Christina Ramberg’s suggestive, vexing paintings in retrospective

CHICAGO — No artist, to my knowledge, was making stranger, sexier, more vexing work in the 1970s than Christina Ramberg. At the same time, I can’t think of an artist more deeply cherished and missed by her peers.

Ramberg died in 1995 at the age of 49, diagnosed with Pick’s disease, an early-onset version of dementia. “Her sense of fun was so attractive,” wrote her friend Lorri Gunn Wirsum. “Her generosity was innate and her interest in others sincere.” About how many first-rate artists are such loving, uncomplicated things said?

Ramberg’s paintings, displayed in a ravishing retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, always strike me initially as devastatingly cool. In a strip-cartoon-inspired, pattern-besotted idiom, they show female hairdos, boneless hands entwined suggestively with shimmering cloths, and headless female torsos in corsets and brassieres.

As Ramberg developed, her immaculate paintings became progressively stranger and more fetishistic, until fishnet fabrics became skin, glossy hair became armor, and torsos became electricity towers. The critic Dan Nadel described Ramberg’s increasingly complex later works, made between 1979 and 1981, as “single-artist exquisite corpses,” referring to the surrealist drawing game whereby each person adds a new section of a body without being able to see the previous parts.

Cool they may be, but Ramberg’s works are by no means parsimonious. Rather, they straddle a divide between erotic heat and deadpan displacement.

Over her tragically curtailed career, Ramberg’s interests remained very steady, very consistent. Her painted surfaces were always smoothly impassive (no theatrically swishing brushstrokes or dense encrustations of paint). The Art Institute’s hang (it was organized by Mark Pascale, who knew Ramberg, and Thea Liberty Nichols) shows how her work developed almost like an unspooling algorithm. Its theme-and-variation logic suggests that, as with scores of other avant-gardists in the 1970s, process was as important to Ramberg as product.

She had a collector’s cast of mind — fastidious, discriminating, curiously offbeat — and was fascinated by morphologies. The show contains a wall of battered dolls, which followed her around from home to home. Some of her paintings almost double as inventories of graphic techniques applied not only to the picture but also the frames: faux bois (“false wood”), marbleizing, tromp l’oeil “glare” marks and so forth.

And yet for all her emphasis on process and taxonomies, every one of her paintings has its own, utterly distinctive glamour. For all their smooth, cartoon-inspired surfaces and machine-like symmetries, they share a psychological quality of control and release that Ramberg ratcheted up to a point of trembling tension.

It’s rare for artists to dig deep into their own psyches and communicate what they find there in genuinely original imagery. Instead of expressing the pathology of fixation (every fixation is a narrowing of imaginative freedom), Ramberg’s works take fixations as a starting point, then open them up to something larger, more sustaining and engrossing. In this way, they become art: ambiguous, involving, charged with the contradictoriness of life.

Ramberg’s imagery drew on so many sources that listing them can make her seem indiscriminate. She looked at classified ads for wigs, with their stylized illustrations of gleaming hairdos. She pored over vintage Sears and Roebuck catalogues showing isolated fascinators, corsets, girdles and pixie pumps. And she liked to peruse the personal ads in BDSM magazines.

She studied comics; hand-painted signs and items purchased at trash treasure markets; art house, pornographic and low-budget movies; and medical textbooks of skin diseases. Her artistic tastes included Indian miniatures, African art, outsider art, Japanese prints and Sienese primitives. She liked edgy fashion photographers such as Guy Bourdin. And she responded to the serial photographs of industrial structures by Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Ramberg created travel scrapbooks and her own photographic slides, and between 1969 and 1980, when her marriage to fellow artist Phil Hanson ended, she also kept a diary.

Parts of the diary have been (understandably) redacted by Ramberg’s family, but as art historian and curator Judith Russi Kirshner explains in the catalogue, its entries reveal much about Ramberg’s inner life, artistic ideas and erotic hankerings. She tried, quite hard, to keep these things separate (although they were not): Her work-related musings, which admit to insecurities about her talent and invidious comparisons with such successful friends and peers as Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt, are written in red, while her more personal reflections, on facing pages, are in blue.

The diaries contain frank expressions of Ramberg’s interest in bondage. “I began with a rather elaborate idea about women-in-pain but loving it,” she wrote, by way of explaining an early series of paintings of boneless hands entwined with stretched fabrics. She occasionally expressed shame about her interest in bodies in extremis, including markers of physical abuse, soiled garments and poses intimating constraint and pain.

According to Nichols, Ramberg was struggling with “the complex fantasies of a young wife’s extramarital yearnings, the shame she felt over her attraction to sadomasochistic imagery, and her guilt over denying that.” And there is a sense, says Nichols, in which the struggle itself became her real subject.

Ramberg was critical about her own body. She was tall and felt this interfered with her desire, in sexual situations, to be dominated by a man. During the heyday of second-wave feminism, she seems to have been ambivalent about the movement. But she read and admired Simone de Beauvoir, attracted, perhaps, by her tragic vision of relations between the sexes. Anaïs Nin’s erotic perspective, meanwhile, made her “proud to be a woman, proud of women.”

Although Ramberg sometimes worried about how much time she spent thinking about “style, fashion, clothing, decorating, fabrics, patter, quilting,” she concluded she was “beyond the point where that would embarrass me.”

In 1973, she gave birth to a premature baby who died shortly after delivery, leaving Ramberg “crazy with pain” and “sobbing uncontrollably.” When she gave birth to a healthy son, Alexander, in 1975, she was an affectionate, deeply engaged mother. But she also became concerned, like so many mothers, by the strain motherhood placed on her creativity and working life. “Is it possible to be an artist and a wife and a mother too?” she wondered. “I feel sick with anxiety over this question.” (She had read Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” during her first, failed pregnancy.)

The anxiety lingered, but Ramberg remained intensely ambitious, and her work continued to develop in fascinating directions. After her separation from Hanson in 1980, she turned a lifelong hobby — quilt-making — into the sole focus of her work for several years. There are five of these quilts in the show, complementing the 78 paintings, six bound volumes and 12 works on paper.

Ramberg’s work is too confident, too brilliantly realized, to be reduced to an expression of her psychosexual preoccupations. Rich, nuanced and imperiously aloof, it is there for women and men to extract whatever feelings and ideas they see in it. But contemplating her work may encourage people to rethink some of their assumptions about what makes powerful female art.

What I see in Ramberg changes from work to work and from one encounter to the next. Sometimes, I see strains of the psychic concentration and formal control in the work of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. (The great French neoclassical portraitist had a penchant for impossible anatomies, austere compositions and an embarrassingly over-the-top, almost plundering sensuality.)

Closer-in-time affinities exist (at least in my mind) between Ramberg and the surrealist Meret Oppenheim, the cartoonist Chris Ware (a poet of secret yearnings renowned for his graphic control) and the fashion-inspired artist Diane Simpson, who was a friend of Ramberg.

But what I mostly see is strangeness (how strange our deepest desires can be, especially to ourselves!) and intensity (how powerfully concentrated our bodies’ most elusive experiences can be!).

How wonderful, too, the freedom art affords to express all this.