William Utermohlen

This piece about the artist William Utermohlen is topnotch for a couple of reasons.

First off, it provides penetrating new insights into Alzheimer's disease. When Utermohlen was 62 he was first diagnosed with the ailment. Rather than quit painting and let his art professor wife support them both, he continued producing art. Inasmuch as his earlier work was part of the painterly "realistic tradition," the work he executed while his Alzheimer's progressed became more openly expressionistic and excruciatingly emotional. A self-portrait he painted in 1967 reveals a fairly photographic scruffy, good-looking face with a receding hairline, whereas a 1996 self-portrait shows a suspicious, jaundice-yellow face peering from behind a window -- and a 1999 painting reduces its subject's face to a raw mauve and white blob with two tiny eye holes. Utermohlen's view of himself gives us a graphic picture of how one Alzheimer's patient saw himself.

If that isn't enough, the second major reason I think this piece is topnotch is the way producer Eric Molinsky deals with the fickleness of fashion in the art world. For most of his career as a realistic painter in England, Utermohlen's work was eclipsed by that of such trendy abstract expressionists as Pollock, Johns, and Rothko. As a newcomer in London, he lacked connections and couldn't sell his work, even after a major exhibition at London's Marlborough gallery. Studying samples of his early paintings, I've seen a lot to admire, but this is 2008. Sad to say, 40 years ago when he was young and healthy, he would've been another "starving artist," were it not for his wife's day job.

Ironically, Alzheimer's killed him in 2007, but it secured his reputation as an artist. Molinsky's 7 1/2-minute cutaway -- it's not a 10-minute segment as it is described -- is as poignantly unforgettable as Utermohlen's life story.