John O’Reilly, artist whose photo montages merged his life with the ages, dies at 91 – The Boston Globe
For Mr. O’Reilly, who was 91 when he died of a stroke May 20 in the Briarwood retirement community in Worcester, disparate decades mingled side by side in his work, sometimes rubbing shoulders in an individual creation.
“I try to make the future, the present, and the past all one time,” he told the Vice website’s Creators Project in 2017. “I don’t think of my work as being in a particular time. They move, they’re things you walk into, but you encounter all time in them.”
That interview took place the year the Worcester Art Museum featured him in a retrospective. Mr. O’Reilly, however, didn’t really think of it as a retrospective, even though dozens of his artworks, created over the course of 50 years, were displayed in “John O’Reilly: A Studio Odyssey.”
“I’m using them in this exhibition to try and find out how you put on an exhibition that is not necessarily a retrospective, but is long and extensive and creates a sort of visual narrative behind my work,” he said.
The show’s narrative inevitably drew on his own biography, which included 27 years working with psychiatric patients at Worcester State Hospital, an experience he considered formative.
“John O’Reilly has said his art is self-portraiture,” Globe art critic Cate McQuaid wrote in a review of the 2017 show. “For many years, he worked as an art therapist at Worcester State Hospital, and certainly the shadows and bruises of his own psyche show up in his work.”
Mr. O’Reilly’s “intricate pieces contemplate the isolation and shame of growing up gay, closeted, and Catholic,” McQuaid added. “He finds models and comrades in artists who went before him. In his large body of photo-based work, he tags fragments of art history to images of himself and cutouts from gay porn. That luscious little knot ties the erotic impulse with the creative one.”
He had been comparatively unknown until 1995, when he was 65 and his work was chosen to be part of the Whitney Biennial in New York City.
“John never wanted fame and never courted fame and never looked for fame,” said his longtime partner, sculptor James Tellin.
In a 1995 New York Times interview a few weeks before the biennial opened, Mr. O’Reilly said that “if you are hungering for fame, you start to do the work for other people. You give yourself up. I was doing these things for me and a few friends. I didn’t get discouraged because I wasn’t out to sell the work.”
For many years, he added, “I had traded my work occasionally – for other artists’ work, for books. Nobody wanted to buy it.”
After the biennial, Mr. O’Reilly was recognized for his accomplishments in the collage and montage form.
The process and imagery in Mr. O’Reilly’s work reflect “the accumulation, layering, and shifting perspectives that accompany a long career of looking while crafting a world in miniature,” Jeff McMahon wrote in a review of the Worcester Art Museum show for the Hyperallergic website. “He understands, quite brilliantly, the optics of the small, the miniature, the literally cut-down-to size.”
Mr. O’Reilly, McMahon added, “is above all a relentless examiner of the depth of an image, and the deceptively flat plane of what we call a drawing or photograph.”
John B. O’Reilly III was born in Orange, N.J., on Feb. 22, 1930, and lived in New Jersey communities as he and his family moved around before they “ended up in Red Bank,” Tellin said.
Mr. O’Reilly’s parents divorced. His father, John Jr., worked for the family’s steamship line company and lived most of his life in Africa. Meanwhile, Mr. O’Reilly and his mother, Dorothy Raynolds O’Reilly, lived in New Jersey with his paternal grandfather, who had founded the company and could be authoritarian.
“I became very religious,” Mr. O’Reilly told The Brooklyn Rail. “We had a chapel in the house. My sister and I would play, and I would pretend to be a priest.”
He graduated in 1952 from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s of fine arts, served in the Army, and then studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he received a master’s in fine arts in 1956.
While there he met Tellin. They married in 2013 and had been a couple since 1960, when they traveled together to Spain.
“When we got back, we were looking for a place to live,” Tellin said. “We were going to Bar Harbor and our car broke down in Worcester and we never left.”
They split the art therapist’s job at Worcester State Hospital, each working 2 ½ days a week.
“The patients were so intense,” Mr. O’Reilly told the Times in 1995. “It liberated both of us to be more free with our feelings.”
Tellin recalled that the most important thing for Mr. O’Reilly’s art “was the sense of what he learned from patients. They had great courage to change and to learn something, to develop something. Art gave them a chance to be more flexible.”
Mr. O’Reilly “was very, very sensitive to all that. The sense of their courage and their ability to work through and express situations in their art was very important to him,” Tellin added. “It made him a very courageous person in his art.”
By the time Mr. O’Reilly started showing his photo montages regularly and attracting notice, he was in his 50s.
“The collages of John O’Reilly constitute a different conjunction of the human and the inanimate,” Globe art critic Robert Taylor wrote in 1983 of one of his early exhibitions, at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy Andover.
Color photos of “seemingly banal” suburban landscapes “are transfigured by the introduction of alien backgrounds,” Taylor wrote.
Over the years, Mr. O’Reilly returned to the Addison for shows. In 2006, the gallery’s then-director Brian Allen called him “the edgiest artist working today. His subject matter is provocative, but he beguiles you by presenting it in such an Old Master way. With his eye for detail, O’Reilly presents the ultimate gift an artist can offer: He rewards your looking closely.”
In addition to Tellin, Mr. O’Reilly leaves his brother, Edward of Pasadena, Calif.
No public service is planned. A memorial exhibition will be announced.
Most of Mr. O’Reilly’s work, except for what is in private collections or the permanent collections of museums, is going to the Addison Gallery, which already has about 1,300 pieces, Tellin said.
“John was very, very pleased that his work would have a home,” he said. “Students will be able to see how this person has developed from a child all the way to being a professional artist.”
For Mr. O’Reilly, keeping nearly all his output in one place reflected how he felt about his creations, and the work itself.
“The dead past and the present living aren’t separated,” he once said.
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
