The Art Institute of Chicago has mounted an exhibition of 36 works by Lucas Samaras from their collection. It has led to some controversy in that it does not reflect the total span of the artist’s work in their holdings. Prior to writing this review, I researched the online collections of Samaras’s work in three major museums: The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), the Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. AIC has 79, MoMA has 78, and The Whitney has 128 works online. What is striking is that the collections are remarkably similar—it became hard to remember which image belonged to which. (MoMA seems to have more pre-Polaroid early work in pastels.) That these three museums have strikingly similar collections of one-off Polaroids speaks to Samaras’s method of working in series. He would slightly change each image of a suite, allowing for the sale of more than one work with the same subject matter.

Note: All Polaroids (internal dye diffusion transfer prints) are by Lucas Samaras and are from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

        Let us consider what kind of artist and person Samaras was. First, he was a recluse, living alone his entire adult life after leaving home in New Jersey and moving to New York around 1960. Second, his discovery of the Polaroid camera as an art medium in 1969 gave him a platform that did not rely on anyone else to process the finished piece, as other types of photography often did at the time. This technological independence dovetailed with his reclusiveness. He also discovered how to independently manipulate and distort the Polaroid images as they developed. He would move the emulsion with a stylus as it developed, giving him a unique way to create his images. After his discovery of manipulable Polaroid photography, most of his work for the next twenty years was in this medium.

        It must be remembered that Samaras as a youth lived through WWII and the Greek Revolution. While his father emigrated to the U.S. in 1939, Lucas and his mother stayed in Greece and were not reunited with his father until they in turn emigrated to the U.S. in 1948. It has been noted that he described artmaking as an escape from the horrors of war and a way to communicate without speaking English. It is also possible that his reclusiveness was a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I saw this phenomenon in my own family who lived in Europe through WWI and WWII. Yet, his reclusiveness appears to have come later, after he had moved to New York City. While still in New Jersey at Rutgers University, he studied with Allan Kaprow and George and Helen Segal. Significantly, in the 1950s, he was active in the Happenings movement.

        Virtually all of the artist’s Polaroid works were self-portraiture in some way. Most of the images were multiple exposures of himself in various poses (mostly in the nude) or with his face peeking out somewhere in the composition. There was a couple that he liked to use as models. They would assume various nude poses—on a chair or standing side-by-side—and Samaras would be seated in a chair next to them, sometimes looking away, sometimes looking out at the viewer. This combination of self-referential poses and subject matter is often considered a form of narcissism by Samaras’s critics. But it is not the narcissism of classical myth that is obsessed with beauty. In fact, some of the distortions he created can be quite ugly and are reminiscent of the tortured paintings of Francis Bacon. Samaras’s so called narcissism is an obsession with the self for its own sake and, possibly, a means of escaping from the outside world in order to look more deeply into his own soul. It leaves one with the impression of a deeply troubled person using art as a tool to come to terms with his history and his being.

        There is some discussion about whether Samaras was gay. And there are a series of images (not in this show) in which he is having sex with himself. In one piece that is included in this show, he appears to be kissing himself by means of a double exposure. This work could just be another manifestation of his neurotic narcissism. There is no evidence in his body of work reflecting any kind of response to the Gay movement after 1969 or to the AIDS crisis in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, Samaras did know Robert Maplethorpe in the 1970s and 1980s, and they were for a time represented by the same dealer. So, he had to be aware of the AIDS epidemic. But these events that heavily influenced the art world did not seem to infiltrate his studio-apartment. Also, nowhere in Samaras’s work is there a gesture of affection for another person, regardless of gender. Consider how radically different he is from his older countryman, Yannis Tsarouchis. Tsarouchis struggled with his homosexuality, and much of his oeuvre deals with this issue. There is a poignant painting by him of one man offering a bouquet of flowers to another. No such imagery exists in Samaras’s body of work.

        Samaras also made sculpture—most famously, his chairs and boxes. They often suggest a propensity for sadomasochism. His “jewel” encrusted pieces included in this show were, frankly, unremarkable to this viewer, and again, bordered on ugly. Later in this century, the artist known as Puppies Puppies took up this subject and created a number of highly creative and amusing sculptural works, such as his razor blade-embedded transparent plastic toilet seat. But humor was seldom part of Samaras’s artistic vocabulary. An exception might be the two pieces of a man and a woman holding jars with images or their own faces in them. This could be considered wry humor about how our corporate culture is geared to selling oneself as a commodity.

        So, what are we to make of the oeuvre of Lucas Samaras? Certainly, he was an innovator in the use of the Polaroid camera and was even supported in part by its manufacturer, the Polaroid Corporation. But electronic technology made the Polaroid camera obsolete, and it eventually fell into disuse to be replaced by the cell phone and Photoshop (though Polaroid has had somewhat of a revival in recent years).

        This leaves us with the content of his work. Its frequent self-inflicted sadomasochism is certainly novel, but not particularly unique, with roots that go as far back a Hieronymus Bosch and religious paintings of hell. It is also deeply indebted to the tortured work of English painter Francis Bacon. Samaras’s oeuvre is sadly melancholic and, overall, the portrait of a deeply disturbed mind of someone who could not quite join society and partake of its joys.

Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a published art critic for more than 45 years and is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.