Paint, Personae, and the Mysteries of (Not) Making It

Jeff Stimmel considers the art and tumultuous life of Chuck Connelly.

By Jeff StimmelDecember 26, 2025

• Art & Architecture

ON APRIL 13 of this year, the artist Chuck Connelly died. He was 70 years old. He enjoyed some fame in the 1980s as one of the young neo-expressionists whose loud, gestural, often-figurative painting was all the rage in New York and Europe. I spent several years filming him long after his star had waned, learning about his life, his art, and his place in the world for the 2008 HBO documentary The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale. With my film long since complete, I hadn’t seen Chuck in a few years when The New York Times contacted me for a quote and stunned me with news of his death.

I met Chuck in 2002, after hearing stories about him from his sister, whom I worked with at New York Times Television. Fascinated by the idea of a magnetic and self-destructive wild-man painter, I sought him out at an old Tribeca bar called the Liquor Store. His hands stained with paint, he was drunk and yelling at the top of his lungs that he was “the greatest,” like Muhammad Ali with a paintbrush. He was animated and cocky yet with a sense of humor about himself. We’d both grown up in Pittsburgh, and there was something immediately familiar about him. I had gone to see him in the hope that he would make a good film subject. He did. But as much as I learned about the man, I learned just as much about the contemporary art world. By the time my film was finished, I had come to understand that Chuck’s whole being, his entire life, was spent in frenzied pursuit of—and flight from—art sales.

Chuck was born in Pittsburgh in 1955, one of four children. His father had been in the war and possibly suffered a form of PTSD. The family was very combustible, with his parents screaming at each other and the kids, a habit that Chuck picked up: he spent the rest of his life screaming at the top of his lungs at anyone around him. From an early age, he was interested in drawing and painting, greatly influenced by a Joshua Reynolds book he had found. A little later, he discovered Turner, Soutine, and Van Gogh, and developed a love for films about artists. When I knew him, he had worn out multiple DVDs of Lust for Life, the 1956 film with Kirk Douglas improbably cast as Van Gogh, and Rembrandt (1936), with Charles Laughton.

In the fall of 1973, Chuck enrolled at the Tyler School of Art, just outside of Philadelphia. He encountered “rich kids” from the East Coast who were informed by minimalism, performance art, and video. Chuck, who had never heard of Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, or Bruce Nauman, felt provincial and became so intimidated that he broke out in a serious rash and decided to quit school, just a few weeks after he had started. His father, however, refused to let him back in the house, so Chuck reluctantly returned. On the drive back, he dropped a hit of LSD and, as he told me, along the Pennsylvania Turnpike came up with an alter ego called “Fred Scaboda” as a kind of defense mechanism. He thought the name suggested a vaguely Eastern European steelworker—a rough, wild, muscular character—and he painted under it for several years. As Fred, he made work unlike anything Chuck had ever created, and signed it with only a black dot. Murdered girls in poodle skirts and saddle shoes, wives discovering unfaithful husbands, a gang rape on a golf course—these were disturbing, mysterious pictures, haunted Americana in a muted palette. Ironic, cool, and preoccupied with images, the Scaboda paintings are closer to the postmodernism of David Salle or the Pictures Generation than to the raw intensity of neo-expressionism.

Chuck moved to New York City in 1979 and immersed himself in Downtown bohemia. Painting was about to make its big comeback, and neo-expressionism would come to dominate the art market in the 1980s. Although Chuck never liked the term, it was easily applied to the work he began making under his own name. This didn’t happen in New York, however, but in Germany, the other hub of neo-expressionism, where he moved in 1982, chasing a German woman he had fallen in love with. As in art school, Chuck was intimidated by the artists in Düsseldorf and Cologne, with their intense seriousness, led by older masters such as Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys. But after he was beaten up in a drunken brawl and thrown into the Rhine, Chuck found a new style of painting for which he would use his real name. (He always said it was Fred Scaboda who was tossed into the Rhine.) The works were pallid, dominated by gray and white, with a blunt art brut sensibility. There are ghostly figures and simple, geometric cityscapes.

Upon his return to New York in 1983, Chuck was able to get representation by Annina Nosei, famed as Basquiat’s gallerist. He continued developing the style he’d begun in Germany—simple forms, rough impasto, scenes often imbued with a dreamlike quality—and more and more color began to creep in. This, however, would represent the high-water mark of Chuck’s career. He was argumentative, suspicious, and prone to outbursts, and he became convinced that Nosei was ripping him off. Many friends tried to explain to him that she was creating a market for him, that he should grin and bear it, but he never could. Her assistants became afraid of him and dreaded his visits to the gallery. Although she worked with a famously difficult artist in Basquiat, Chuck was too much in the end, even for her. Toward the end of the decade, he jumped to the up-and-coming Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, but that relationship lasted only until the mid-1990s. Chuck’s behavior got worse as his drinking grew more out of hand, and poor decisions in every part of his life pushed his career trajectory off track. His work fell off too, becoming sloppy and uncaring.

