Some of Utermohlen's late self-portraits will hang at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts next month, offering patrons a view into his gradual, frustrating decline into dementia, culminating with an inability to organize facial features into a cohesive vision of self.
The 17-painting exhibit is part of a two-month effort to bridge neuroscience and the arts in a way that promotes public understanding of a disease that is eroding the brains of 5.2 million Americans, say officials with the University of Utah's Brain Institute, which organized the exhibit in partnership with the art museum.
"This is an opportunity to look at Alzheimer's from the inside out, what it is like to be someone with the disease," says Norman Foster, a U. professor of neurology who directs the Brain Institute's Center for Alzheimer's Care, Imaging and Research. "He's a gifted artist who was able to keep using that gift to express his feelings."
Alzheimer's is a progressive and eventually fatal neurodegenerative disorder afflicting a growing number of people, including more than 30,000 in Utah. Memory loss is a symptom common to all patients, but other impairments often touch language, decision-making, judgment, attention and personality. Patients, most commonly in their 70s and 80s, can become combative and delusional, sometimes wandering lost in their own neighborhoods.
"Patients do the best they can with the ever-increasing challenges the disease presents," Foster says. "You can see that in [Utermohlen's] paintings. His abilities change, but there is also a haunting feeling of being lost. A colleague calls it the most boring disease you can have. . . . When you lose basic capabilities, particularly the ability to communicate, then you begin to turn in to yourself."
Alzheimer's patients deserve to be understood individually, specialists say, rather than stereotyped, as the disease affects different people in different ways. "It threatens their basic humanity, but not all their humanity is lost in the disease," Foster says. "Too often these people have been swept aside. People have been institutionalized and marginalized. The families sometimes withdraw from social engagement. The treatment we recommend combats that tendency."
Utermohlen is from Pennsylvania, but lived most of his life in England, where he passed away in 2007. Before he lost his ability to apply pigment to canvas in 2000, Utermohlen continued to paint under the encouragement of medical staff at London's National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. After completing each self-portrait, he shared it with a trusted nurse, Ron Isaacs.
"Ron's conviction that William's efforts were helping to increase the understanding of the deeply psychological and traumatic aspects of the disease undoubtedly encouraged Utermohlen to continue," says his widow, art historian Patricia Utermohlen.
Alzheimer's toll becomes progressively apparent in the paintings as Utermohlen's artistic and neurological abilities failed.
"The final works are barely discernible as portraits, with one in particular that shows where he repeatedly sketched in facial features and then erased them in frustration," says Jenny Woods, UMFA liaison. "Utermohlen continued to communicate through his art, long after he lost all other forms of communication."
bmaffly@sltrib.com
