Michael Hurson

Youngstown, OH, 1941 - 2007, Nyack, NY

BiographyFebruary 11, 2007
Michael Hurson, Whimsical Artist, Dies at 65
By ROBERTA SMITH

Michael Hurson, a New York-based artist whose drawings and paintings imbued human and inanimate subjects alike with a stylish caricatural energy, died on Jan. 29 in Nyack, N.Y.. He was 65 and lived in Garnerville, N.Y.

He died of a heart attack hours after entering Nyack Hospital complaining of breathing difficulties, said Paula Cooper, the New York art dealer who has exhibited his work since 1982.

Mr. Hurson combined a gift for drawing with a sharp intelligence cloaked in whimsy and often took inspiration from Burr Tillstrom, a longtime friend and the creator of the influential puppet show “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” broadcast on television from 1947 to 1957.

His most direct nod to puppetry was “Red and Blue,” a play produced at the Public Theater to negative reviews in 1982; its only characters were two talking light bulbs — one red, one blue.

His first New York exhibition, a 1974 show in the Project series at the Museum of Modern Art, featured precise balsa-wood miniatures of modern interiors, the most complex of which was based on one of Mr. Tillstrom’s homes.

Mr. Hurson negotiated his own path between Pop and Conceptual Art, couching familiar everyday objects in seemingly neutral, almost hermetic terms. He shared these instincts with artists like Robert Moskowitz, Neil Jenney and Jennifer Bartlett, and his work was included with theirs in “New Image Painting” at the Whitney Museum in 1978. Mr. Hurson was represented there by small, sly paintings of walking or dancing eyeglasses — possible self-portraits whose use of silkscreen and multiple canvases seemed to riff on Andy Warhol’s work.

In an increasingly nuanced yet insistent, subtly Cubist drawing style of angled planes and tweedy textures, Mr. Hurson also made portraits of pencils, coat hangers, drinking fountains and a Pinocchio puppet purchased in Italy, as well as actual people.

In the 1990s, he began translating famous masterpieces into this style, including Picasso’s “Guernica,” Masaccio’s Adam and Eve from the “Expulsion From Eden” and, most recently, Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte,” which he knew intimately from his days at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Born and raised in Chicago, Mr. Hurson earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Art Institute in 1963.

His work is represented in numerous public collections, including those of the Modern, the Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

He is survived by his sister, Debra George of Racine, Wis.

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