – March 21, 2007) was an American and British figurative artist known for his late-period self-portraits completed after his diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. He was diagnosed in 1995, having had progressive memory loss since 1991. After diagnosis, he began a series of self-portraits influenced by both the figurative painter Francis Bacon and cinematographers from the German Expressionism movement. The last of his self-portraits was completed , some six years before his death.
Born to first-generation German immigrants in South Philadelphia, Utermohlen earned a scholarship at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1951. After completing military service, he spent 1953 studying in Europe where he was inspired by Renaissance and Baroque artists. He moved to London in 1962 and married the art historian Patricia Redmond in 1965. He relocated to Massachusetts in 1972 to teach art at Amherst College before returning to London in 1975. His early work consists of separate six cycles, each of which covers themes and subject matter ranging from mythology to war to nudes.
Most of Utermohlen's life was spent in obscurity. His later works began to attract attention at the beginning of the 21st century. His self-portraits especially are seen as important in the understanding of the gradual effects of neurocognitive disorders, and have become some of the most well-recognised works of art about Alzheimer's. His late paintings have been widely displayed since his story became known in popular medicine literature.
Early life
William Charles Utermohlen was born on December 5, 1933, in Southern Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the only child of first-generation German immigrants. At the time, the area was split along language lines; his family lived on Hicks Street in the German-speaking part of the city, but the Germans that lived there migrated further across the US, which resulted in them living in an Italian bloc. Utermohlen's parents did not allow him to venture outside of his immediate surrounding; the art critic Manu Sharma speculates that, by making Utermohlen look inwards, such protectiveness had an influence on his artistic development.
Utermohlen earned a scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1951 where he studied under the realist artist Walter Stuempfig. He completed his military service in 1953, following two years in the Caribbean. Shortly after, he studied in Europe, traveling through Italy, France and Spain where he was heavily influenced by the works of the Proto-Renaissance artist Giotto and the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin. He graduated from PAFA in 1957 and moved to England, in part because he was attracted to the London art scene. Utermohlen's wife, the art historian Patricia Redmond, said that "when he was at art school, he was very pretty, and he was chased around by all the homosexual tutors and everybody else ... he didn't care but he didn't fancy them. When he came to England he discovered, amazingly, because the English had always been like this, that we quite liked girlish men."
Utermohlen attended the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford between 1957 and 1959, while he was on the G.I. Bill. There he met the American artist R. B. Kitaj, whose pop art works had influenced Utermohlen. After Oxford, he returned to the U.S. for three years. He moved to London in 1962 where he met Redmond, whom he married in 1965. In 1969, his artwork was featured in an exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery. He taught art at Amherst College in Massachusetts from 1972, where he spent his last year as an artist-in-residence. In 1975, Redmond received her master degree at Massachusetts, after which they had again returned to London, eventually gaining British nationality in 1992.
Style His early works are mostly figurative, and described by the medical academic James M. Stubenrauch as "exuberant, at times surrealistic" style of expressionism. During the late 1970s, in response to the photorealist movement, he printed photographs onto a canvas and painting directly over them. Examples of this technique include his 1997 Self-Portrait (Split) and two portraits of Redmond.
During this period, Utermohlen did not explain his work or discuss them with Redmond as she was an art historian, and he feared she would interfere with his creative progress. Redmond believes he was "absolutely right" in this approach as she would likely have highlighted faults in his work.
Regarding Utermohlen's art style, Redmond said to The New York Times that "he was never quite in the same time slot with what was going on. Everybody was Abstract expressionist, [while] he was solemnly drawing the figure." She explained in a Studio 360 interview that Utermohlen was "puzzled and worried, because he couldn't work in [a] totally abstract way", as he considered the figure "incredibly important". His art is mainly centered on portraiture, although Utermohlen has also made murals at the Royal Free Hospital and at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue.
Six cycles
Most of his early paintings can be grouped into six cycles: Mythological (1962–1963), Cantos (or Dante) (1964–1966), Mummers (1969–1970), War (1972–1973), Nudes (1973–1974), and Conversation (1989–1991).
The Dante cycle is named after and inspired by Dante's Inferno. The cycle conflicted with the optimistic mood of the 1960s due to its reference to medieval literature, according to The Wall Street International, who simultaneously cites the Dante cycle as making him into a mature and committed figurative artist.
The War series references the Vietnam War; and according to Redmond the inclusion of isolated soldiers represented his feelings of being an outsider in the art scene.
Both the Mummers and Conversations series are based on early memories; the former, completed between 1968 and 1970, is based on the Mummers Parade of Philadelphia, of which Utermohlen wasn't allowed by his parents to participate in. In a letter from November 1970, Utermohlen stated that the cycle was created as a "vehicle for expressing my anxiety".
