Semetic Garden...A Young Man

The art historian and fellow School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alum Franz Schulze once called Irvin Petlin “one of the most gifted members of the mid-fifties Art Institute generation. [His] is possibly the most oblique, magical, eerie and difficult to read of all recent Chicago art.” While attending SAIC from 1953 to 1956, Petlin came to reject abstraction, claiming “it was missing the human imprint; there were no faces to look at, there were no eyes staring back.” In the early 1970s Petlin began working in pastels, creating the series The Semitic Garden, from which this work comes.