Paintings by artist Robert Guinan that depict gritty bar and street scenes in Chicago are little known in this country. Yet his work is revered in France, and his paintings grace the walls of several French embassies throughout the world. One was displayed in the presidential home of French leader Francois Mitterrand.
“There are several theories as to why he is so famous in Europe yet not here,” said his son Sean. “He had a journalistic approach to his work and his subject was the slum life of an American city. Americans didn’t want to see this aspect of themselves. To the French, it was exotic. To Americans, it is a mirror to what they maybe don’t want to see.”
Street musicians, life along Maxwell Street, prostitutes in bars and the graphic and tough scenes of Chicago’s West Side were his main subjects as he sought to showcase an often dismissed segment of society.
“He had an affinity for the humanity in the people he drew and painted,” said his friend Paul Berlanga, owner of Berlanga Fine Art in the River North neighborhood. “He was not above them. They were not just subjects. They were other human beings.”
Guinan, 82, died of cancer on Sunday at his Evanston home, his family said.
In 1972, Guinan entered into a business relationship with Albert Loeb, a legendary art gallery owner whose father represented Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Loeb became his sole benefactor, and every painting created by Guinan from 1972 to 2008 became the property of Loeb, who paid him for the work and provided him a monthly salary. With this arrangement, Guinan could leave teaching and become a full-time artist.
“My father had become a realist and perfectionist, and he did not have a prolific turnout,” his son said. “Sometimes it would take months for him to create one piece for a single payment but he also received a regular monthly salary. It was a very happy opportunity where he could just do this and nothing else, and it evens out.”
Loeb cultivated a demand for Guinan’s work in Europe and featured him in his Parisian gallery, where actor Johnny Depp purchased a piece. Depp and Guinan struck up a friendship, his family said, and would spend hours together listening to old Turkish musical recordings.
Born in Watertown, N.Y., Guinan was fascinated with art from an early age and began emulating the covers of boys’ adventure magazines. At age 13 he began private art lessons with a woman in town. His first exhibition was held at the Watertown library when he was 15.
After high school, he took a job in a dental lab making false teeth. But he soon moved to Rochester, N.Y., and in 1953 enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War. He was a radio operator in North Africa and Turkey, and on breaks and leaves went beyond the revitalized areas to find a culture of peasants, prostitutes and the disenfranchised.
“That was a very romantic and formative part of his life. He fancied himself a Vincent van Gogh or Toulouse-Lautrec,” his son Sean said.
With his military stint over, he returned to Watertown and helped his father, who was the town’s milkman. He moved to Chicago around 1959 and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During this time, he discovered the seedy areas just beyond the students’ residences along Dearborn Street, his son said.
“He absolutely loved it. He was near a lot of bars, and they had these strange little talent shows with old men singing. Piano players and a lot of singers, amateur artists. He loved that culture and places like the Kings Palace and the Queens Paradise,” Sean said.
After he graduated from the Art Institute, he worked as a freelance art teacher for New Trier High School and at the Art Institute of Chicago. He also worked as a busboy and bartender at Stouffer’s Restaurant.
His reputation in the art community grew as he participated in several art shows, one of which was attended by a Swiss art dealer who then crafted a show abroad. It was that show that Loeb attended.
“He could speak on any subject and put everything in historical context in the present day,” said his son Paul. “He lived by his own rules. He was a free thinker and iconoclast. He was a nonconformist but if you were to describe him that way to his face he would instantly make fun of you for being overly grand or flowering of your assessment of him. He was so nonconformist that any way you would assess him he would goose you for it a little bit.”
His marriage to his first wife, MaryBeth Guinan, ended in divorce. She survives him. His second wife, Birthe “Bee” Svensson-Guinan, died in 2008.
Other survivors include another son, David; a daughter, Edith Newman; a sister, Patricia Gravelle; his partner, Rita O’Hara; and one granddaughter.
A memorial service will be held at 7 p.m. Friday at the Cliff Dwellers, 200 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago.
Patricia Trebe is a freelance reporter.
