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.

“The Lord spoke and he said: Give up the repair of lawn mowers; Give up the repair of bicycles; Give up sermons; Paint my pictures… And that’s what I done.” Howard Finster is among the most prolific and best-known outsider artists. He turned his house in Georgia into “Paradise Garden”, a venue to display his vision of preaching through art, with a constant display of work for sale to the collectors and dealers who were frequent visitors. Much of the building material in the garden was accumulated from Finster’s television and bicycle repair businesses and his twenty-one other trades. His art came to national attention in 1980 when LIFE magazine featured him among several leading folk artists. He played his banjo on Johnny Carson’s television show, designed an award-winning record album cover for the Talking Heads and executed paintings to hang in the Library of Congress. Finster produced more than 20,000 works of art using anything at hand – furniture, bottles, mirrors, plastic, plywood, canvas, and, as he would say, “the best bicycle paint available”. His style is instantly recognizable; the best is deserving of the status he earned by preaching and promoting to aspiring believers and collectors. Finster had his first solo show in a commercial gallery at Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago in 1979, and another at Ms. Kind’s New York gallery in 1981. His work is in the collections of national and international museums and he was chosen to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in 1984.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

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.

Clementine Hunter (pronounced Clementeen) was born to Creole parents, Antoinette Adams and Janvier Reuben, in late December of 1886 or early January of 1887 at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana. Hunter would never learn to read or write, later saying she only had about ten days of schooling, and was put to work in the fields when she was very young. At 15, she left Hidden Hill, which is considered to have been the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin and is today known as Little Eva Plantation, for Melrose Plantation, where she would change her name from Clemence to Clementine.

At Melrose, she would pick cotton and give birth to her first two children. After their father died in 1914, she married Emmanuel Hunter in 1924 and the couple remained at Melrose, where they both worked. She would give birth to another five children, two of whom were stillborn, picking cotton until the day before she gave birth and returning to the fields shortly thereafter. By her mid-30s, Clementine would begin to work as a cook and housekeeper. She would never travel more than 100 miles from home.

By the 1930s, Melrose Plantation had begun to be something of an artist colony, and when New Orleans artist Alberta Kinsey left behind brushes and tubes of paint, Hunter painted her first picture – on a window shade. Her work would come to the attention of the plantation’s curator, Francois Mignon, and in addition to supplying her with materials, Mignon would help Hunter get her work displayed locally. They would later collaborate on a Melrose Plantation cookbook.

A color photograph of artist Clementine Hunter (Louisiana), in a blue smock holding a rooster. (p4A item # D9957218)

Hunter continued to paint, often producing artwork on any scraps she could find, from paper bags to window shades to jugs, hanging a sign outside her cabin that charged “25 cents to Look.” Her works illustrated the daily life of the early 20th-century plantation – picking cotton or pecans, doing chores, commemorating baptisms or weddings – and as such make valuable socioeconomic and cultural contributions as well as artistic ones. She was a prolific painter, creating an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 works between the late 1930s and her death on January 1, 1988, but her work is also considered uneven, likely because so many pieces were created in haste and because she continued to live in poverty most of her life, so values for her work can vary widely. Works from the 1940s and 50s are typically considered her best works.

Clementine Hunter (American/Louisiana, 1886-1988) oil on canvas board painting, “Pecan Pickin’”, circa 1955. (p4A item # E8882656)

In the 1940s, Hunter sold work for as little as a single quarter and by the late 1970s, she was selling pieces for several hundred dollars. By the time of her death in 1988, dealers were selling her works for thousands of dollars. Fame did find her late in life, with Hunter landing a solo exhibition, the first African-American artist to do so, at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). She received an invitation to the White House from Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and would receive an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986.

Hunter’s work is naive and simplistic enough in nature that there have been instances of forgery. This is complicated by the fact that she painted on a wide variety of materials, rarely titled her works, and because they were originally sold from her front door for pocket change, there is rarely anything resembling a firm provenance. Her work also tends to sell in a price range that makes forgeries easy enough to pass off – they can sell cheaply enough without drawing suspicion and they tend to sell in a price point where buyers are often less likely to do or demand research and are unlikely to spend the funds for a full authentication.
Reference Note by p4A editorial staff, 2011.

Artist Note Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019:

The descendant of enslaved people, Clementine Hunter was born in the Cane River region of central Louisiana at Hidden Hill, the infamous plantation said to have inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She worked for most of her life on the Melrose cotton plantation. A self-taught artist and one of the field’s best-known, she didn’t start painting until she was in her 50s. After work, Hunter recorded everyday plantation life from memory, whether picking cotton in the fields or baptisms and funerals. Her palette is bright, her faces usually dark in tone and without expression. She disregards perspective and scale. Her earlier work was on found material; she graduated to canvas and board when patrons gave her art supplies and orders for specific images which she often repeated on request. Her signature changed over the years from “Clemence” to “C H” to “CH” to a backward “C” superimposed over the letter “H”. This is considered a fairly reliable method by which to date her paintings. Though she first exhibited in 1949, Hunter did not garner public attention until the 1970s when both the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited her work. Even with success, Hunter chose to stay in Louisiana, working at Melrose Plantation until it was (ironically) sold at auction in 1970. She lived out her days in a small trailer a few miles away. The sale stripped Melrose of many Hunter murals that adorned its buildings. Her African House Murals, painted in 1955, were preserved, and can be seen at the African House at Melrose Plantation, now a named National Historical Landmark.

