A Hermit Gets Naked, Goes Wild. Plus, the Marvel Called the Thorne Rooms

At the Art Institute of Chicago, self-love reigns, as well as living large by going small.

E nough of the American Revolution, at least for a week. Chicago’s on my mind. Forget about Warhol, Lichtenstein, Richter, and Basquiat, artists whose work at last week’s marquee auctions went for tens of millions. All fine but overrated and obscenely overpriced. Looking at the sweep of 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s artists, the era’s real maestro, spark, iconoclast, and wizard has to be Lucas Samaras (1936–2024), whose work is never a big money player. There’s a good Samaras show at the Art Institute of Chicago running until July 1. And next to the Samaras show are the Thorne Rooms, another creative triumph. “There’s no place like home” is a theme that unites them.

Lucas Samaras: Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking, I write with a snarl, unfolds in two rotations, which means visitors have to go twice. In a flourish of incompetence, it’s not even listed on the Art Institute’s current exhibition page. I got a press release and went. After all, it’s Samaras.

Samaras is best known for his AutoPolaroid series, from 1969 to 1971, and his Photo-Transformations, from 1973 to 1976, but he was a pioneer player in early ’60s Happenings, a pastelist, a sculptor, and a painter. He’s not acclaimed from the rooftops or the auction blocks because his work’s small and he’s considered a photographer. Most of Samaras’s work is self-portraiture, and a chunk of that nude self-portraiture, an acquired taste. Also, he was a recluse and never left Manhattan after, say, 1980 and almost never left his apartment in Midtown, which he called his Xanadu. He’s also called the Father of the Selfie. He’s an icon of the Me Decade, too.

The show begins with Ultra-Large Lucas, an 8-foot-tall color-bust self-portrait from 1983 that shows the bearded, dark-eyed, Greek-American Samaras awash with blue, pink, and red light and looking  — I thought at first — demonic. Then I thought “inquisitive” and “stern” before I returned to demonic. His work is open to different interpretations. He also looks like what I imagine Svengali looked like, and, like Svengali, Samaras was a flamboyant seducer who played with fire and had a touch of evil. He came to the U.S. from Greece as a teen, studied art at Rutgers and then acting with Stella Adler, who taught Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, and Robert De Niro how to imagine and to immerse, how to access and use what’s raw in others and in yourself. Samaras smolders like a Greek monk in the mountaintop monastery, offering agony, ecstasy, but also camp.

Samaras’s method made himself a sitting, standing, walking, looking work of art as the title tells us, and he dug deep in search of what one critic called “the conglomerate of many creatures.” Sitting, Standing draws almost entirely from the Art Institute’s permanent collection, which is heavy on photographs, so his installation, performance art, and pastel portraits aren’t there. That means we don’t get much of a sense of how he began. The show’s a soupçon, not a survey.

In an early experiment, he placed objects from his apartment — plants, art supplies, books, a roll of toilet paper — so they’d fill three-quarters of the photograph. In the upper right corner is an image of two Samarases kissing and embracing. Bright, seemingly divine light shines from the back through spaces between the two bodies. Now, that’s a new kind of self-portraiture. The photograph is a Polaroid peel-off that developed slowly but Samaras altered the image by sketching in the second body.

His self-absorption, drawn from the Greek myth about Narcissus, led to an unusual brand of self-love in that Samaras was a lifelong celibate, having never disrobed — in a lovey-dovey mood — before any animal, mineral, or vegetable and having never entertained a human touch driven by desire. “When you live alone, you become the audience to your own life,” he said. “You have the power, you can turn it any way you want, make the drama go this way or that.” Lots of his work is soft porn, and some of it spoofs Playboy centerfolds. It all has high-octane aesthetic drama. My favorite work is Panorama, from between 1983 and 1986. It’s a montage of slices of a nude self-portrait. It’s late-stage Cubism, but Braque and Picasso it ain’t.

Samaras did a group of self-portraits in which he’s disguised, not seriously so, but he predicts what Cindy Sherman started doing a few years later. In his Photo-Transformation series, using an experimental Polaroid camera, he manipulated the sealed patches of colored gels in the thing’s innards for a look that’s new — not new and improved as the ads from the ’60s into the ’80s promised, but entirely original. They’re surreal, dangerous, glitzy, and worth comparing to Warhol’s celebrity portraits from the 1970s and ’80s.

Samaras’s nudes are still edgy in part because of an unstoppable taboo against men strutting all their stuff, but Samaras tossed back the example of ancient Greek art, where nudity was the norm. He said his self-portraits conveyed his masturbatory fantasies, too, as well as the spirit of Greek myth. Move over, Rembrandt, Dürer, Van Gogh, Kahlo, and even Gainsborough, Reynolds, Velázquez, and Van Dyck. Portraiture of every stripe would never be the same.

There are a few of Samaras’s sculptures in the exhibition, among them Chair with Objects, from 1986, the chair packed with eccentric objects, and a bowl from 1965 covered with different types of rhinestones for a dense, fragmented, textured, and psychedelic look. He made boxes à la Cornell starting in the 1960s, close to 300 of them. Many are shaped like small coffins. There’s one in the exhibition, from 1986, with an X-ray of Samaras’s head, a praying mantis in a natural-history-museum specimen enclosure, beads, yarn, and rhinestones.

