Photo By Gail
Knight Horrors looks like some sort of surreal still life extracted from a child’s fever dream — and the longer you look, the stranger it gets. A tiny armored knight on horseback occupies the center of the scene, surrounded by an outrageous assortment of creatures and characters: a grinning finger puppet-style monster perched on the helmet of a Roman soldier, a grimacing gremlin, a colorful parrot, a rat, a flamingo, a skull and assorted other fantastical beings. It’s part cabinet of curiosities, part nightmare, and part seriously weird family portrait.
Painted in 1985 by American artist Aaron Bohrod, Knight Horrors is an oil painting on gesso panel measuring just 12 by 16 inches. The title itself seems to contain a little visual joke: Knight Horrors sounds suspiciously like “night terrors,” which makes the painting feel like a parade of creatures that have escaped from somebody’s particularly bizarre dream.
Bohrod (1907 – 1992) had a fascinating career that took him through several very different artistic worlds. Born in Chicago, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, where John Sloan was one of his teachers. He initially became known for realistic paintings of American life and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships that allowed him to travel around the country documenting Midwestern towns and landscapes. During World War II, he served as an artist and correspondent, working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the Pacific and for Life magazine in Europe.
After becoming artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1948, Bohrod’s work took an increasingly unusual turn. By the 1950s, he had largely abandoned his earlier American-scene paintings in favor of meticulously detailed trompe-l’oeil still lifes —paintings so realistically rendered that objects appear almost physically present. He also explored ceramics and surreal imagery, eventually developing a distinctive visual language filled with objects, creatures, puns, art-historical references, and unexpected juxtapositions.
That background makes Knight Horrors particularly fun to look at. Bohrod had the technical skills to paint everything with extraordinary precision, but instead of using that realism to simply reproduce the world around him, he used it to construct a world that doesn’t exist at all. The creatures look convincing enough to be specimens in a natural history museum, yet their combination is completely absurd.
That’s what I love about this painting. Bohrod doesn’t seem interested in making his fantasy world frightening. Despite the title, most of these creatures look more mischievous than menacing. The result is a wonderfully eccentric collision of pop culture imagery, surrealism, humor and painstaking realism — a reminder that sometimes the most convincing things in a painting can be the things that could never possibly exist.
Photographed in the Lincoln Glenn Gallery in the Chelsea Gallery District.