This cycle spans the years 1958 to 1970.
Bill's home city. Working class New Year's Parade.
Outlandish costumes in wild colors.
http://williamutermohlen.org/index.php/12-artwork/mummers/11-mummers#sigProGalleria54ab193708
This excerpt is drawn from Pat Utermohlen's 2006 Essay of Bill.
... In the great wide world outside our English media began to bombard us with stories of the Vietnam war. This was the time of the student anti-war marches, in America and England. We were on holiday in Europe, driving from Paris to Amsterdam to visit an old friend of William’s from the Oxford days now living in Amsterdam and lecturing at the University. We stopped over in Brussels and after leaving dinner at a café we came upon a lighted window showing the television news of some sort of student riot. We continued our journey to our friend’s house where we found him in a great state of concerned agitation explaining that the night before we had seen the Kent State Riots and August Fry (our friend) was convinced that this was the beginning of the disintegration of our secure world . Dr Fry frequently came to London always visiting and often staying with us. Originally from Chicago he had married a woman from Holland and elected to stay in Europe. Both he and William were obsessed with the news from America, both relieved, but somehow guilty not to be serving in this unpopular war. This is the psychological background for the next large series William began to paint which he called ‘The Mummers Parade’.
William worked on these with great intensity, I now realise they combined his ambiguous attitude to his past life with his current obsession with the Vietnam war. In South Philadelphia, when William was a small boy there was once a year a time of great excitement, the Mummer’s Parade held on New Years Day. The procession still continues but it is much changed. In William’s pictures we see the men parading circa 1942-5, the time of the second World War . At that time in the parade only men took part, always dressed as women, blacked up and wearing overshoes painted gold and they danced to the tune of ‘Golden Slippers’ dressed in the most elaborate costumes. Marching in ethnic groups, often to the tune of black musicians. The men and boys who marched were white, mostly men working by day in the dockyards of South Philadelphia. But for this one day the city was theirs, they marched in the freezing cold up Main Street to City hall. The men had taken the whole year to practice the ‘strut’ and the wives, not allowed to take part, had fashioned the costumes. William longed to be part of it, learning the strut and begging his father to allow him to join in the celebration, but the older William was fearful that his beloved only child would have an accident. The young William could only stand on sidelines longing to be part of the excitement. All of his current feelings about the poverty and the latent brutality of South Philadelphia is in these pictures, the frenetic dancing backed by the figures of the Philadelphia police with their truncheons at the ready, his almost brutal contemporary dismissal of his family, his longing to get away and the overwhelming guilt following his abandonment of his home and country, overlaid with his current anger and frustration over the war in Vietnam. This all culminates in a huge canvas ‘Old Glory’ circa (72x120 inches). The American flag (post Jasper Johns) had become an ambivalent symbol. In William’s childhood, the days at school had always begun with the saluting of the flag. Now the flag seemed to stand as a symbol of imperial arrogance, and also a banner for anti-war protesters. In this picture William combines the heroic figures of the horsemen of the apocalypse with the tragic figures of the remembered dock workers, reminding the onlooker, in this war, young men could escape the carnage it if they had the money to continue their education, perhaps even leave the country to study abroad.
To view the images from the Mummers Cycle you can scroll down this page or to view the slideshow click here
to view the studies for this cycle click here.
Mummers
William Utermohlen, 1958
Ink on paper, 20 x 27 cm
Don't Try to Clark Street Me
William Utermohlen, 1968
mixed media, 101 x 101 cm
Jazz Musicians 2
William Utermohlen, 1968
mixed media, 21 x 15 cm
Jazz Musicians 3
William Utermohlen, 1968
mixed media, 255 x 210 cm
Jazz Musicians 4
William Utermohlen, 1968
mixed media
Golden Slippers
William Utermohlen, 1969
oil on canvas, 107 x 137 cm
Gold Derby
William Utermohlen, 1969
oil on canvas, 42 x 36 cm
Man as Woman
William Utermohlen, 1969
oil on canvas, 51 x 40 cm
Mummers
William Utermohlen, 1969
oil on canvas, 255 x 200 cm
Old Man
William Utermohlen, 1969
oil on canvas, 41 x 36 cm
Silver
William Utermohlen, 1969
oil on canvas, 41 x 36 cm
Three Clowns
William Utermohlen, 1969
oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm
Uncle Sam's Clowns
William Utermohlen, 1969
oil, aluminum leaf on canvas, 106 x 137 cm
American New Year
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 72 x 84
Boy
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 61 x 51 cm
Dance of Death
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm
De Niro Comic Club
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 121 x 76 cm
Derby and Cards
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 1220 x 965
Double Portrait
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 1220 x 965 cm
Happy New Year
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil and gold leaf on canvas, 122 x 122 cm
King Jockey in Black
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil and gold leaf on canvas, 61 x 61 cm
Liberty Clown
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 86 x 71 cm
New Year's Shooters and Brass Band
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 106 x 137 cm
New Year's Morning
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 87 x 71 cm
No. 1 The Costume
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas
Old Glory
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 180 x 300 cm
Study for Old Glory
William Utermohlen, 1970
pencil and ink on paper
Red Mouth
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 25 x 20 cm
Red Tears
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas, 25 x 20 cm
There is a Rainbow Around My Shoulders
William Utermohlen, 1970
oil on canvas
-The End-
