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View at the museum ↗Exquisite Corpse
The Hairy Who (Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Jim Falconer, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum)1967/68
- Attribution
- Art Green (American, born 1941); Gladys Nilsson (American, born 1940); Jim Nutt (American, born 1938); Suellen Rocca (American, 1943-2020); and Karl Wirsum (American, 1939-2021)
- Medium
- Graphite, with erasure, on off-white wove paper
- Physical dimensions
- 28 × 23 cm (11 1/16 × 9 1/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of the artists
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: © Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Kirl Wirsum.
View the museum record ↗From the museum
The so-called cadavre exquis or exquisite corpse, a Surrealist visual game, was created in winter 1925–26, when members of the group gathered in the evenings. If conversation lagged, they invented games to spark the unconscious. The exquisite corpse grew out of one such invention, which reimagined the children’s game of “head, body, legs,” in which each participant adds to a drawing without seeing the preceding contributions, which are hidden by folding the paper. The results are strange, sometimes violent, combinations of images. The Surrealists produced many such drawings (the Art Institute has several; for example, 2018.333 , 2018.334 , and 2018.335 ), and these collaborative experiments were profoundly influential. The Chicago-based Hairy Who artists also played the game in the late 1960s, but with more playful results (for example, 2018.684 , 2018.685 , 2018.686 , 2018.687 , 2018.688 , and 2018.689 ).
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0