Chuck Connelly, Combative Neo-Expressionist Artist, Dies at 70

Chuck Connelly, a prolific Neo-Expressionist artist with an uncompromising personality whose paintings depicted scenes like Noah’s Ark breaking apart in a storm and a huge candy-cane-colored funnel cloud looming over a rural landscape, died on April 13 at his home in Philadelphia.He was 70.His wife, Adrienne Mooney-Connelly, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer.

She said he died in bed under his favorite painting, “Animals in the Street,” in which animals — a bear, a lion, a horse, a giraffe, an elephant and others — walk garishly dressed as humans on a city street.Mr.Connelly rose to renown in the early 1980s, when he was represented by the prestigious SoHo art dealer Annina Nosei and hobnobbed with hot fellow artists like Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

He made about $1 million from the sale of his paintings in that decade.At one point his fame and volatile persona led to his being hired as the model for an impassioned artist character played by Nick Nolte in Martin Scorsese’s “Life Lessons,” part of a trilogy of short films under the title “New York Stories” (1989).(The other films were directed by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola.)Mr.

Connelly’s art frequently drew critical praise.Reviewing a show of American Neo-Expressionists at a gallery in Ridgefield, Conn.

in 1984, Grace Glueck of The New York Times wrote, “Chuck Connelly’s heavily textured paintings, ‘Freedom Ride’ and ‘Two Men Sitting,’ in muted grays and browns make eerily effective compositions of satanic clown figures, and come closer than anything else here to the mood of early-20th-century German Expressionism.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscri...