Scott Kerr, a fifth-generation art dealer in St. Louis, crossed the Mississippi River in East St. Louis, the once vibrant city of Illinois, and surpassed the massive black population that had not recovered. So last year, I didn't know what to expect from the economics of citizens' uncertainty in the 1960s.
Carr was unsolicited by a man named Lincoln Walker who wanted to get a reputation for his paintings from his father, Abraham Lincoln Walker, a painter of the trade house who died in 1993. I was responding to an email. He was consumed in his basement for 30 years to make art.
Young Walker (62), an auto mechanic going on the link, led the car to a tractor trailer on his property. So he opened the rear door to reveal more than 800 artwork trobes packing racks, stacking them deep on the floor.
“I was just fascinated by what I saw,” Kerr said of the dark, fantastical paintings. “As soon as I saw it, I was very certain that this was the main job.”
So far, much of the art world seems to agree.
Last November, at the American Art Dealer Art Show in New York, self-taught artist expert Andrew Edlyn held a presentation on Walker's work. (Ker, whose Gallery Macaugen & Bar currently represents Walker's real estate, is working with Edryn.)
Edlyn's booth was sold out, he said, paintings purchased by renowned collectors, including Beth Rudin de Wicky, founder of the Bunker Art Space in West Palm Beach, Florida. James Keith Brown, president of the new museum committee; Artist Brian Donnelly (aka Cars).
Walker's first solo New York Gallery show opened on February 22nd at Andrew Edlyn Gallery and features around 20 paintings priced at $10,000 to $85,000. Several more works by the artist will take part in the Outsider Art Fair, which Edlyn will own at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Manhattan from February 27th to March 2nd.
In a preview of Walker's paintings in his gallery, Edrin described one untitled 1980 canvas as an intersecting work of surrealist Max Ernst and romantic painter and poet William Blake. “I don't know if it's hell or purgatory,” Edrin said.
He compares some of his black life's neighbourhood scenes with expressive, parochial painters such as Benny Andrews and Ernie Burns, as well as surrealists such as Giorgio de Chirico. , believes he must have seen other artists while teaching himself to paint. And Salvador Dali. However, Walker's influence remains largely unknown.
“There's this inherent mystery about the work of many “outsider” artists who were discovered after death because they didn't necessarily write or talk about it and didn't want to tell people about it,” Edrin said. Ta. He points out that it is typical for someone other than an artist to put such work into the public eye, citing the stories of two acclaimed self-taught artists. Henry Darger's landlord saved his work, and Martin Ramirez's psychiatrist shared him.
Edlyn admits that the term “outsider art” is controversial, and much of the art world rejects differentiation between trained and untrained artists. “Nomenclature is very politically loaded,” said Maxwell Anderson, president of the Deep Foundation, where the soul-developed spirits promote black artists in the American South. “When I look at our website, I can't find the following phrases: “self-study”, “outsider”, “vernal”. We want it to be seen as art. ”
But Edlyn believes there is a clear culture in the outsider art category.
Such artists “have no career aspirations, it's not part of the equation,” Edrin said. “I always felt there was something self-conscious and liberated in a creative process. They're creating their own world.”
Walker certainly never paid attention to his paintings.
“If no one ever saw one of them, he never minded. He was adopted as an infant by Walker and his wife Dorothy, and when his mother died in 2013, his father's father was Link, who took over the job, said Link. Almost died during the coronavirus pandemic, he decided it was time to do something with them. He said he had sent enquiries to the art world. I said, and Kar said he was the only one to respond.
“My mother wanted to put his paintings out there,” Link said. “We all knew how good he was. We want his name to be great.”
