Never a City So Real

by Alex Kotlowitz

  Guinan hadn’t been here for a number of years, but little has changed; the place is still owned by Michael Liacopoulos, who came over from southern Greece and purchased it from a Jewish man in 1982. As you walk in, there’s a liquor store to the left, and to the right, running the length of the seventy-foot store, is a narrow, handsome bar made of oak. A thirty-five-year-old Budweiser clock hangs over its center; a nineteen-inch television sits at one end. A pool table is in the rear. The clientele, at least during the week, is a melting pot of Ukrainians, Poles, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans; on weekends, the young professionals and artists—the recent arrivals—come to play pool. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, Liacopoulos serves his patrons a turkey dinner.

  Guinan and I take a seat at the bar. “Used to be packed with mailmen before they went to work,” Guinan tells me. The local post office is the bar’s neighbor, and while the postal workers come in less frequently, they still appear for the occasional shot and a beer. Guinan was reluctant to meet me here because in the early 1990s, a local weekly at Guinan’s suggestion had written about the bar, and what was written—that it was a dive—angered the tavern’s owners. This is the first time he’s been back since that article, but all seems to have been forgiven: Liacopoulos greets him warmly. Guinan orders a Zywiec, a Polish beer, and—although he says he’s stopped smoking—pulls out a pack of Marlboros. “I’m smoking now just ’cause I’m in a bar,” he explains.

  For nearly thirty years, Guinan drank and smoked and sketched at taverns around the city. He painted prostitutes and junkies, recent immigrants and blues singers. And he ventured out into the streets as well. He met an aging jazz piano player, Emile, who because of his musical prowess was known as the King of Clark Street; one of Guinan’s paintings is of Emile sitting in his home, shoulders hunched, stomach flabby, playing his piano naked. Another of his subjects was Sister Carrie, an evangelist, who could usually be found at the Maxwell Street Market on Sunday mornings, jumping and shaking as she sang and banged on her tambourine. He captured people riding the El, sleeping and gazing out the window. He painted two boys climbing out of Lake Michigan under the shimmering light of street lamps. There’s one painting in which, like voyeurs, we peek through the windows of the Fine Arts Building downtown, watching lithe young ballerinas in leotards and tutus practicing their routines. He drew a portrait of Mike, who ran a small dry cleaners that had become a neighborhood gathering spot, and he painted the women who used the back of Mike’s shop to clean vegetables. He sketched the regal-looking African-American poet Margaret Danner, and boxing night at the Union League Club, where men in white shirts and ties and women in evening gowns watch young black and Hispanic men pummel each other to the mat.

  Guinan does everything from small pencil sketches to large oils, some of which sell for as much as sixty thousand dollars. Taken together, his work, which has been compared to Edward Hopper’s, comprises an astonishing collective portrait of the city. Where Hopper painted with strong, luminous colors, Guinan’s work is muted and filled with extraordinary detail. In one portrait of Sister Carrie at her home, you can make out the mismatched, makeshift drapes covering the window and the ripped, layered linoleum on the floor. Dressed in her white domestic’s uniform from the hotel where she worked, Sister Carrie sits erect in a fragile-looking wooden chair, her tambourine in her lap. You can sense her economic struggles and her strong bearing. The International Herald Tribune once wrote that Guinan portrays “a world of desolate dignity.” An art dealer I spoke with said of Guinan’s work that it feels familiar—not the artistry, but the people and places. There’s an intimacy about his portraits that lets you feel that you know, or think you know, his subjects.

  Guinan’s work, as you might have gathered, is quite popular, although not in Chicago, where he’s virtually unknown. But in France.