Years later, Chuck told me, “When you look at my career, it was really just a stretch of two years where I was in the shit and having success. And for those two years, you think you’re a wonder boy, but then everything catches up to you and the long slide begins.” He would always use that phrase, “in the shit,” as if he were talking about serving in Vietnam. Nosei always maintained that Chuck thought only of survival, never of building a career. Chuck wanted to be the biggest artist in the world and felt that he deserved to be selling his art for top prices; at the same time, he hated the idea of “selling out,” which he equated with any form of success. Having come of age in the late-1970s Downtown scene, he had street cred in his head, and being in an Uptown gallery with rich folks horrified him. Still his self-worth rose and fell with the prices of his work, and he created a wild-man persona in the service of those sales. It was perhaps this crazed figure he cut that led Martin Scorsese to base a character on Chuck, played by Nick Nolte, in the director’s contribution to the 1989 omnibus film New York Stories. But eventually Chuck lost control, and the contradictions of that persona eventually consumed him.

Laurence Groux, whom he met in 1996 and married two years later, helped him for a time. She convinced Chuck to leave New York for Philadelphia, where he had some art-school friends. They settled into a huge, dilapidated Victorian house in the East Oak Lane neighborhood, where he holed up painting every day for the next 26 years. He finally brought out the mad colors and brushstrokes of Van Gogh and Soutine that had inspired him as a child. These were paintings that spoke to his life, obsessions, and anxieties: paintings about love, fear, hate, shame, poverty, and the afterlife. He applied globs of oil paint by brush or by hand, depicting angels, natural disasters, nudes, mean girls, lost animals, dying birds, rappers, lonely houses in the rain, and empty cathedrals. He even cut back on his drinking for a time. Groux and Chuck divorced in 2005, in the middle of filming The Art of Failure.

By that time, Chuck was relying on the support of a few patrons, mostly local Philadelphia businessmen and older women with a little cash, who kept him going with diminishing stipends while asking for more work. Needless to say, none of them was anywhere near the heart of the art world. Chuck hatched the idea of having a young actor play Fred Scaboda. No gallery would touch Chuck, but Scaboda’s work had never been shown and was so different from everything else he’d made. Looking at slides of the paintings that the young actor had brought in, a gallerist said that they were exactly what she’d been looking for, perfect for the moment—not realizing that the paintings were 30 years old. Chuck never figured out the logistics of the ruse, since an interested gallerist would surely notice the age of the paint in person. It’s fascinating to speculate what impact it would have had on Chuck’s place in art history if he had shown this work in 1979.

Chuck would rail against what he called elite “art shit” and denounce the corruption of the art world as “just three-card monte.” These tirades always ended with how little he cared, how he hadn’t followed contemporary art for years. But every time I would visit him in that haunted Victorian house, I’d notice on his coffee table, hidden underneath cigarette ash, beer cans, and marijuana dust, the new issue of ARTnews or Artforum. He knew the game and was watching its every play. But what is the game, exactly?

When an artist sells a work, the gallery normally gets 50 percent. By contrast, in film, television, literature, or music, a manager or agent gets anywhere from 15 to 25 percent, and unlike these other artists, a painter or sculptor gets no royalties or residuals. Nevertheless, the bad numbers are supposed to be worth it if the artist is good. In fact, why one artist gains success and most others don’t remains an eternal mystery in the business. I have interviewed dozens of art dealers, critics, appraisers, patrons, and artists, but none have offered any real insight. During the years I spent making the documentary about Chuck, in the back of my mind I was always wondering, “Why couldn’t this guy make it?” Chuck never really checked any of the boxes that would have helped him become a success, except perhaps the quality of his work. He never worked in new media. He wasn’t at all political—he was more spiritual. He was strictly thought of as a figurative painter working in oil on canvas; this is inaccurate, but the image stuck. He changed his painting style constantly and made very odd career choices: he jumped galleries, played one off the other, and gave away paintings to girlfriends, drug dealers, and bartenders who would sell them for cheap, hurting his market. He was difficult, to say the least, calling his gallery daily to complain that they were letting him down, that they had no idea what they were doing. He sold work out of his house, often in violation of the arrangement with his gallery, while he still had one. He had no advisors, no assistants, no press agents, no social media.

A white male with a drinking problem and a bad attitude—it became a harder sell as he got older and the art world changed. Chuck was essentially old-fashioned, even when he was young, more like an abstract expressionist out of the 1950s than a hip and savvy 1980s artist reworking graffiti or cartoons, and for whom a big part of the job was networking (or “Schnabeling,” as Chuck used to say, in reference to art star Julian Schnabel). That’s why it was always puzzling to me that he worshipped Warhol. It’s true that they both grew up in modest Pittsburgh homes with the factories in the background— in Chuck’s case, actually, an industrial slag dump that would light up the sky all night. Chuck had a strange attraction to what he saw as Warhol playing the market, making fun of the art world while getting rich. This never made much sense to me. What did is what private dealer Mary Lou Swift told me: that Warhol was “a character,” and Chuck always wanted to be a character too—a memorable, larger-than-life persona.

Of course, the persona he adopted didn’t help him, and at some point, I think he accepted his fate. He knew how “the shit” worked. Until the end, he painted and painted and painted. Then, as his widow, Adrienne Mooney-Connelly, said, “for 48 hours he didn’t paint anything. It was then that I knew he was going to die.” Maybe now that he’s gone, she suggested, they’ll have an easier time developing a market for Chuck. Chuck once said to me, “Gallerists often say the art world would be better off without the artists. We’re always complaining and asking for stuff and being a pain in the ass.” Artists probably don’t even do that anymore.

¤

Featured image: Chuck Connelly, Quote on Quote, 1980. 53 x 76 inches. Connelly painted this as his alter ego, Fred Scaboda.