Artist With Alzheimer’s Disease Draws Himself as Condition Progresses

William Utermohlen, an artist who suffered with Alzheimer’s, has provided the world with perhaps its clearest visual representation of the effects of the disease - one that is both fascinating and chilling. “William Utermohlen was born in south Philadelphia in 1933. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1957 and on the G.I. bill at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford in 1957-58. In 1962 he settled in London, where he met and married the art historian Patricia Redmond. In 1967 he received his first important London show at the Marlborough gallery. London life and London characters have most particularly marked his numerous portraits which constitute one of the richest aspects of his work. In the 1980s he painted two major murals for two great North-London institutions, the Liberal Jewish Synagogue at Saint John’s Wood and the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Apart from portraits, still lives and drawings from the model Bill’s art can be arranged in six clear thematic cycles: Th