Early Abstract and Modernist Painting

Topcat Boy, 1970
Object-Ed Paschke, Topcat Boy
Born in Chicago in 1939, Ed Paschke studied at the School of the Art Institute in the 1960s while working as a commercial artist and experimenting with collage and film. Upon his exposure to Pop Art he began to incorporate images borrowed directly from popular print media into his work. As evidenced in his 1970 painting, Topcat Boy, Paschke’s interest in cartoons, animation, posters, and tattoo art provided diverse source material for his colorful, playful, and often out-landish imagery. Paschke drew on his experiences in the sleazy nightclubs and wrestling venues of Chicago, making their subcultures subjects of his Pop informed art. He carefully recreated the look and feel of various media and often manipulated his source materials—adding a woman’s face to the body of a doll, or hockey gloves and a Mexican lucha libre mask to the figure of the top-hatted man in Topcat Boy—to layer his canvases with a multitude of textures and psychedelic colors that enhance his sensational subjects.
Topcat Boy, 1970
Early Abstract and Modernist Painting

Telegraph Poles with Buildings, 1917

Construction, 1915

Peinture, 1917–18

Painting No. 50, 1914–15

Nature Symbolized #3: Steeple and Trees, 1911–12

Sails, 1911–12

Welcome to Our City, 1921

Boy with Cow, 1921

Super Table, 1925

Purple and Green Leaves, 1927

Boat Going through Inlet, c. 1929

The Green Chair, 1928

Politics, 1931

Brooklyn Bridge, on the Bridge, 1930

Sailboat, Brooklyn Bridge, New York Skyline, 1934

Red Amaryllis, 1937

Room Space, 1937–38

Adolescence, 1947

Highway, 1953

Topcat Boy, 1970

Untitled (Village Street Scene), 1948

Passing Show, 1951

Kalounna in Frogtown, 1986