44 Wilde 1944 (Being a selection of 44 images from a sketchbook kept by John Wilde mostly in 1944)

Mount Horeb, Wisconsin: Perishable Press (Walter Hamady), 1985. Original handmade paper covers. 26 x 19 cm. Full page illustrations. Unpaginated. Edition of 200 copies. Fine.Mailing label from Perishable Press included. John Wilde, an American surrealist associated with the Magic Realist school of painting, whose fantastic, darkly humorous images brought him fame far beyond his native Wisconsin, died on March 9, 2006 at his home in Cooksville. He was 86.The cause was cancer, said his dealer, Tory Folliard of the Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee.Mr. Wilde (pronounced WILL-dee) dedicated his six-decade career to painting, with an exacting touch, narratives involving grotesque, doll-like people in otherworldly situations. He was inspired partly by Salvador Dalí and partly by Northern Renaissance masters like Bosch and Grünewald.Mr. Wilde often painted himself into his pictures, giving himself a weirdly oversized and misshapen head. He also created intensely detailed, colorful and mysteriously glowing still lifes.Although he lived his whole life in Wisconsin -- except for a wartime stint in the Army -- Mr. Wilde rejected the regionalism of artists like Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. Instead he became part of a loose community of like-minded Midwesterners -- including Marshall Glasier, his teacher at the University of Wisconsin, and the Chicago-based fantasy painter Gertrude Abercrombie -- who advocated idiosyncratic and freely imaginative forms of expression. His paintings also relate to those of New York-based Magic Realists like Paul Cadmus and George Tooker. For Mr. Wilde's solo exhibition in New York at the Edwin Hewitt Gallery in 1950, the ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, a friend of Cadmus and the New York Magic Realists, wrote the brochure text.Paintings by Mr. Wilde were included in "Surrealism USA," a major exhibition at the National Academy Museum in New York last year. Currently two shows of Mr. Wilde's works are on view: at Spanierman Gallery in New York and at Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee