Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz Page B

domestic’s uniform from the hotel where she worked, Sister Carrie sits erect in a fragile-looking wooden chair, her tambourine in her lap. You can sense her economic struggles and her strong bearing. The
International Herald Tribune
once wrote that Guinan portrays “a world of desolate dignity.” An art dealer I spoke with said of Guinan’s work that it feels familiar—not the artistry, but the people and places. There’s an intimacy about his portraits that lets you feel that you know, or think you know, his subjects.
    Guinan’s work, as you might have gathered, is quite popular, although not in Chicago, where he’s virtually unknown. But in France.

    Guinan is originally from upstate New York and served a three-year peacetime stint in the army in Tripoli and Ankara as a radio operator. There, he fancied himself a Toulouse-Lautrec and sketched local peasants, imitating Toulouse-Lautrec’s nervous brush strokes, which he later abandoned for a more disciplined, naturalistic style. He arrived in Chicago in 1959 to attend the School of the Art Institute, and a friend took him to Maxwell Street, an introduction that altered his life. Maxwell Street may have been one of the most exhilarating, industrious, and productive open street bazaars in the world. Begun in 1874 by Jewish merchants (in the same neighborhood as Manny’s), it gradually became a hodgepodge collection of Jews, Mexicans, and African-Americans. (In its later years, the kids I knew from the West Side referred to it as Jewtown, even though by then most of the merchants were black.) On Sunday mornings, blues musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf played on the sidewalks, plugging their amps into the adjacent apartment buildings. Old men sold weathered
National Geographic
magazines, used picture frames, rusted tools, and assorted hardware such as nails and screws. On occasion, you could find new clothes and phonographs, though it was best not to ask where they came from. Samuel and Raymond Popeil, who eventually went on to invent the Veg-O-Matic and the Pocket Fisherman, honed their salesmanship techniques at Maxwell Street by hawking kitchenware. Street vendors barbecued Polish sausages and pig’s-ear sandwiches over fires set in city trash cans. “It was like being in Turkey or Libya,” Guinan says. “This open street market, all the ruckus.” He produced from that time a series of paintings that captured the market in its last days, solitary figures peddling their merchandise, and yet despite the fact that its end was near, there’s a joy and liveliness to these works. They’re among my favorites.
    When the Maxwell Street Market was finally shut down in the late 1990s (there’s a new, more sanitized version now a few blocks east), Guinan was devastated. “I thought it was the end of the world,” he recalls. “They’re destroying what’s lovely about the city all for what? For condos.” This has become a theme for Guinan, a city disappearing, but he’s been saying it now for thirty years and so one begins to wonder if that isn’t simply the nature of urban landscapes, that they shift and erode over time. Guinan soon discovered the bars on Clark Street, what was then Skid Row, and then the taverns in Wicker Park, including Rite Liquors.
    In the interim, Guinan was discovered by a French art dealer, Albert Loeb, who saw three of Guinan’s paintings at an art show in Switzerland. “It was a total surprise,” recalls Loeb. “It was realism. The first person I thought of was Courbet.” Gustave Courbet was a nineteenth-century French painter who, in an age when most art was idealized and historical, drew everyday villagers, in Courbet’s words, “as nature made them, without corrections.” (I mentioned to Guinan the comparison, and he laughed. His work does mirror Courbet’s, he said, except that the revolutionary Courbet