January 29 to March 4, 2018
8 West 8th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York City, nyss.org

Let’s blame it on the constant digital barrage. Lately, news about artists has threatened to distract us from actually examining their art. Some of the most captivating stories are about artists tagged as outlier, outsider, or self-taught—stories of, say, an eccentric mystic creating prescient abstract paintings; of a reclusive janitor secretly making comic strips of gender ambiguous children. And then there’s James Castle.

Who can look at his eked out dark little interiors without wanting to learn Castle’s story? Born profoundly deaf, mute and dirt poor in Idaho in 1899, his desire to make art was so urgent that he drew using soot scraped from a wood stove, moistened with saliva and applied with sharpened sticks on discarded scrap paper or unfolded cardboard containers. But let’s put aside the story and look intently at his work. James Castle: People Places & Things, curated by Karen Wilkin at the New York Studio School, gives us a new opportunity to reassess what really makes his work so fascinating.

Although it may seem incredible, when we look closely it becomes apparent that in these drawings we see a mind making a systematic inquiry into the expressive and formal possibilities of representation. Meaning that we see someone, though unschooled, not just dutifully trying to replicate his surroundings in a drawing, but doing it with an awareness of just how he is structurally recreating his world and endowing it with feeling. What he chooses to depict and with how much detail indicates where his attention was fixed. His ubiquitous rectangles, for example, not only serve as building blocks of figuration, but are meaning-filled vessels: Pictures, doorways, windows and the drawing itself exist on an equivalent level with other rectangular objects. Tabletops are rectangles strewn with marks representing objects.

In series of works in this exhibition Castle is seen building his understanding of pictorial structure. Several drawings of the same scene change his point of view: more to the right side, or from a slightly lower vantage point. These shifts affect the representations in the picture. A window seen from the side can go from a dark rectangle in one drawing to open up to the landscape in another. A strange face haunting a little interior turns out to be a doorway containing a sliver of patterned wall hung with eye-like pictures.

From an early age he intently, privately, and with no knowledge of art or how it is made, produced hundreds of small works. A former chicken coop and then a trailer became his studio on his parents’ small subsistence farm in Idaho. After they died, it was willed to his sister and he lived there with her family his entire adult life. But we shouldn’t overly romanticize this vision of a little deaf mute boy spitting into soot, and scratching out drawings on materials he scavenged from the trash. It’s not as if they were so poor they couldn’t afford pencils and paper. In fact he was eventually supplied with oil sticks and watercolors. The way he used materials indicated something much deeper than mere penurious ingenuity.

The use of found materials was a way to own his surroundings. He could barely communicate beyond basic gestures and he refused to do farm chores, but the alchemical transformation of the byproducts of his immediate environment into depictions of it, became a way of understanding and laying possession to surroundings to which he probably felt excluded.

He attended a school for the deaf for five years when he was ten, and what occurred there is a mystery. He left at what must have been the middle of puberty, but sexualized bodies do not make an appearance in his work, and because he was not able to use what he learned to communicate beyond basic signing, the possibilities of human relationships seem to have been limited. Instead, like many artists, he used drawing to understand his relationship to his world. Though interiorized in feeling, his work was not about a rich fantasy life like many outliers, and unlike most mainstream artists, his explorations were of necessity more urgent. Looking closely one can see that through his work he began to study how his physical reality was put together.

Nothing is dated here and any ideas of chronology can only be speculative. Nevertheless it is not hard to sense a progression from detailed drawings of his immediate environment—a kitchen, a bedroom, the side of a house, or a view of a field—to a more sophisticated deconstruction of pictures, where abstract form is understood as meaning. Several drawings are devoted to iconic house forms that register as ambiguous symbols.

One of the great strengths of Wilkin’s exhibit is how the drawings are often augmented with James Castle’s source material, which he had carefully preserved. Castle drew inspiration from sources that at first seem so random that it is only when we look to their transformation that we see what might have attracted him. It is usually a fascination with the way a form conveys feeling.

