About This Artwork

Jim Nutt
American, born 1938

Miss E. Knows, 1967

Acrylic on Plexiglas with aluminum and rubber; enamel on wood frame
192.1 x 131.1 cm (75 5/8 x 51 5/8 in.)
Twentieth-Century Purchase Fund, 1970.1014

Jim Nutt was a leading member of the Hairy Who, an irreverent, loose affiliation of artists working in Chicago who exhibited together at the Hyde Park Art Center in the late 1960s and whose work displayed similar stylistic inclinations. Influenced by the aesthetics of comic books, advertisements, cinema, folk art, tribal art, and Surrealism, Nutt’s darkly humorous, sometimes violent work presents an emphatically vernacular, unconventionally sensuous, and often explicitly sexual vision of the human figure. Miss E. Knows exemplifies the artist’s meticulous and painstakingly slow technique of painting on the back of Plexiglas to create a seamless, glossy surface. In this composition, charged with the animated feel of the artist’s early work, a filmstrip cuts across the eyes of the distorted central figure as surrounding ancillary images juxtapose disparate, fragmented narratives in Nutt’s graphic, linear style.