The Alzheimer’s Paintings
William Utermohlen was a successful, iconoclastic American artist living in London when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Here, we examine a series of his self-portraits.
By Dave Bunnell
Saturday, March 31, 2007
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William Utermohlen was a successful, iconoclastic American artist living in London when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1995. Instead of simply giving into despair, he characteristically tried to understand his disease by painting a series of self-portraits.
The paintings starkly reveal Utermohlen’s gradual descent into the ever-darkening pit of dementia. At the very least, they are frighteningly poignant. It is almost as if you can see the artist painfully struggling to come out from his foggy reality back into the clarity of his previous self.
According to his wife, he understood that technical flaws were creeping into his work, but he couldn’t figure out what to do about them.
We present here four of Utermohlen’s works. The first (mixed media on paper) was executed in 1967, long before the onset of Alzheimer’s; the second, Self Portrait—Red, was done in 1996 shortly after he was diagnosed; the third, Self-Portrait—Green, was painted in 1997; the last, which was his second-to-last painting, was completed in 2000. One final painting was partially erased and never completed. View a slideshow of the four self-portraits here »
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