A social worker, Dorothy Walker displayed some of her husband's paintings at street fairs and local galleries in the mid-1970s. According to Link, he would scream at his husband when he didn't show up for these events. In 1995, with the help of Lou Brock, a baseball hall of fame inducted by his wife through church and near Dorothy, she walked a posthumous retrospective at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
A 1995 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the exhibition pointed to Dorothy's display of some of her husband's paintings in Seattle in 1974. (Link is a professor at Washington University, whose mother's uncle is a professor at Washington University, who taught him, but it's not clear if his father ever met Lawrence.) St. Louis, Missouri
Born in Henderson, Kentucky in 1921, Abraham Lincoln Walker was once home to creative celebrities such as Josephine Baker, Ike, Tina Turner, and Catherine Dunham. In a 1995 article, Dorothy said that as a child, he was an inspirational speaker of the evangelicals at the Church of God of Christ in Mound, Illinois.
“But he was really religious,” Link said. “I would have come downstairs and he would kneel down and pray. Some of his paintings might be what he portrayed as afterworld, like hell or heaven.”
Walker worked in the smearing and wallpaper business of thriving homes, and first tried making art in the early 1960s when Dorothy asked him to bring home a catalog of murals. When I chose a tree with apple flowers to hang on the living room sofa, Walker balked for a price of $25 and instead painted the images himself.
“He had the ability to see something and replicate it,” Link said. While his father draws long before and after work and weekends, he plays underground and listens to Bill Cosby on an eight-track or jazz album. , just blocking you from the Walkers house. During lunchtime from work, Walker ran around the neighborhood on a sketchpad, drawing one of the burnt-out houses that were often abandoned there.
Link said his father never went to the museum, but he maintained a set of family encyclopedias at his workplace. This is a possible source of early 1960s works, where Walker learns the fundamentals of anatomy and composition and experiments with style. Cubism, etc.
By the 1970s, Walker had developed a painting style that unfolded around him with his own moody palette and dystopian style stories. These scenes became increasingly psychedelic and abstract in the 1980s, and he became abstract in pieces that moved paint onto canvas on a giant strip. Link said he used panty knife, brushes of all kinds, newspapers, plastic wrappers and more.
Walker stopped smoking and drinking after the sudden death of his best friend, Link said, and for the last 15 years of his life he lived mainly in juice vegetables. According to his wife's account, Walker is regularly faster and then has a vision.
“I think as he goes further into abstraction, he refers to his reaction to the spiritual world,” Kerr said. “From three feet away, you would think the painting is completely abstracted.
Masimiliano Gioni, artistic director of the New Museum, said he was impressed by how Walker used “frottage,” a technique to rub the surface of a texture and tease images within the pattern. The arts have a long history, and most famously, he said it was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci.
“Did Walker develop it himself? Maybe. Did he learn it? Perhaps Zioni said, “Along with the great self-taught artists, you always have the knowledge of art and techniques. We are facing this strange phenomenon of having. It suggests that they were certainly less isolated than we think.”
Beth Marcus, a Boston-based Boston-based group of contemporary and self-taught artists, bought two Walker works in November. What she really was interested in was the massive brushstrokes of later works. “It reminded me of Gerhard Richter and Ed Clark,” she said.
Walker's relationship with reality and fantasy captivates Katherine Gentleson, a senior curator of American art and a folk and self-taught curator at Atlanta's High Museum. “My favorite of his paintings abstracted the form of human beings, born from almost geological problems, such as the continents fall apart and very cosmic,” she said. Gentleson has committed to obtaining at least one painting for the High Museum from Walker's exhibition at Edryn.
Many self-taught artists she exhibited were exposed to standard art through museums, magazines and television, but she said from a scholarship perspective, “We have something that we have relevant influences.” I think we need to be broader with what we think is. Their art.”
Many experiences in Walker's life “may have had an interesting connection to his brushstrokes, which he appears to be soaking up, and the lyrical quality of the otherworldly realm,” Gentleson said. Ta. “Artists, especially late 20th century artists, are very rare. They're really out of culture, as Jean Debaffe imagined.” Dubuffet promotes the idea of ”art brute” as pure and simple talent. He was a medieval French artist.
For Donnelly, an artist who purchased five Walker paintings, the work can stand on its own visual force without connecting the historical dots of all art and the dots of biographical ones. “I love learning about artists,” he said.
