ARTS & CULTURE

Compass Players) in a faux-military costume; Jo re Stewart (a poet, pacifist, and pamphleteer immortalized in Allen Ginsburg’s Howl ) emptying a trash can on some men in suits; Ed Bland and Nelam Hill (directors-to-be of the seminal 1959 film The Cry of Jazz ) debating at a front table; among countless others.

It’s an astonishing artifact, a historian’s dream. But age has done the yellowing, fading display no kindnesses. The boldest part of the frontispiece is a signature in the lower right corner: “Art Castillo.”

When he drew Moulin Jimmy’s , as the original artwork is fondly known to its few surviving subjects, Arturo (later Arthur) Teodoro Castillo was a 24-year-old contradiction—not a University of Chicago student, but part of the institution’s intellectual orbit; a keen observer of Hyde Park’s social intricacies, but not much of a talker himself; a caricaturist who regaled his friends with inked likenesses, but who considered himself primarily a writer.