Willie Massey is a self-taught artist from Kentucky who spent his life as a tenant dairy farmer. He made only utilitarian objects before his wife’s death in 1955. After, he began to make sculptures, which he called “tricks”. He fashioned animals and birds, farm equipment, birdhouses and airplanes from found objects and repurposed material. He would also buy stretched canvases and paint on the backs to create pre-made frames for his images. Massey is probably best known for his birdhouses, his wingless birds made from aluminum foil painted with enamel, and his airplanes. He died in 1990 as a result of burns suffered in a fire in his home. In 1998 Massey’s art was featured in the exhibition African-American Folk Art in Kentucky at the Kentucky Folk Art Center . His work is included in many permanent collections, including the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Morris Museum of Art, Morristown, NJ; and the University of Mississippi Museum, Oxford, MS.

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.

The decorative arts world has many “squishy” and vague vocabulary words, but few are “squishier” and vaguer than cartouche. Originally, the term comes from Egyptology and is used to describe a oval enclosing hieroglyphics and having a horizontal line at one end. (The line denotes royalty.) The oval had significance not unlike that of a closed circle, in that it was believed that an oval around a person’s name provided protection to that person. The strong association with the god-like royalty of ancient Egypt and the “good luck charm” nature of the symbol meant that it was eventually co-opted by the rest of the population and, as a result, it appears on all manner of structures and objects from the era.

Centuries later, when Egypt was a land divided constantly by conflicts, soldiers, seeing these ovals everywhere, are said to have found them to resemble the paper cartridges used in muskets. The French word for cartridge is cartouche and thus it became, in its original use, the term applied to this particular hieroglyphic element.

A Civil War-era example of a paper cartridge. (p4A item # D9865000)

Sterling silver vase with blank cartouche. (p4A item # E8906323)

Discerning collectors, dealers, and museum curators of Asian art regularly made pilgrimages to a charming 18th century saltbox home in Wilton, Connecticut: Vallin Galleries. Owned and operated by Peter L. Rosenberg for nearly thirty years until his sudden death in December of 2013, Vallin Galleries was widely regarded as an outstanding source for the best of Asian art and antiques. Skinner is proud to offer Peter’s estate, a testimony to the nearly 75 years of the family business of selling Asian art, in a two-day auction April 26-27, 2014 in Boston.

The story begins with Peter’s mother, Josephine, who opened a lampshade and lamp store on 10th Street in Greenwich Village in 1940. Making lamps from Chinese porcelain vases was very much in vogue at the time and Josephine produced many for the finest homes. As the business grew so did her passion for Chinese porcelains and Asian art. In 1951, she moved to Wilton and established Vallin Galleries. Twenty-five of the lamps, made by Josephine and offered in the sale, were found in one of the large hearths. Buying from families whose forebears were missionaries, diplomats, or businessmen in the Far East and from the 1944 government sale of the Yamanaka Company’s inventory, the gallery was a well-established purveyor of fine Asian art when Peter joined the family business.

Under the direction of Peter and his wife Louise, who pre-deceased him, Vallin Galleries acquired and sold works of art to museums, dealers and private collectors, including the eminent art dealer, author, and scholar, Robert H. Ellsworth, who purchased an extremely rare 15th century altar coffer which is published in his book on Chinese furniture, as well as an 11th century Song period fresco, originally in the C.T. Loo collection, now at the Chicago Art Institute. A Chinese marriage collar, in this sale, was purchased from Vallin in 1986. Objects offered in auction houses frequently have a Vallin Gallery provenance. Like any dealer or private collector, Peter was proud to have sold to the Metropolitan, the Brooklyn, and Los Angeles County museums, among others.

Peter belonged to several professional and educational organizations including: The Art and Antique Dealers League of America, serving as a board member; The Oriental Ceramic Society of London; The Asia Society; and the China Institute. He encouraged and mentored many young collectors and dealers with a generous spirit and a passion for Asian art. He felt that part of the pleasure of the profession came from finding and presenting exceptional material, but, he also felt that the greater pleasure came from welcoming to the gallery people who were serious collectors as well as those who were beginners.

It is with pleasure that Skinner offers what remained in the gallery upon Peter’s death. Since Peter bought aggressively right up to his death, the more than 700 lots in the April 26-27, 2014 Asian Works of Art auction represent treasures still to be had. We [Skinner, Inc.] would like to extend special thanks to Richard Kenworthy and Yuanfei Bellido for their research and cataloging.

Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc., April, 2014, Judith Dowling.