The Conversations paintings were described by Polini as an attempt to describe his life before memory loss. Pre-dating his diagnosis, they already indicated the onset of a number of symptoms. Titles such as W9 and Maida Vale reference the names of the district and neighborhood, respectively, that he lived in at the time. The artworks contain saturated colors and "engaging spatial arrangements", which highlight the actions of the people in the artworks. Tobi Zausner likened the perspectives and spatial arrangements of the Conversation pieces to the work of M. C. Escher.
Alzheimer's and later works
Utermohlen experienced memory loss while working on the Conversation series. This included inability to wrap his necktie or to find his apartment. He had issues with speech and knowing the time of day. Utermohlen rarely depicted himself in the Conversation series, and in one of these few depictions, in Snow, Utermohlen showed himself as isolated from the group of five people at the table. Tobi Zausner believes that this was a representation of Utermohlen's struggles with verbally communicating when he was painting Snow. Between 1993 and 1994, he produced a series of lithographs depicting short stories by World War I poet Wilfred Owen. The figures are more still and mask-like than the Conversation pieces. They consist of a series of disoriented and wounded soldiers, and are described by his art dealer Chris Boicos as a seeming premonition of the artist's dementia diagnosis made in the following year. By this time, he often forgot his teaching appointments.
In 1994, he was commissioned for a family portrait. Around one year later, Redmond took his client to Utermohlen's studio to see the progress, but saw that the portrait had not advanced since their last viewing nine months earlier. She feared Utermohlen was depressed and sought medical advice, where he was subsequently diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's disease in August 1995 at the age of 61. An MRI scan that was done in November left little doubt about this diagnosis, showing pronounced cerebral atrophy. He was sent to the Queen's Square Hospital where a nurse, Ron Isaacs, became interested in his drawings and asked him to start drawing self-portraits. As each self-portrait was completed, Utermohlen would show it to Isaacs, where he would photograph it. The first, Blue Skies, was completed between 1994 and 1995, before his diagnosis, and shows him gripping a yellow table in an empty, sparsely described interior. When his neuropsychologist Sebastian Crutch visited Utermohlen in late 1999, he described the painting as depicting the artist trying to hang on and avoid being "swept out" of the open window above. Polini likened the depiction of him holding onto the table to a painter holding onto his canvas, saying that "[i]n order to survive, he must be able to capture this catastrophic moment; he must depict the unspeakable." Blue Skies became Utermohlen's last "large scale" painting.
That year's sketch, A Welcoming Man, shows a disassembled figure that seems to represent his loss of spatial perception. Regarding the sketch, Crutch et al stated that "[Utermohlen] acknowledged that there was a problem with the sketch, but did not know what the problem was nor how it could be rectified." He began a series of self-portraits after his diagnosis in 1995. The earliest, the Masks series, are in watercolor and were completed between 1994 and 2001. His last non-self-portrait dates 1997, and is of Redmond, titled by Patrice Polini as Pat (Artist's Wife).
Death
Utermohlen had retired from painting by December 2000, could no longer draw in 2002, and was in the care of the Princess Louise nursing home in 2004. He died of pneumonia at the Hammersmith Hospital on March 21, 2007, aged 73.
Later work Self-portraits
His series of self-portraits became increasingly abstract as his dementia progressed, which according to the critic Anjan Chatterjee, describe "haunting psychological self-expressions". The early stages of the disease had not impacted his ability to paint, regardless of what was observed by Crutch et al. His cognitive disorder is not believed to have been hereditary; aside from a 1989 car accident which left him unconscious for around 30 minutes, Utermohlen's medical history was described by Crutch as "unremarkable". Redmond covered the mirrors in their house because Utermohlen was afraid of what he saw there, and had stopped using them for self-portraits. After Utermohlen's diagnosis, descriptions of his skull became a key aspect of his self-portraits, and the academic Robert Cook–Deegan noticed how as Utermohlen's condition progressed, he "gradually integrates less color".
Crutch et al speculate that the change in his painting style may have been caused by "deterioration in [his] ability to process perceptual and spatial information", which Tobi Zausner states didn't impact Utermohlen's memory massively in the early stages of the disease. Dr. Bruce Miller says that this might have made Utermohlen's earlier self-portraits more abstract and surreal, citing the cause of this to be the right parietal lobe, which they call "the dominant hemisphere for artistry". Redmond acknowledges that the visual distortions in the portraits were intentional, stating that the enlarged ears may represent his hearing problems. She also noted an emphasis in his forehead that is present within the self-portraits. Xi Hsu states that the vibrant pop art like colors and "traditional draughtsmanship" of Utermohlen's earlier works were "spared [from] the effects of dementia"; they are also present in the self-portraits. According to Giovanni Frazzetto of Science, the portraits are marked with "an agonizing awareness of impending physical and existential decay".