William Charles Utermohlen is an American figurative artist known for his late self-portraits completed after his 1995 diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. He had been suffering from progressive memory loss for about four years prior to his 1995 diagnosis. During that time, he began painting a series of self-portraits, influenced in part by figurative painter Francis Bacon and the German Expressionist cinematographers. Born to first-generation German immigrants in South Philadelphia, Utermohlen received a scholarship to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts in 1951. After completing his military service, he spent 1953 studying in Western Europe, where he was inspired by Renaissance and Baroque artists. He moved to London in 1962 and married art historian Patricia Redmond in 1965. He moved to Massachusetts in 1972 to teach art at Amherst College before returning to London in 1975. Utermohlen died in isolation on March 21, 2007, at the age of 73, but his later works have earned him posthumous fame. His self-portraits are seen as particularly important in understanding the progressive effects of neurocognitive disorders. His early works were mostly diagnostic, although James Stubenrau described Utermohlen's early art as "exuberant, sometimes surreal" in the expressionist style. For a period in the late 1970s, in reaction to the Realist movement, he printed photographs on canvas and painted directly over them. An example of this technique can be seen in Self-Portrait . He used this technique for two of Redmond's portraits. Regarding Utermohlen's artistic style, Redmond told the New York Times that he was "detached from what was happening." “Everyone followed abstract expressionism, while he followed figurative art formally.” She explained in an interview with Studio 360 that Utermohlen was “confused and anxious, because he couldn’t work in a completely abstract way,” and that figurative art was “too important.” Utermohlen did not explain or discuss his work with Redmond. She later said that as an art historian, she feared interfering with his creative progress. Redmond thought she was “absolutely right” in this approach, and speculated that if she had intervened, she would have highlighted flaws in his work. Most of his early paintings can be grouped into six cycles: mythological, cantos, pantomime, war, nudes, and conversation pieces. The mythological series consists mainly of watercolors. The Dante cycle is inspired by Dante’s Inferno, while the art-style paintings are influenced by Pop art. The War series refers to the Vietnam War, and according to Redmond, his painting of isolated soldiers represents his feeling of being an outsider in the art scene. Both Mummers and Conversation are based on childhood memories, the former completed between 1968 and 1970, and inspired by the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. In a letter from November 1970, Utermohlen stated that the cycle was created "as a means of expressing my anxiety." Redmond described Mummers as "a sympathetic vision of the lower classes, and even of his own projected self-image." French psychoanalyst Patrice Pouligny described the Conversation paintings as Utermohlen's attempt to describe the events of his life before his amnesia. His symptoms pre-dated the diagnosis, and indeed they indicated their presence. Titles such as W9 and Media Valley refer to the names of the neighborhood and county, respectively, in which he lived at the time. The artworks themselves feature more saturated colors and "engaging spatial arrangements," which highlight the actions of the people in the artworks. Utermohlen suffered from amnesia while working on the Conversation series. His symptoms ranged from not being able to remember how to tie a tie to being unable to find his way back to his apartment. Between 1993 and 1994 he produced a series of lithographs depicting short stories by the First World War poet Wilfred Owen. The figures were more static and mask-like than conversation pieces. Composed of a series of disoriented and wounded soldiers, they were described by art dealer Chris Boykus as seeming to presage the artist's diagnosis of dementia the following year. By this time he was often forgetting teaching appointments. In 1994 he received a commission to paint a family portrait. About a year later Redmond took the client to Utermohlen's studio to see progress, but Utermohlen had made no progress since her last visit nine months earlier. Redmond feared that Utermohlen was depressed and sought medical advice. He was diagnosed with possible Alzheimer's disease in August 1995, aged 61. He was sent to Queen's Square Hospital, where his drawings were taken care of by nurse Ron Isaacs, who asked him to begin painting a self-portrait. His first work, Blue Skies, was completed in 1994–95, before his diagnosis, and shows him holding a yellow table in a largely empty interior. When neuropsychologist Sebastian Kroetsch visited Utermohlen in late 1999, he described the painting as depicting the artist trying to hold on and avoid being “swept away” by the open window above. Pollini likened his drawing of him holding on to the table to a painter holding on to his canvas, saying: “In order to survive, he must be able to depict this catastrophic moment, to depict the indescribable.” Blue Skies became Utermohlen’s last “large-scale” painting. His sketch from that year, The Welcoming Man, shows a disjointed figure that seems to represent his loss of spatial awareness. Of the drawing, Kroetsch and others have stated that “Utermohlen acknowledged that there was a problem with the sketch, but he did not know what the problem was or how to correct it.” He began a series of self-portraits after his diagnosis in 1995. The earliest, the Masks series, is in watercolour and was completed between 1994 and 2001. His last non-self-portrait dates from 1997, and is of Redmond. Patrice Pouligny called it Pat. His self-portrait series became increasingly abstract as his dementia progressed, and according to critic Anjan Chatterjee, depicts "painful psychological self-expressions". The early stages of the disease did not affect his ability to draw, although Crotch noted. His cognitive impairment is not believed to be hereditary; apart from a 1989 car accident that left him unconscious for about 30 minutes, Crotch described Utermohlen's medical history as "unremarkable". Redmond covered the mirrors in their home because Utermohlen was frightened by what he saw there, and he stopped using them for self-portraits. After Utermohlen's diagnosis, descriptions of his skull became a key aspect of his self-portraits, while academic Robert Cook Deegan noted how, as Utermohlen's condition progressed, "the colours he incorporated gradually became less and less". His later self-portraits were characterised by a thicker brush stroke than his earlier work. Writing in Queens Quarterly, journalist Leslie Mellen said that the works became more distorted but progressively less colourful. In Nicky Gerrard's 2019 book, What Dementia Teaches Us About Love, she describes the self-portraits as an emotional novelty. Sharma notes that they depict his dementia, a condition that leads to a loss of self-recognition and object recognition.