Art in America

By Michael Bonesteel

Chicago Outsider artists Hen­ry Darger, Lee Godie and Joseph Yoakum gave free rein to personal fantasies that utterly transformed their realities, both on and off the canvas. In many respects, these artists may be distin­guished by an inability to differentiate between art and life. Their absolute belief in the artistic fictions they created—not just in the ideas or con­cepts behind them—resulted in a con­viction that lent psychological power to their work.

Jean Dubuffet, Roger Cardinal and Michel Thevos have argued elsewhere that Outsider art is more than the product of a delusional personality. The fantasies of delusional personali­ties are normally unrealized, whereas Outsider artists document and thus affirm their fantasies by creating “proof” of their existence. Such proofs reinforce the absolute nature of their beliefs. Making matters more complex is the notion—a necessary corollary of any serious treatment of Outsider artists—that their artistic production consists of almost every­thing they do, from the pictures they paint to the clothes they wear, from their habits of speech to their ob­viously embroidered life histories. In a most unconventional and literal sense, they live their art. Consequent­ly, and despite the evident contradictions, biographers tend to take Out­sider artists at their word: black artist Yoakum claimed to be a full-blooded Navajo Indian; Darger, the son of a Chicago tailor, said he was born in Brazil; bag-lady artist Godie reported that she came from a wealthy family. Disputing these claims would be as futile as disputing the “truth” of an expressionist painter’s interpretation of the human figure. For many an Outsider artist, it’s all art. The acceptance of so-called primi­tive, naive and Outsider artists by Chicago’s art world cognoscenti was well underway by World War II. Long before several generations of Chicago Imagists in search of inspiration began their pilgrimages to the Field Mu­seum of Natural History or to the haunts of contemporary self-taught and itinerant Outsider artists, local naives such as Jennie Siporin and Thorvald Hoyer were familiar names in Chicago’s small art community. In fact, Siporin and Hoyer were exhib­iting at the Art Institute’s annual “Chicago and Vicinity” shows as early as 1940. Professors at the School of the Art Institute, beginning with Kathleen Blackshear, later followed by Whitney Halstead and continuing into the present with Ray Yoshida, insin­uated the work of ethnic primitive and modern naive artists into the cur­riculums of Chicago’s future artists, historians and critics. By the time Dubuffet gave his famous “Anti-Cultural Positions” lecture at the Arts Club in 1951, the groundwork had already been laid for Chicago’s enduring re­ceptivity to and affection for what Dubuffet termed L’Art Brut—the “raw art” of untaught artists who were for the most part isolated from mainstream art-world influences. More recently, the Museum of Con­temporary Art’s seminal 1979 exhibi­tion, “Outsider Art in Chicago,” grouped Darger, Godie and Yoakum rather indiscriminately with William Dawson, Aldobrando Piacenza and Pauline Simon. Although the latter three were certainly inventive within the contexts of broader folk and naive traditions, Darger, Godie and Yoa­kum stand apart as true Outsider art­ists, unparalleled originals working out of their own idiosyncratic frame­works.

When bag-lady artist God­ie was picked up for va­grancy, taken to court and asked her occupation, she explained: “I’m a famous artist.” Noting the elderly woman standing before him wrapped in bolt-ends of cheap fabric—her self-styled version of an East Indian Sari—the judge assumed she was suffering from delusions of grandeur and sent her off for a stay at a psychiatric hospital. Notwithstand­ing her own inflated view of herself as a latter-day French Impressionist, the fact is that she is a famous artist. She has supported herself making art for more than a decade—few local artists can boast a similar professional accomplishment. She was as much a fix­ture as the two bronze lions on the front steps of the Art Institute, where for years she would hawk her paint­ings and brag toothlessly but in an undeniably engaging way, “I’m much better than Cezanne.” Her name is recognized beyond local art circles, and her work is probably in more Chicago collections than that of any other area artist. If all that doesn’t amount to a kind of fame, nothing does. Godie could be found in the late ’60s painting big orange circles on her own cheeks, eyeshadow over her eyes and thick, black eyebrows above her natural ones—all from the same paint box she used to make her pictures. She has told people that her father shot guns with Marshall Field Sr. and that her sister took piano lessons from Ignace Jan Paderewski. It is uncertain whether Godie (which she pronounces “Go-day”) is her real name or a fabri­cation suited to fit her identity as a self-proclaimed French Impressionist. It matters little, of course, that she is no more an Impressionist than she is a Cubist. What matters is that she has transfigured her life with the palette of her imagination.

