Corbett vs. Dempsey

works by Robert Nickle

Robert Nickle began work in collage in 1946, the year he first came to Chicago from Michigan, and he continued in that medium over the course of his thirty-four-year professional career. Remarkably consistent in appearance over the years, his works are tidy, carefully balanced compositions made up of layered scraps of paper form Chicago's streets. They are often untitled or titled only descriptively; Nickle wrote that he preferred his works to speak for themselves and for him.

Nickle came to Chicago to study with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design. As he trained in graphic design, he began to make collages; his artwork was shown publicly as early as 1947, when one of his collages was included in the "new Realities" show in Paris. After he finished his studies at ID, Nickle accepted a teaching position in design there form 1949-1952. He subsequently took a job at UIC, where he remained for the rest of his career.

Nickel admired Piet Modrian, and like him, devoted painstaking attention to the subtle adjustments required to achieve balance in his art, sometimes taking years to complete a single work. Nickle would spread up to fifty collages at a time on the work tables f his studio, each one sandwiched in glass to preserve its arrangement. Moving from one work to another, he would scrutinize and make adjustments in a process he described as being akin to playing simultaneous chess games. A finished work would be signed on the back next to a photograph of the atist(he did not want his signature to disturb the collage), and framed between two pieces of glass in a stainless-steel frame of his own construction.

The works range in size from one to eight square feet. Most are at the smaller end of this range, because Nickle liked to see a collage in its entirety as he worked on it. He made use of texture, overlapping, and variations in edges of the scarps as well as shape and size to achieve a remarkable richness and range of effects. Although he use predominantly subdued tones, at times he would include a brightly colored element in a composition or assemble together several pieces of colored paper, creating interest form their variations in tone as well as shape. Like Paul Klee, another artist he admired, Nickle would sometimes include a letter or word as an element of visual interest in his compositions.

Nickle exhibited extensively during his career. He had one-person shows at AIX (1978); Cranbrook Academy Museum in Bloomfeild Hills, Michigan (1979); and UIC's Gallery 400 (1994); and numerous solo shows at his long-time gallery, Richard Gray, Chicago, and at the Acquavella Contemporary Art Gallery in New York. He participated in MOMA's "assemblage" (1961) and MCA's "abstract Art in Chicago" (1976). His works are in the collections of several museums, including AIC, MCA, and The David and Alfred Smart Museum in Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; National Gallery in Washington, DC; and the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo.

Biography by Megan H. Mack, from Art in Chicago 1945 - 1995