I wish the exhibition developed Samaras’s technique, since he was able to do so many new things because of Edwin Land’s and Polaroid’s innovations in self-developing film. Polaroid gave Samaras one of ten SX-70 prototypes in 1973. He used it for his Photo-Transformations series, blurring the walls between photography, painting, and drawing. Were there more tricks? Samaras’s mentor among the Old Masters was El Greco, also Greek. He saw himself as the last Byzantine, living like a monk and making art packed with innuendo. He’s an original.

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So, from Narcissus to Narcissa. Narcissa Niblack Thorne and the Thorne Rooms, that is. Next to the Samaras show, in the Art Institute’s basement, are the 68 Thorne miniature rooms, part fantasy, part history, part design, exquisite, much-loved, and cult objects for many. How fitting. Samaras just wanted to stay home. If I lived in these rooms, I wouldn’t want to leave, either. Exactingly made between 1932 and 1940 in a 1:12 scale, about 1 inch for every foot, they’re Mrs. Thorne’s brainchildren. She was born in Indiana in1882, married a Montgomery Ward heir, and became a Chicago socialite on a mission. Inspired by doll houses, Christmas crèches, and the nascent Period Room movement in museums, she wanted to delight people of all ages with craftsmanship on a tiny scale, raise standards for proper living, and celebrate the best design of the past. She succeeds to this day.

The European rooms range from an English church nave and apse from around 1300 to an English Great Hall from the late Tudor period, a French bedroom from the same period, and English and French dining rooms, reception rooms, bedrooms, and boudoirs until the days of empire. Craftsmen made the tiny furniture using old techniques. Masters from the Needlework and Textile Guild of Chicago made rugs, tapestries, bedspreads, and draperies. Moldings, wainscoting, and plasterwork on walls and ceilings came from experts. Plastic repelled Mrs. Thorne. Silver in dining rooms started with melted Liberty dimes, then fashioned by silversmiths. Marble floors were made from marble. Tiny books have leather bindings.

Mrs. Thorne thought that English and French design from the 18th century was the pinnacle of style — I agree — but over time she commissioned a Biedermeier room, Chinese and Japanese interiors, and rooms in Santa Fe hacienda taste. Living in the days of Colonial Revival and a developing a reverence for American antiques, she added 37 American rooms, about half from New England and Virginia, most colonial or Federal, but she threw the net wider. There’s a South Carolina ballroom in what looks to Yankee me like Georgian bordello style and also a New York parlor right before the Gilded Age hit. The room that has the most objects in it, surprisingly, is the one dedicated to the minimalist Shakers, who lived self-sufficiently and among useful gadgets.

The Thorne Room galleries are wood-paneled, with low lighting and individual rooms in boxes like stage sets built into the walls. The rooms look sacramental and like a glimpse into a secret world where aristocratic Lilliputians might have lived. Low-placed windows in the rooms often look out to hints of a garden.

When I was there, two school groups — tweens — were there. They were smitten. A plush Louis Quinze boudoir drew a group. “Boudoir” meant a saucy space for them, and indeed Mrs. Thorne saw the room and style in terms of a proliferation of forms on which to recline. A French bathroom and boudoir from the Revolutionary Period, from 1793 to 1804, is elegant but simpler, with classical motifs like crossed arrows and laurels and drapery swags hung over poles in severe poles. The tub is sunken and a perfect circle. It matches an oculus above it. Among these kids, I spotted developing taste. Some viewers went for Colonial because it’s familiar. Some went for California cool, some for Jacobean bulk.

French design is more didactic and changes more dramatically as we move from the days of the Louis kings to liberté, égalité, fraternité and the inevitable coupez-leur la tête that follows utopian flights. The English seem always to put a premium on cozy. Mrs. Thorne wanted style purity and unity, but, let’s get real, people tend to mix and match and like accrual. That’s an English and American aesthetic. Even purist English rooms will have touches of chinoiserie, the look of Pompeii, and French things, which tend never to go totally out of style no matter how much the Brits and French quarrel.

The American rooms will feel like home since that’s our heritage and we know the iconography best. There’s a miniature ship on the mantle of the Massachusetts living room and kitchen. It’s the Mayflower. The Connecticut Valley tavern parlor has a door that gives us a peak into another room. We see a fully rendered bar. Pine, oak, hooked rugs, and a dollop of simplicity rule. Things get lusher as we grow richer — wallpaper, Oriental rugs, silver, ancestor portraits, and plasterwork appear — but the look never turns floaty. American art is never too far from terra firma. It has weight.

A close look makes for chuckles. The Tudor room has a dog sleeping by the fireplace. The English drawing room has what’s got to be the tiniest chess set made, Mrs. Thorne reported, “by a very big Englishman with proportionately large hands,” suggesting a Pickwick with wee chisels and gougers. The Georgia double parlor from around 1850 has a “chaperone sofa.” It’s a French Empire–inspired sofa with a hump separating two spaces to sit so no one reclines if tempted. The Middletown parlor is late Victorian and meant to reflect the spirit of Middletown (1929), the study by sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd of small American cities. In the 1930s, this would have been old-fashioned décor. Still, the toy locomotive and doll on the carpet, an early wall telephone, and an insanely showy portrait frame make you feel “as though you were visiting your grandmother,” Mrs. Thorne wrote, which means warm and fuzzy.

Mrs. Thorne has to be considered a master artist though she didn’t make anything. She was, though, the visionary, designer, entrepreneur, goader-in-chief, patron, and sourcer. The Art Institute compares her to Walt Disney. That’s not far off. And Mrs. Thorne knew how to make a place for the viewer. The rooms have only three walls. We stand in what would have been the fourth, supplying the heart and soul.