Thomas Chimes: Adventures in Pataphysics
by: Taylor, Michael R.

Hardcover. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 253 pages, color illustrations. Bibliography and index. Thomas Chimes is one of the most important artists to emerge in Philadelphia since World War II. Tracing the stylistic evolution of Chimes's idiosyncratic art, this book presents a long-overdue survey of his five-decade career: canvases combining landscape imagery with symbols such as crucifixes (late 1950s-mid-1960s); mixed-media constructions set within finely crafted metal boxes (late 1960s-early 1970s); his best-known works, a series of forty-eight intimate sepia-toned panel portraits of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and artists that are placed within oversized wood frames (1973-78); and the enigmatic 'white paintings' of the past two decades.