A panel from the comic strip “Henry“ is transformed from a silly scene of the dopy overgrown boy. He has fallen asleep as he digs a pitchfork into a garden plot, a trail of Z’s rising from his head as his perturbed mother looks out at him through a window. Castle turns this, like much of his work, into a dark existential moment. The Z’s are gone, but the strings connecting the stakes demarcating the garden plot are carefully reproduced, as is the side of the house with the window and a shrub in the background. But his mother is barely limned in the window, and Henry becomes a misshapen homunculus with a pitchfork. The shrub in the background goes from a cheery bush to a harbinger of something gray and ominous. Is Castle’s Henry digging his own grave? While the white picket fence in the background is preserved as merely a white shape, Castle amusingly reproduces an anomaly in the newsprint as a strange ellipse. Castle very diligently constructed the black outline that frames the original panel, thus emphasizing the successive rectangles of garden plot, house, and window.

At what point Castle starts to recreate actual objects from the world is unknown, but it seems to come from a more confident and sophisticated understanding of representation. Pieced together drawings are constructed into simulacra of articles of clothing. Or a drawing of a typographic word like “plays” will become the subject of an entire piece. The font is carefully delineated, but the letters become individual calligraphic personae, each serif endowed with unique expressive qualities. He may have been unable to read, but it seems deliberate to represent that word “plays” so evocatively.

He had also created whole hand-bound volumes of images. Apparently one of the few things he did learn at the school for the deaf was how to bind sheets of paper into books. The books are strange amalgams of pages of little rectangles, sometimes twelve to a page, mostly containing portraits, but some are strange symbols or objects, and the images are surrounded by scribbly lines to indicate print. They resemble high school yearbooks or product catalogues. It is this eerie cataloguing aspect that exemplifies the systematic quality of Castle’s work. Having lived until the late 70s, he must have encountered television, and it is notable that some of the portraits look as if their heads are TV sets with faces appearing on screen.

While Castle’s story is compelling, unlike many outliers he was acknowledged as an artist during his life. When he was fifty, Castle’s nephew attending art school in Portland, Oregon brought a few of his drawings to the attention of a professor and his talent was immediately recognized. For the next 20 years until his death in 1977 he became celebrated in the Pacific Northwest with eight one man shows, only to lapse back into obscurity until 1998, when twenty years after his death, his family finally allowed access to the work. Its appearance at New York’s Outsider Art Fair reignited national interest, followed by a retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2008, museum accessions, and a presence at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Examining the pictorial thinking of “outsiders” often takes a back seat to the thrill of rescuing overlooked objects from the trash bin of history. An excitement that is fueled by a perhaps unconscious nostalgia for artistic sincerity is elicited by work that often bears a coincidental visual relationship to modernism but is untainted by modernism’s worldly ambition. This is not really the case with James Castle. The correspondence to mainstream art in Castle’s work, while unwitting, is not superficial. Though it appeared he was indifferent to his “success,” the diligence and concentration that he brought to his work are qualities of many mainstream artists, and tells us a lot about what it means to be an artist. As an artist, he exists on a twentieth century continuum somewhere between Albert Pinkham Ryder and Agnes Martin. And though isolated, James Castle lived in our time and was certainly touched by it. Art has historically been forged in solitude, and though it is tempting to romanticize it, his solitude, while deeper than that of most artists, fueled a quiet passion that is evident in the mood and intensity of the work.

The post Beyond Soot and Spit: Rethinking James Castle appeared first on artcritical.

Countless individuals, institutions, and causes lost a remarkable and irreplaceable friend earlier this fall with the passing of collector and philanthropist William Louis-Dreyfus. He literally transformed the lives of artists whose works he amassed. A stalwart campaigner for social justice, he pioneered ways of fusing his twin passions for art and for serving the underprivileged in the novel plans he laid for the dispersal of his collection. And, it can now be revealed, he was a significant and gracious supporter of artcritical magazine and its programs, a generous enabler who made no editorial demands and chose to keep a low profile.

I first got to know William in his capacity as a collector. He was a benefactor of the New York Studio School where I spent a decade as gallery director. The solo show of new sculpture by John Newman that I organized could fairly be judged a success on all fronts, starting with the quality of the work and its spectacular, architect-directed installation. Although John had enjoyed major attention at the outset of his career, attested to by the star-studded school lobby on opening night, his fortunes had taken a dip since the halcyon days of the 1980s. That changed with a steady flow of visitors and a review in the New York Times. But what totally galvanized the situation was a visit one evening to the galleries from Louis-Dreyfus. He evidently flipped on seeing Newman’s whimsical, fearless inventions. Quirky almost to a point of willful vulgarity, yet intense in their miniaturist energy, and heartfelt in pushing sculptural boundaries and chromatic possibilities alike, these intimately sized hybrids struck such a chord in the collector that he all but bought out the show. He would go on eventually to acquire three-dozen of Newman’s pieces and a number of drawings, and helped secure gallery representation for the artist. John is unabashed in declaring that William’s patronage turned his career around.