  Guinan is originally from upstate New York and served a three-year peacetime stint in the army in Tripoli and Ankara as a radio operator. There, he fancied himself a Toulouse-Lautrec and sketched local peasants, imitating Toulouse-Lautrec’s nervous brush strokes, which he later abandoned for a more disciplined, naturalistic style. He arrived in Chicago in 1959 to attend the School of the Art Institute, and a friend took him to Maxwell Street, an introduction that altered his life. Maxwell Street may have been one of the most exhilarating, industrious, and productive open street bazaars in the world. Begun in 1874 by Jewish merchants (in the same neighborhood as Manny’s), it gradually became a hodgepodge collection of Jews, Mexicans, and African-Americans. (In its later years, the kids I knew from the West Side referred to it as Jewtown, even though by then most of the merchants were black.) On Sunday mornings, blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf played on the sidewalks, plugging their amps into the adjacent apartment buildings. Old men sold weathered National Geographic magazines, used picture frames, rusted tools, and assorted hardware such as nails and screws. On occasion, you could find new clothes and phonographs, though it was best not to ask where they came from. Samuel and Raymond Popeil, who eventually went on to invent the Veg-O-Matic and the Pocket Fisherman, honed their salesmanship techniques at Maxwell Street by hawking kitchenware. Street vendors barbecued Polish sausages and pig’s-ear sandwiches over fires set in city trash cans. “It was like being in Turkey or Libya,” Guinan says. “This open street market, all the ruckus.” He produced from that time a series of paintings that captured the market in its last days, solitary figures peddling their merchandise, and yet despite the fact that its end was near, there’s a joy and liveliness to these works. They’re among my favorites.

  When the Maxwell Street Market was finally shut down in the late 1990s (there’s a new, more sanitized version now a few blocks east), Guinan was devastated. “I thought it was the end of the world,” he recalls. “They’re destroying what’s lovely about the city all for what? For condos.” This has become a theme for Guinan, a city disappearing, but he’s been saying it now for thirty years and so one begins to wonder if that isn’t simply the nature of urban landscapes, that they shift and erode over time. Guinan soon discovered the bars on Clark Street, what was then Skid Row, and then the taverns in Wicker Park, including Rite Liquors.

  In the interim, Guinan was discovered by a French art dealer, Albert Loeb, who saw three of Guinan’s paintings at an art show in Switzerland. “It was a total surprise,” recalls Loeb. “It was realism. The first person I thought of was Courbet.” Gustave Courbet was a nineteenth-century French painter who, in an age when most art was idealized and historical, drew everyday villagers, in Courbet’s words, “as nature made them, without corrections.” (I mentioned to Guinan the comparison, and he laughed. His work does mirror Courbet’s, he said, except that the revolutionary Courbet saw his renderings as a political statement, which Guinan says “seems silly today.”) When Loeb contacted Guinan, it turned out that Guinan had only five other paintings. Over the years, he had burned everything else. “I just figured I wasn’t going anywhere,” he says.

  Loeb sold one of his first Guinans to François Mitterrand, who was the head of the Socialist Party at the time and who bought a portrait of Emile sitting in his apartment by a space heater. Guinan’s paintings have since been purchased by museums in Lyon, Grenoble, and Paris. The French diplomatic corps display Guinan’s paintings in their embassies around the world. Two French filmmakers have made documentaries of Guinan; one of them, titled Division Street, filmed Guinan at Rite Liquors. Most recently, the actor Johnny Depp, who lives in France, stumbled upon Guinan’s work and purchased a portrait of a one-legged prostitute sitting at a bar called the J.N.L. (It was one of the rare occasions on which Guinan didn’t get his subject’s name; he ran out of money to pay her for her time.) Even Guinan’s biggest collector, Allison Davis, a Chicago developer, discovered Guinan during a vacation in Paris.

  In Chicago, he’s essentially unknown. Unnoticed. Like an invisible man, he likes to say, citing the moniker penned by a local reporter. Only three Chicagoans own Guinan’s work. He
has never had an exhibition here. Even with an occasional story over the years in the local press about Guinan, recognition for his work in the city has been elusive at best. When in the mid-1990s, for instance, the Museum of Contemporary Art held a show of Chicago artists, Guinan wasn’t included. And despite efforts by Loeb, no Chicago art dealer has ever represented him. When asked about this neglect, Guinan will let out an exaggerated sigh. He’ll quote the only American review he’s ever received, from the former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, who wrote, “He strikes this observer as an artist of distinctly limited gifts who makes his impression primarily on the basis of his timely and dramatic subject matter.” The review appeared in 1972, and yet Guinan knows it by heart. I asked a local gallery owner, Alice Adam, why she thought he hadn’t found a place here. “Well, have you ever met him?” she replied. “He’s sort of a hermit, a bit of a loner. He’s bitter. I don’t think he pushes enough.” A former gallery owner suggested that he’s too self-denigrating.

