Christina Ramberg

Ramberg was one of the few women affiliated with the "Chicago Imagist" school, a loosely associated group of artists who studied under Ray Yoshida at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during the late 1960s. Building upon the framework established by avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, Art Brut and Pop, the "Imagists" shared an interest in vernacular culture, the grotesque, and the irrational. In her figurative, but faceless, paintings and drawings, Ramberg often took as her subject the female form and the garments that shape and constrain it. This study sheet, which resembles a sewing pattern for a jacket, relates to contemporaneous paintings in which ambiguous forms are draped with segments of stylized garments. This is an important addition to the group of works by Chicago Imagists already represented in the Morgan collection, notably Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and Gladys Nilson. The work's title may refer to a scenario outlined in a nineteenth-century economic treatise written by M. Frederic Bastiat, about a man named Mondor who rents his house.