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The Accidental Artist
James Castle, who painted with soot and spit and found objects, gets a major retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. VIEW OUR GALLERY of an Outsider Art star.
James Castle was born deaf. He never learned to read, write, or speak and only once did he ever leave his home state of Idaho. He was an outcast by nature, but social and geographical isolation didn’t inhibit his artwork: Castle, though untrained, was a master draftsman with a dry sense of humor and an overactive imagination. The first full-scale retrospective of his work, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 3, rightly introduces him as a highly nuanced artist with inadvertent ties to several major movements in 20th-century art, Surrealism and Pop among them.
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For Castle, who died in 1977 at the age of 78, art was everything and everything became art. Throughout his life, the artist—who, because of his disabilities, could never live completely independently—would scavenge his family’s home for old cigarette packs, notebooks, schoolbooks, matchboxes, and discarded pieces of cardboard to use as canvases. An inky mixture of soot and saliva was his primary medium, though as his work developed he would sometimes incorporate hues derived from watercolor blocks and other pigment-heavy materials.
• Art Beast: The Best of Art, Photography, and DesignNo one outside Castle’s immediate family saw his drawings and sewn-cardboard sculptures until the 1950s, when Idaho museums and galleries started to take notice. Castle sold some pieces in the 1960s but his work didn’t truly reenter the market until the mid-1990s, after his sister and caretaker Peggy died. (It’s quite possible that Peggy didn’t see the value of his work. She said in 1976: “Everybody’s been elated with [James’s drawings], but I can’t be.... I’ve been around them all my life.”) Twenty years after his death, Castle earned praise at the 1997 Outsider Art Fair in New York. He has been slowly gained clout both here and abroad ever since.
The some 200 works on view at the Art Institute (and previously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) aren’t dated, but the curators here have done their best to create some semblance of a chronology, starting with Castle’s landscapes and schoolbook doodles (he briefly attended the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind) and ending with a more playful series of figures. Throughout, Castle’s mastery of linear perspective is remarkable. When he sketches his parents’ farm, Idaho prairies, trees, and picket fences recede into the distance, adding depth to the monochromatic sketch. Sculptures from this era bear a similar attention to detail and perspective. Castle built geese with wings puffing out from their bodies by layering pieces of cardboard then stitching them together. His later figures (descriptively titled Dresser Head Man, Chair Head Man with Chair Legs, Girls in Tan Coats with Landscape Faces) are delightfully surreal, bringing to mind 1920s-era paintings by Max Ernst and foreshadowing Nam June Paik’s boxy, TV-headed robots.
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Well, a great story about a remarkable artist, an outsider artist. What else to say? I consider myself an outsider artist, if one has to have a niche market and label to go with it. I guess in the real world you do.
I've seen your art and it is juvenile, pedantic and uninspiring. In the real world, you should be working in an office, but you are too lazy.
All of that was a lie.
I would enjoy creating art like this, but I wouldn't expect people to appreciate it or buy it.
Excuse me "afterthought" ( above) but the vicious attack you launched on " rosenblatt" ( who I assume might be Richard Rosenblatt) seems more than slightly uncalled for! Do you try to eviscerate "rosenblatt" and then recant-- or do you try, and then say that he is mendacious on top of it all?
You might take a little to hefting logic and style books to study and use in your writing, since you think you can write well enough to blog.
Poor Mr. Rosenblatt, who could be the grocer/sunday painter down the street, for all I know, was simply expressing benevolence-- and here you come in with a suspicious cudgel. "Afterthoughts" about a misspent life? Just a brooding desire to add to the general smudge of nastiness?
I took the trouble to look up the paintings of Richard Rosenblatt and he can't be too lazy as he went to the Art Students League where my mother studied and so did Lichtenstein.
His paintings are very pleasing... a little Hopper a little Frenchness and simple. They probably make a lot of people happy and his parents proud of him-- what do you want, everyone Edvard Munch?
Also , by the way, thank you Rachel Wolff-- for a very interesting and inspiring story of a unique triumph over adversity.
Thank you.
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