She paints portraits of glamorous, vivacious women with huge, staring eyes and bushy eyelashes—renderings somewhat reminiscent of Inez Na­thaniel-Walker’s portraits. Godie’s women, however, have an intensity and strangeness more akin to an Art Brut artist such as Aloise. Godie’s works, with titles like Flaming Youth, Sweet Sixteen and Gibson Girl, recall a world of innocence that ended with the Great Depression. She herself still lives in such a world, for she always wears her makeshift dresses without slacks no matter how cold the weather and insists that her male visitors re­main in the downstairs lobbies of the fleabag hotels where she stays—if she allows callers at all. She occasionally does portraits of famous personalities like Princess Margaret or James Dean, but usually she paints liv:e sitters on the street. On separate occasions, she has identified Girl in the Mirror as either a self-portrait or a portrait of her daughter, whom she said was “as beautiful as Shirley Temple,” and who supposedly died at an early age of diphtheria. Her canvases range from roll-ends of primed burlap to window shades, often unevenly cut to odd propor­tions. Before switching to watercolor and ballpoint pen, she used to paint in heavy layers of tempera straight from the bottle, with the unfortunate result that these early works suffered from considerable flaking, despite re­peated coats. of thick brown wood­working varnish. Some paintings have never completely dried and feel tacky even today. Affixed to a number of paintings are hand-colored photo­booth photographs of herself holding up fans of money. Among her various inventions are: painting “books” (sheaves of canvases bound on one side with shoelaces), “pillow paint­ings” (two painted canvases sewn back to back and stuffed with wadded newsprint), and a pre-made ongoing series of traced hands floating above black and white keyboards which she cut to order at different lengths. For more than a decade, her work has sold for $5 or $50 depending on her mood—prices that reflect not only pre-inflation, but pre-Depression stan­dards.

But to reiterate, Godie’s paintings are only the tip of an artistic iceberg known as the Lee Godie phenome­non. Her eccentric and unpredictable behavior, her bizarre habits and per­ceptions, her considerable charm and wit—all must be included in the oeuvre of this Outsider artist who has been known to attack anyone bringing a camera within whacking distance of her portfolio, who is given to observ­ing that one’s eyesight improves as one removes constricting layers of clothing, or who may suddenly dash off in the middle of a conversation with the words, “I’ve got to go, my hair’s on fire.”

Henry Darger’s belief in the world he had created was so strong that his epic mas­terwork, In the Realms of the Unreal, converged with aspects of his ordinary, day-to-day life. His real and unreal realms were all of a piece, and actions in one had repercussions in the other. He was a motherless child whose father died when Darger was still young. According to his 2,631-page autobiography, he was cruelly mistreated by nuns as he was shuttled from one Catholic orphanage to another and ended up in a home for “feeble-minded” boys from which, he finally ran away. Darger’s Realms would seem to be a fantastic and fearful projection of his own childhood memories and experiences. He com­plained that he never wanted to grow up, and one suspects that, in certain ways, he never really did; although his creative vision was cosmic in scope, his perception of reality appears to have been arrested in a preadolescent phase. Given a strict Catholic up­bringing and sheltered among exclu­sively male companions, Darger may not have known that girls without clothes looked any different from boys. As improbable as this state of affairs sounds, it seems to be the sim­plest explanation as to why Darger the man—a man who apparently didn’t like women and never had a girlfriend—populated his artistic com­positions with hermaphrodites: little girls with penises.

He began composing the story that was to occupy him for more than half a century sometime between 1911 and 1916. His monumental life’s work was not discovered until after his death in 1972. Another landlord might have taken one look at Darger’s work and relegated the entire effort to the gar­bage heap. But Nathan Lerner, an art­ist/photographer in his own right, im­mediately grasped the importance of his tenant’s output when he discovered it hidden away in old trunks and buried beneath the piles of broken toys, religious kitsch and assorted bric-a-brac that filled Darger’s one ­and-a-half-room apartment on Chicago’s North Side. In the Realms of the Unreal was comprised of approxi­mately 19,000 single-spaced, legal­-sized pages divided in to 12 to 13 bound and unbound volumes. Lerner also found a number of journals, ledg­ers and diaries. More astounding, however, were the 87 large (8- to 10-foot-long) watercolored murals stitched together into three gigantic “books” (Godie wasn’t the first to come up with the idea), plus 67 small­er drawings, all separate illustrations for his Realms saga.