In the Hand

Milwaukee-born Wilde (pronounced “Wil-dee”) lived and worked in his native Wisconsin for his entire life. He studied art and art history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 1938-42. There he worked with James Watrous, who was on the forefront of an American revival of historical techniques. Wilde learned to make his own medium from a synthesis of recipes dating to the Medieval and Renaissance periods and through personal experiments. From the early 1940s, Wilde cultivated a technically and intellectually sophisticated approach to intensely personal subject matter. Equally indebted to Northern Renaissance art and European Surrealism, he was championed by the critic Lincoln Kirstein as part of an alternate modernist tradition that rejected the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic. His wide-ranging oeuvre encompasses uninhibited sexuality, shocking scenes of violence, and gorgeous meditations on the beauty of nature. In the Hand belongs to this latter category, succinctly presenting death as a reality to be honored through the artist’s creative skill.