This week: Duncan and Richard talk to artist, professor and musician Jim Lutes about his work, his career, and his recent show at the Renaissance Society."Chicago-based painter Jim Lutes is often considered heir to the Imagist
tradition. This, however, is only part of the story. Having come to
artistic maturity in the late 1970s, Lutes exemplifies a larger and
more complex historical narrative that entails the emergence of
figuration and regionalism under the declining influence of Abstract
Expressionism. This would be born out over several bodies of work in
which Lutes would vacillate beween a populist mode of figuration and a
painterly abstraction, the combination of which produced a style along
the lines of Picasso in the 1930s or Guston in the 1970s."