An artist whose work spanned decades, styles

"Thomas Chimes' art is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," Inquirer art critic Edward J. Sozanski wrote in 2007.

After a 2007 interview with Mr. Chimes, Inquirer reporter Amy S. Rosenberg wrote that in his work, "there's always another idea, another citation, another memory, another theory, another poet or artist to bring toward the surface, then submerge again, behind layers of paint or layers of ideas, until just barely visible, a reduction."

Both encounters with Mr. Chimes took place during the two-month retrospective that the Philadelphia Museum of Art staged of nearly 100 of his paintings, metal box constructions, and works on paper.

Last week, Michael Taylor, the museum's curator of modern art, who staged that show, said simply, "He was the dean of Philadelphia contemporary artists."

On Tuesday, his 88th birthday, Mr. Chimes died of melanoma at the Wissahickon Hospice in Center City.

His son, Dmitri, who owns two Philadelphia restaurants named Dmitri's, recalled that his father "described himself as a hermit" because "a hermit is someone who lives where the wild things are."

He was also a leader among artists. As Taylor said: "That was the kind of double story with him.

"One was the artist who was a hermit and needed to create the work he did," while living in an apartment on Washington Square. "The other was this garrulous intellectual who was a great storyteller."

He hadn't outlived his time, Taylor said, "because he kept his work so fresh and invigorated with new ideas. And he painted to the very end."

Taylor said his favorite work was a painting from a photograph of Alfred Jarry that Mr. Chimes had reworked into his own oil-on-panel creation.

Sozanski wrote: "Chimes' primary inspiration has been Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), a French poet and playwright whose play Ubu Roi caused a riot when it opened in Paris in 1896.

"Jarry believed that writers should reject intelligence in favor of hallucination, and he advocated defiance of authority through absurdity and incoherence."

Most of the work in the 2007 retrospective, Sozanski wrote, "revives and reconfigures the agenda of symbolism, a mainly literary movement of a century ago that attempted to suggest ways that people could enter the spirit world."