  Guinan seems resigned to his fate, a chronicler of Chicago for all but Chicagoans. There’s a touch of drama to Guinan, and if you catch him on a bad day, he can, indeed, sound embittered. “Ask Algren,” he once told me. “Chicago kills its own. You have to go to New York to be a success. That was Algren’s complaint. Algren says Chicago isn’t the second city, it’s the secondhand city.” Guinan admires Algren. He owns first editions of five of his books, and has read each of them at least twice. In his studio hangs a black-and-white photograph of Algren in an overcoat walking down Division Street on a wintry day. Algren’s good friend and unofficial photographer, Art Shea, signed it: For Guinan—Who knows where it’s at.

  Not long ago, Guinan invited me to join him and Loeb during one of Loeb’s periodic visits to Chicago. Guinan lives on the city’s North Side in a three-flat. He and his wife live on the first floor; he rents the second, and he uses the third landing as his studio. The three of us walked to a nearby coffee shop. Loeb has kept a kind of video journal of Guinan, filming his lectures, filming his interviews, filming interviews with Guinan’s subjects. The unspoken assumption is that someday someone might be interested in it.

  Guinan’s neglect seems to hit Loeb harder than it does Guinan himself. At one point in our conversation, Loeb recounts an encounter with the curator of a Chicago museum. “She said Bob had no impact on Chicago,” he tells me, indignant at the slight. To which Guinan replies, “She’s right, I haven’t.” But Loeb won’t let it go. He tells me the story of how in the mid-1990s, the city’s Cultural Center was planning an exhibition of Guinan’s work, how exciting that was, and then how it all fell through. Loeb says he was never completely clear about the reason why. Maybe it was the money needed to ship Guinan’s work back to Chicago from Paris. Maybe it was the fact that the Democratic Convention was to be held in the city that year, and barflies, naked piano players, and reclining prostitutes weren’t exactly the image the city wanted to put forth. Or maybe they just lost interest. Loeb, who’s dressed in a safari shirt, appears agitated. “Were you disappointed?” I ask Guinan, giving him an opening. “No,” he replies. Loeb then tells me about a Chicago art dealer who once said of Guinan’s paintings, “Who wants to look at these? These are the people who want to mug you.” To which Guinan sighs.

  The International Herald Tribune once suggested that the reason Guinan’s work is viewed with some suspicion in America and more specifically in Chicago “may be motivated by the idea that his art is burdened with a social message.” When I ask him about this charge, Guinan responds as he often does, by telling a story that at first blush seems to have nothing to do with the matter at hand. In the early 1960s, he recounts, he’d been invited to a black storefront church on the West Side where the small congregation planned to honor the church’s pianist, Spencer Randolph. Guinan knew Randolph from the taverns where he’d play at night. During the ceremony, the minister told a story about a boy who saw a lightning bug. The boy wondered why the lightning bug lit up like that, so he asked his father. His father, who wasn’t an educated man, could only think to reply, “It’s just something in him.” Then the minister went on. “People ask us why we sing, why we shout, why we fall out? It’s just something in us.” Days later, I realize that Guinan was really talking about himself. It’s just something in him.

  An admirer says, “He’s so intuitive, everything’s so obvious to him. It’s all inside him.” I once asked Guinan why he chooses the subjects he does. “I wish I could say something like the people in these bars are more honest, more down-to-earth, that they don’t put on any airs. But it’s not necessarily true. . . . In the end, you see, all it is is someone for people to look at.” He’s being somewhat disingenuous, but his point his clear: His work—unlike, say Courbet’s—is not meant as a social statement.

  Guinan is attracted to the unvarnished quality of those who have little left to lose. He has become friends with many of those he painted. He attended the wedding of one, Sybil, a former prostitute. He took Emile to France with him for an opening, and Loeb rented a piano so that Emile could play. (The film Casablanca was popular in France at the time, recalls Guinan, so everyone kept asking for “As Time Goes By,” which Emile, accustomed to honoring requests, was happy to play.) Guinan and his wife regularly dined with Loretta, whom he drew at Rite Liquors. And he would visit Geraldine, a former prostitute, at her room in the Fullerton Hotel to help her with letters she was writing to a lover.

