This catalogue accompanied the 1999 MCA Chicago exhibition Jim Nutt: Portraits, organized by curator Lynne Warren. As Robert Storr’s “Pug Beauties” essay at the beginning of the publication states, “This is portraiture without patron or model; these are portraits that reveal the inner self of those who exist only on the lacquered surfaces over which their countenances blossom like chiaroscuro orchids—hothouse flowers not evil so much as disturbingly at ease with their strangeness.”