Alerted to William’s largesse – not to mention his appetite – I began to take proper note of him as a collector, especially when Christina Kee, who had been my work-study assistant at the School and later began to write for artcritical, joined William’s curatorial team. Nothing could quite prepare one for a first visit to his warehouse-cum-museum in Mount Kisco, NY where one could see room after room of efficiently stacked but artfully displayed works, often with one artist per room, although not a few artists needed more space than that. He had a penchant for outsider artists, amassing unparalleled holdings of James Castle, Bill Traylor and Thornton Dial (over 200 works by Castle and over a hundred each both Traylor and Dial). Tellingly, he preferred to avoid the term “outsider,” perhaps intuiting that all the artists he collected, well known or marginalized, academically trained or self taught, were equally charged by independence of vision and authenticity of touch.

His catalogue was a liberating and shameless mix of “big ticket” and oddball reputations, of conservative realists and outlandish mavericks, of modernist giants and student unknowns, it being very clear that the collector had his own criteria of worthiness. He had dozens of drawings by Giacometti; a massive early stain painting by Helen Frankenthaler among several other pieces from the same hand—an outlier in his tastes, this was a work whose quality he swore by; and literally hundreds of works each in different media by the social realist polychromatic sculptor Raymond Mason; the painter of hieratic and mysterious figures on beaches and blazing sunsets, Graham Nickson; the ethereal miniaturist Eleanor Ray; and others. He had more than 200 artists in his Mount Kisco Pithom and nearby estate. His collecting in such depth almost had an outsider, OCD aspect to it, as he would only half jokingly aver.

Eclectic as his holdings were, there were most definitely consistent qualities. He made no bones about the fact that he appreciated skill, hard work, individuality, authenticity, traditional mediums and a visceral sense of connection with the human story. Some of these were traits, it could be argued, that others were blessed to value in him, as a patron.

I realized that William was especially generous to take the interest that he did in artcritical. Although he was a literary man (for a decade he had been chairman of the Poetry Society and was a published poet himself) he was not in natural sympathy with art criticism. He was conscious of his alienation from prevailing art discourse. Although he obviously devoted enormous resources to collecting and supporting his collection, he knew that much of what he valued in art was out of fashion. That he was as maverick and “outsider” as many of the people he collected.

He knew about The Review Panel, having come to hear Christina Kee when she appeared in the series, but he wanted to know if we ever discussed more general issues or problems in art, rather than always focusing on shows. I argued that “meta” subjects often come up, but that to my mind it is better to have critics engage with specific bodies of work, and allow broader issues to emerge organically. Later, Christina shared her interpretation of this exchange, confiding with characteristic humor her sense that William’s dream was of one definitive, landmark debate, with someone arguing with the passion he felt on the subject, which would somehow dissipate all the misunderstandings that had arisen around art. He told me that he particularly liked the criticism of Jed Perl.

In “Generosity of Eye,” a film about William co-produced by his daughter, actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, William outlined his audacious plan for the dispersal of his collection. Rather than leave it all to a museum, perhaps a new-built institution or a wing bearing his name, he would be donating it, for the purpose of sale, to a favored philanthropic project, the Harlem Children’s Zone. The creation of Geoffrey Canada, this is a cradle-to-college educational support system for an impoverished, at-risk community. Obviously, many of the artists William collected have or had little market beyond his own patronage, making the liquidation of his holdings problematic for artist and beneficiary alike, but the venture is a long-term one and will hopefully be handled with sensitivity and skill by trusted parties. Modest and self-effacing though he was, William didn’t shy away from the egotism underlying the altruism and risk in his gesture. The poet-philanthropist-collector-humanist was also—after all—a venture capitalist. He wanted the market to vindicate his taste.

The post Generosity of Eye: William Louis-Dreyfus, 1932 to 1984 appeared first on artcritical.