{"id":19467,"date":"2021-05-20T19:27:44","date_gmt":"2021-05-20T23:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=19467"},"modified":"2021-05-21T19:48:46","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T23:48:46","slug":"john-oreilly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2021\/05\/20\/john-oreilly\/","title":{"rendered":"John O\u2019Reilly, Celebrated Worcester Collage Artist, Has Died"},"content":{"rendered":"

John O\u2019Reilly, the celebrated Worcester collage artist, died this morning, May 20, at age 91. His partner of 60 years, sculptor James Tellin, \u201cwas in the room with him, rubbing his feet when he realized he was gone,\u201d says Howard Yezerski, who has exhibited O\u2019Reilly\u2019s art for decades.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly won national attention when several artworks by the \u201cobscure 65-year-old collagist from Boston\u201d (in the words of New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman) were featured in the 1995 Whitney Biennial in New York.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the visual elements are lifted from art history, gay pornography and found vintage photographs, supplemented by photos taken by (and of) Mr. O\u2019Reilly himself. The complex cutting and pasting, subtle and seamless, is entirely hand done, without digital assistance.\u201d New York Times critic Holland Cotter reported<\/a> in 2011.<\/p>\n

Yezerkski recalls, \u201cMy little gallery represented him in a Whitney Biennial in 1995 that Klaus Kertess put together. The work could be beautiful and it could be outrageous. It was also charming, honest and fearless.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"John<\/a>
John O’Reilly, “Pink Bedroom 6-2-79,” paper montage, June 2, 1979.(Courtesy Howard Yezerski Gallery)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

O\u2019Reilly grew up gay and Catholic in suburban New Jersey, where he was born in February 1930. Decades later, he would make art inspired by the years of World War II, when his father was away serving in the military and wreckage from torpedoed ships washed up on nearby beaches.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly studied at Syracuse University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, before becoming a part-time art therapist at Worcester State Hospital for 27 years. And he made \u201csmall, intricate photo-collages in private for many years,\u201d Cotter reported in 2011.<\/p>\n

One of O\u2019Reilly\u2019s first collages, his 1965 \u201cSelf-Portrait,\u201d mixed \u201cPolaroid self-portraits with images from astronomy and Hieronymus Bosch. A large hand scrapes over moon craters, soil, and a woman’s body. Tiny male figures stand and sit on the last, as if it were a landscape; one of the breasts squirts a nebula into the cosmos,\u201d Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid wrote of a 2014 exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Reilly combined images of West Coast modernist architecture with Poussin, Cezanne, Ingres, Titian, Vermeer, and other art historical references in collages during the 1970s. When these works were featured in a 1983 exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, critic Robert Taylor wrote in The Boston Globe: \u201cPerhaps the most engrossing work is a series of autobiographical images in which the quasi-nude artist appears in resonant contexts like the platinum prints of Walt Whitman by Thomas Eakins.\u201d The collages \u201cimply paradox, visual pun and the interactions of what we see and what we know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"John<\/a>
John O’Reilly. (Photo: Seth David Rubin)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During the 1990s war became O\u2019Reilly\u2019s subject. \u201cHe always felt war was the greatest obscenity of human kind,\u201d Yezerkski says. When the Boston galleries exhibited these collages featuring imagery of sex, religion and violence, Yezerski recalls putting up a sign up warning about the content\u2014including a collage depicting Christ with someone\u2019s finger up his bottom.<\/p>\n

Yezerski remembers, \u201cI swear to God I had a visit from a cop in plain clothes, it must have been a state cop. … Is this pornography or is it art?\u201d<\/p>\n

Of a 1998 group show at Boston\u2019s Institute of Contemporary Art, Globe critic critic Christine Temin wrote, \u201cThe best photographs in the show are those of John O’Reilly, whose black and white montages star nude men in acrobatic high jinks against a vast, dark void that suggests outer space.\u201d<\/p>\n

When four-decade survey of O\u2019Reilly\u2019s art appeared at Yezerski Gallery in 2009, critic Sebastian Smee wrote in the Globe: \u201cO’Reilly’s way with photomontage\u2014his combination of intellectual wit and eroticism (in most cases homoeroticism)\u2014is also intimately present and even conversational. We are invited into these images, which shimmer with art history quotations, frank avowals of desire, and playful meditations on the artist’s predicament.\u201d<\/p>\n

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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, nature, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, (hopefully) weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2021 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"John<\/a>
John O’Reilly. (Photo: Seth David Rubin)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"John<\/a>
John O’Reilly. (Photo: Seth David Rubin)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John O\u2019Reilly, the celebrated Worcester collage artist, died this morning, May 20, at age 91. His partner of 60 years, sculptor James Tellin, \u201cwas in the room with him, rubbing his feet when he realized he was gone,\u201d says Howard Yezerski, who has exhibited O\u2019Reilly\u2019s art for decades. O\u2019Reilly won national attention when several artworks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[552,868],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19467"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19467"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19530,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19467\/revisions\/19530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}