Theodore Harold (Ted) Gordon’s biographer Roger Cardinal explains the intensity of Gordon’s pictorial expression as “a short-circuit in the creative current, whereby the self-taught draftsman, absorbed by his image-making, becomes a perpetual motion machine, an instrument of what the Surrealists called ‘automatism’ or spontaneous, unmonitored creation.” A government worker for decades, Gordon avoids most social relations, preferring life at home with his wife and the solitary and obsessive pursuit of his art. While he draws animals and people, most of his drawings are male portraits, possibly self-portraits, meticulously hatched by rarely-repeated linear patterns pressed into (usually 12″x 11″) paper with pens and accented with colored felt-tip pens and pencils.

Gordon, the recipient of a one-person show at Collection de L’Art Brut in Lousanne, Switzerland, has drawings in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Collection de L’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland; Musgrave-Kinley Collection, London, England; Aracine Collection, Paris, France; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; and American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY. In 1998, the artist donated to the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD what is the largest and most representative collection of his work in the United States. He received an award of distinction from the Folk Art Society of America in 2000.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Ted Gordon is a California-based artist who has been represented by Braunstein / Quay Gallery, San Francisco, and the Outsider Folk Art Gallery, Reading, Pennsylvania. His works are represented in the permanent collection of the American Visionary Art Museum in Virginia and the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Information Courtesy of Skinner, Inc., December, 2011.

Daniel Rohrig never trained as an artist. As a boy in his childhood hometown of Harmony, Indiana, he would use photos of movie stars and actors from film magazines as models for his drawings and paintings. Serving in the Pacific during WWII, Rohrig became fascinated with the art and culture of Japan and turned his attention to the depiction of Japanese movie stars. He envisions his favorite Japanese actors in invented scenes and settings, many annotated with their names. He also depicts significant events in Japan’s history, often examples of its military prowess. Rohrig died suddenly in 1969. Some ten years later, the consignor learned of Rohrig’s work from his niece (who is also the source of this biographical sketch). He purchased the three portfolios of original work she had inherited at Rohrig’s death, some 70 works in all. Rohrig’s art remained undiscovered and unavailable to the public until offered in December of 2018 by Rago, which remains the exclusive agent. To date, Rohrig has sold at auction and at the 2019 Outsider Art Fair in New York. The American Museum of Folk Art, New York, NY has acquired four works for its collection, intended for a 2020 exhibition.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

The Swiss artist Adolf Wolfli is considered among the greatest exemplars of Art Brut. Born in poverty, orphaned before the age of ten, mistreated and abused in a series of foster homes, by the time he was in his twenties he had been twice arrested for attempted sexual abuse. After the second arrest in 1895 he was sent to Waldau Clinic in Bern, Switzerland, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and where he remained until his death. In 1908 he started work on an illustrated personal mythology that filled 46 books in 25,000 pages by the time of his death. He divided the narrative – composed of prose, poetry, musical compositions, and some 1600 drawings and 1600 collages – into five parts: From the Cradle to the Grave (nine books; 1908–12), Geographic and Algebraic Books (seven books; 1912–16), Books with Songs and Dances (six books; 1917–22), Album Books with Dances and Marches (eight books; 1924–28), and Funeral March (16 books; 1928–30, unfinished). From 1916 on Wolfli also produced what he called Brotkunst (“bread art”), single-sheet drawings he would sell for income or exchange for art supplies and tobacco. Though independent of the narrative work, the bread art echoes its themes. His international reputation was established on these drawings.

Jean Dubuffet first encountered his work on a tour of Switzerland in 1945 and designated him “le grand Wolfli”. Wolfli’s work figured prominently in Dubuffet’s Art Brut manifesto and collection, but otherwise received little attention until 1972, when the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann presented a selection of the bread art at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. Wolfli’s great narrative only began to be systematically examined and transcribed in 1975 when it was taken from the Museum of the Waldau Clinic to the newly established Adolf Wolfli Foundation at the Bern Museum of Fine Arts, Bern, Switzerland. Wolfli’s work is held in every major public and private collection of outsider art worldwide.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.