Jim Nutt

Nutt attended the University of Kansas, the University of Pennsylvania, and Washington University in St. Louis without completing a degree, then transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned a BFA in 1965. There he met the artist Gladys Nilsson, who later became his wife and lifelong artistic partner. In 1966, Nutt, Nilsson, Art Green, Suellen Rocca, Jim Falconer, and Karl Wirsum formed the Hairy Who, staging a series of exhibitions organized by Don Baum at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in 1966, 1967, and 1968. The group's raucous, cartoon-inflected style, along with contemporaries working in similar veins, became known as the Chicago Imagists.

Nutt held his first solo exhibition at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago in 1970. Over the following decades his paintings shifted from the group's original comic-strip exuberance toward slower, highly controlled close-up portraits of invented female faces, rendered first in reverse paint on Plexiglas and later in acrylic on linen and in graphite. He continued to show regularly in New York, including at Nolan/Eckman Gallery in the late 1990s, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago mounted a twenty-year survey of his work in 2011. He lives and works in the Chicago area and, in 2023, presented a body of new graphite drawings at David Nolan Gallery in New York.

Nutt's critical standing rests heavily on his role in the Hairy Who and on the sustained, close-focus intensity of his later portrait paintings and drawings. The Art Institute of Chicago mounted a major survey of the Hairy Who in 2018, underscoring the group's lasting place in the city's art history and Nutt's part in shaping its exhibitions. The New York Times profiled Nutt again in 2023, on the occasion of his David Nolan Gallery show, presenting him as an artist still actively developing his close-focus portrait style into his eighties. Critical attention has consistently framed him as a peer's artist, a reputation built more on museum and institutional esteem than on market visibility.

Nutt's public auction record is thin and only partially documented. The clearest single-lot result located is Untitled, which sold for USD 37,500 at Phillips; the exact sale date could not be confirmed from public sources. Phillips also lists a smaller sale, Tack, at USD 2,500. Market-tracking database MutualArt reports realized prices reaching up to USD 966,098 for paintings, but it does not identify the specific lot, auction house, or sale date behind that figure, so it should be read as an unverified database ceiling rather than a confirmed record sale. Taken together, the pattern is a market built on museum standing rather than high-frequency trading, with too few public sales to support a reliable price trend.

Nutt's market is defined by scarcity rather than volume: individual sale results are few, unevenly documented, and can shift sharply with a single strong or weak lot, which is why the reported ceiling above USD 900,000 should not be treated as an established benchmark. No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed, which places extra weight on provenance and on verification through his representing galleries, David Nolan Gallery and Venus Over Manhattan, both in New York. His deep museum presence, continued gallery representation, and recognition such as his 2016 honorary degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are the strongest signals of durability, while the small, sparsely documented auction record is the main reason to treat any single public sale figure with care.