Thomas H. Kapsalis: Oblique Perspective

Oblique Perspective opens and runs parallel to a memorial show at Corbett vs. Dempsey titled Nine Decades, which highlights a single Kapsalis work from each of the decades stretching from 1949 to 2020.      

Thomas H. Kapsalis (1925-2022) enjoyed one of the longest running careers in the history of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he was a beloved teacher for more than 50 years.  Himself an alum of SAIC, Kapsalis studied with landmark figures such as art historian Kathleen Blackshear and printmaker Vera Berdich.  In 1943, the young painter and sculptor graduated from SAIC and was drafted into the U.S. Army less than a year later.  As a member of the 106th Infantry, 422nd Regiment of the Army, Kapsalis was captured and injured during the Battle of the Bulge; a POW until the end of the war, he then returned to Chicago and entered graduate school at SAIC, taking a few classes at a time.  In 1953, he was awarded a Fulbright to travel back to Germany, where he spent a year studying with painter Willi Baumeister.   When he landed back in Chicago, Kapsalis became regular faculty at his alma mater, and he eventually went on to teach an astounding number of prospective artists, including most of the future Imagists and many artists from other enclaves with different outlooks than theirs or his.  As an artist, Kapsalis was committed to modernism and specifically the mission of abstract art.  His teaching, however, was uncommonly inclusive, and among the classes he taught was life drawing, where he proceeded from the kinds of core principles he learned from artist-teachers like Constantine Pougialis, Edmund Giesbert, and Paul Wieghardt.  Kapsalis was old school and vanguard, a gentleman professor who was indeed gentle and an abstract thinker who encouraged his students to imagine outside the box.  Jim Dempsey, who studied life-drawing multiple times with Kapsalis in the early 1990s, recalls the professor as a calm presence who might hang back until you were struggling and then force you to see the problem differently by turning your composition 90-degrees, even if it was representational.  "It was like going to the gym," says Dempsey.  "I repeated his class to keep those muscles toned, even though I wasn't the least bit interested in being a figure painter."  

During his five-decade stint as a teacher at SAIC, Kapsalis created various unique teaching tools, including charts and graphs that introduced basic compositional ideas and color principles.  Among these are a small group of color chart paintings that he made at the end of the Vietnam war.  After his wartime experience in WWII, Kapsalis had taken a stance against the conflict, and his subtle act of resistance was to eliminate color entirely from his work.  As the U.S. started pulling out of Vietnam, he made a series of canvases that superimposed text – names of colors – on top of rectangles of different colors.  The exhibition Oblique Perspective will present two of these remarkable paintings, which Kapsalis used as a way of introducing complex color relationships to his students.  The show also includes other handmade teaching materials created in the 1960s and '70s, as well as many other pieces of teaching ephemera, such as his individual note cards on decades of students, books of recommendation letters, and even teaching materials he'd copied from his beloved teacher Ms. Blackshear, all drawn from his archives, which, true to Kapsalis's form, were fastidious and complete.

– John Corbett

Exhibit Opens Friday, June 23 5-8pm and continues though Summer. Open hours are generally Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, by appointment. Email or direct message @DavidSalkin on Instagram for more information. David Salkin Creative is a custom surface and textile-design studio that hosts a diverse exhibition program, located in West Town, Chicago.