  These men and women are, for him, what the city is all about: people getting by, people with nothing to hide. He admires their straightforwardness, their directness. In the monograph of his work, he recalls some of his encounters, including the time he approached a prostitute named Anita at a bar and offered to pay her hourly fee of twenty dollars if she’d let him sketch her. She agreed, and the two retired to a by-the-hour room at the Victor Hotel.

  “Now, I want you to behave as if I were a date,” Guinan told her. “Do whatever you do and I will stop you at some point and ask you to pose. Do you take off your clothes?”

  “Take off my clothes! On a date? I usually wear pants, you know, slacks. And just take out one leg. You don’t want to do me with no clothes on anyway, I got terrible stretch marks.”

  Guinan guessed her age at twenty, but Anita told him she was in fact thirty-two and had three children. Guinan had her pose lying on the hotel bed, in red panties and bra, her hands behind her head. She has a distant look about her, as if she’d rather be somewhere else, which is probably how she looks when she’s performing her job.

  “It would be a lot easier to fuck, wouldn’t it?” Anita suggested.

  “I got to do this work.”

  “Takes all kinds.”

  Guinan needed to return the next week to finish the drawing, and he asked Anita if they could get the same room. She simply told the clerk that she had a date who couldn’t “make it” unless he was in the same room, a request that didn’t seem to fluster the man behind the desk.

  It’s a story which seems meant to let us know that Guinan recognizes that, in the end, he’s completely dependent on the goodwill of his subjects. He often worries that he has taken advantage of people who are down on their luck. One time, he went on a rant about white suburbanites slumming at South Side blues clubs: “There’s something about it I don’t like. Young white rock musicians from the suburbs will go down to some dark South Side neighborhood and have themselves photographed against some bleak urban setting to make it look as if they live there, as if they suffered the hard knocks. They’ve taken someone else’s misfortune to use as a background for their own mediocrity.” “But couldn’t people say that about you?” I asked. “Exactly. Exactly. ’Cause I feel like in the back of my mind I’m doing something similar . . . I mean I pay them, but in a way I get that nagging feeling that maybe I’m exploiting these people.” “Is that why you stopped doing it?” “No, I stopped doing it ’cause my stomach was killing me. It got to the point two years ago that I couldn’t stand looking at anoth
er beer.”

  But Guinan has another problem. His subjects are moving targets. Gentrification has pushed the poor and the marginalized this way, then that. It’s like being rocked on a ship. First Maxwell Street closed. Then Clark Street was cleaned up, and then the artists and young financiers moved into Wicker Park, and gone were the taverns, the King Palace, the J.N.L., and Sam’s. Rite Liquors is one of the last of his hangouts still standing. “The image of Chicago is becoming self-conscious,” he says. “Suddenly the mayor wants to clean it up, make it look like Anywhere, USA, with a lot of wrought-iron fences and flowers. Flowers in all the parking lots. There seems to be this need to homogenize the place. It was a city of neighborhoods but more and more it’s becoming . . .” He doesn’t finish his thought. He doesn’t have to.

  Guinan’s still painting. He’s been sketching jazz and blues musicians at places like the HotHouse and the Velvet Lounge. He can depend on them. They’re predictable. He knows when they’ll be there. He tired of the chase. We met up one night at the Velvet Lounge, a small, dark former speakeasy with floral-print wallpaper from the 1940s. On the wall opposite the bar are photographs of jazz musicians who have played here. On one of them, the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy has scrawled, This place is a temple. The lounge is owned by saxophonist Fred Anderson, who’s now in his seventies and, as the founder of a modern jazz co-op, has performed here and overseas, in Germany, Hungary, France, and Japan. Someday, Guinan wants to paint a portrait of Anderson, whose curved posture resembles a sax. Guinan had taken me here this particular evening to hear Nichole Mitchell, a jazz flutist whom he has painted. He titled one of the portraits “Wheat Grass,” since for a while Mitchell lived on a diet of wheat grass. (A French pharmacist bought that work.) There were six members of the band, and nine of us in the audience, not counting two middle-aged men at the bar watching a Chicago Bulls game. When we returned to the Lounge a few weeks later, this time to hear Edward Wilkerson, Jr., a young, talented sax player who’s been reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly and whose pieces are, as Guinan suggests, like individual short stories, the crowd again was scarce—three people besides ourselves. “That’s why I identify with these guys, ’cause I don’t have an audience either,” he says.