Tony Fitzpatrick was never the most famous or the trendiest Chicago artist, but few of his peers managed to cross into the realms he did as a poet, gallerist and movie actor.
Along the way, the nearly lifelong Chicago resident gained many friends. He was a critic and a ceaseless advocate of his hometown, incorporating scenic and iconographic elements from its urban fabric into his distinctive collages and other works.
“I just see him as inherently Chicago,” said Emily Ziemba, research curator for the Art Institute of Chicago’s department of prints and drawings. “There are so many stories that you can mine from Tony’s work.”
Nearly 70 of Fitzpatrick’s creations will be featured as part of a larger May 28 sale overseen by Potter & Potter Auctions. The Chicago firm is billing it as the largest grouping of his work to come to market since his October death at age 66.
“Every [auction] house I’ve been at has always sold Tony’s works, but we made a concerted effort to do something with a little bit of a splash,” said Aron Packer, Potter & Potter’s fine and outsider art specialist.
The sale offers an opportunity to take stock of the artist’s achievements and at least begin to assess his place in art history. The sale will feature 32 lots, most from one anonymous collector, and they carry an estimated total sale price of $36,000-$52,000. “I think we will sell everything,” Packer said. “It should do well and be good for his legacy.”
Fitzpatrick’s works are interspersed among the sale’s first 66 lots with examples by other artists who inspired him or worked in a related vein, including Harry Who member Karl Wirsum and self-taught painter Lee Godie. “It was fun for me to curate,” Packer said of the lineup.
The son of a burial-vault salesman and one of eight children, Fitzpatrick grew up in Lombard and graduated from Montini Catholic High School. Before ultimately making his living as an artist and gallery owner, he worked a mix of jobs, everything from boxer and bouncer to radio host and construction worker.
Although he studied art at the College of DuPage and a few other institutions, he was largely self-taught, drawing on a multitude of sources for his work, including outsider and tattoo art and gritty street culture.
An everyman artist who made paintings, drawings and scores of original prints, his preferred medium was brightly colored, tightly packed collages. “They’re loaded with these sort of strange visual cues all over,” Ziemba said. “You get immersed in trying to decode what they mean.”
She was speaking specifically of the images Fitzpatrick created to illustrate his 2001 book featuring the poem “Bum Town,” in which he describes riding around Chicago as a child in his father’s Oldsmobile as the two listened to a White Sox game on the radio. But her observation can be applied to nearly all his works.
“He was really his own person,” Ziemba said. “He developed his own style and stuck to it. You can always identify a Tony Fitzpatrick print. You can see them across a room. You know exactly what you are looking at.”
Running through many of his works are birds, a fascination since childhood. Days after Fitzpatrick’s death, a remembrance was featured on the website of the American Birding Association, which selected him as its 2020 Bird of the Year artist and featured his commissioned depiction of cedar waxwings on the cover of “Birding” magazine.
“The piece Tony created was beyond our wildest dreams,” wrote the association’s web czar, Greg Neise, in the article. “When the magazine came out, and I took a few copies to his studio, he told me that being on the cover of ‘Birding’ was one of the most prestigious achievements of his life. A tad overstated, maybe. But he meant it.”
To get a sense of how integral Fitzpatrick was to the Chicago art scene, consider that the Art Institute of Chicago holds 232 prints and drawings. Among them are 182 donated in 2011 by famed Connecticut collector Mickey Cartin, a tribute to Fitzpatrick’s art-world reach.
In addition to his work as a writer and artist, Fitzpatrick was also a respected actor, performing roles on stage and television and appearing in 15 movies, including such heavy-hitters as “Philadelphia” and “The Fugitive.”
“Tony had circles within circles of friends,” Neise said. “Actors, musicians, writers, artists, neighborhood characters, chefs, club owners and the birding community. He had time for all of them, while kicking out a truly impressive amount of new art every month.”