Cincinnati-based artist Charles Meurer painted in the tradition of the American trompe l’oeil masters, William Michael Harnett and John Frederick Peto. The artist traced his fascination with trompe l’oeil painting to seeing Harnett’s still lifes at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition of 1886 and other works by Peto in Cincinnati art galleries in the 1890s. Born in Germany in 1865 to American parents, Meurer was raised in Tennessee. As a young artist Meurer received a pivotal commission from Adolph Ochs, editor of the Chattanooga Times, to paint a still life incorporating the front page of the paper along with books and other objects relating to the newspaper industry. Successful with this commission, Meurer continued to elaborate on this theme. The artist included paper currency in many of his still lifes.

Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc., January 2010.

The last of the great 19th century trompe l’oeil painters, Cincinnati based Charles Meurer invented the “editorial sanctum,” a genre of still life in which the objects, notably the front page of a newspaper, celebrate a particular individual (A. Frankenstein, After the Hunt: William Michael Harnett and Other Still Life Painters, 1870-1900, 2nd ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968, pp. 154-155).

Born in Germany and raised in Tennessee, Meurer studied with Franck Duveneck at the Art Academy of Cincinnati in the mid-1880s, and pursued additional training at the Academie Julian and the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In terms of facture, his paintings bear some mark of his tight academic training in Paris, although in terms of subject matter, his work is much more Germanic in flavor. Meurer’s encounter with William Harnett’s trompe l’oeil paintings at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition of 1886 and with John Peto’s rack paintings in Cincinnati art galleries profoundly shaped his career. By the mid-1890s he had begun to specialize in still lifes of gentlemen’s paraphernalia – beer steins, playing cards, letters, pipes, cigars, and currency – and his realistic reproduction of money, considered unlawful, frequently landed him in trouble with government officials.

Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, June 2009.

Floral still lifes were one of Charles Meurer’s favored subject matters, aside from trompe-l’oeil and pastoral scenes. Meurer studied in Cincinnati under Frank Duveneck, and then in Paris and Lyon, France. He eventually settled in Terrace Park, OH.

Information Courtesy of Cowan’s Auctions, September, 2018.

Maurice Sendak was a Caldecott award-winning children’s book author and illustrator. The Brooklyn native illustrated more than 80 books by other authors before writing one himself: in 1963 he turned the children’s book world upside down with his first masterpiece, Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak’s dark, moody illustrations were a shocking contrast to the comparatively light and happy fare typically found in children’s books of the time. The main character, Max, like many of Sendak’s protagonists, acted like a real child, not some idealized version of youth. During his long career, Sendak wrote and illustrated more than 50 books, including Where the Wild Things Are (1963), In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Outside over There (1981). Sendak designed sets and costumes for stage versions of his books, and in the early 1980s created the sets for several operas, including Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Houston Grand Opera. He also collaborated with Carole King on the musical Really Rosie, producing the book, lyrics, and artwork.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, December, 2018.

In 1968, following the deaths of two of her children, Chicago native Lee Godie reinvented herself as an artist and future icon of the Chicago art scene. She began to sell her canvases – paintings that she compared favorably with Cezanne’s – at the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago, thus associating her creative identity with the Art Institute’s renowned collection of late nineteenth-century French art. The worlds of elegance Godie created with her images belied her lived experience. While she painted likenesses of society types and still-lifes of birds and plants, she lived outdoors and in transient hotels and stored her art supplies in public lockers. The photo booths at the Greyhound bus station provided this self-taught artist with an accessible, affordable medium through which to act out personas that interested her, such as the Gibson Girl and Joan Crawford, whom she imitated with provocative costumes, poses, and makeup. She took several hundred self-portraits, many embellished by hand and sometimes attached to her canvases. Performance wove through every aspect of her art. She valued interacting with her clients and deciding whether they deserved to own her work and, if so, how much they should pay. In 1979, Godie’s paintings were included in Art in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The Carl Hammer Gallery mounted two one-woman exhibitions of her work, and in 1993, the Chicago Cultural Center mounted Lee Godie, A 20-Year Retrospective. Godiea€™s work can be found among the permanent collections of the American Folk Art Museum, New York; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Arkansas Arts Center; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Godie’s tenacious self-invention and devotion to her creative identity never flagged. According to dealer Carl Hammer, when she was asked about her birthdate, she would reply “I don’t celebrate my birthday, I celebrate my status as an artist.”

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, December, 2018.

Vestie Davis was born in Baltimore, moved to New York City in 1928, and never left. He worked many jobs, among them train conductor, circus barker and ticket taker, undertaker, church organist, and subway newsstand operator. Davis did not begin painting regularly until he was in his forties and never trained in art. As described in the introduction to the one-man exhibition Vestie Davisa€™s New York at the American Folk Art Museum (October 20, 2009a€”November 7, 2010): “The New York of Vestie Davis is a bright, sparkling place with impressive and diverse landmark buildings, bridges, parks, and beaches. It is a hub of civic, financial, and recreational activity chronicled in meticulously detailed pictures from the 1950s through the 1970s. Davis predicted that some of his favorite sites would not survive the evolving needs of the city, and he faithfully rendered them with this in mind.” Davis drew, but worked predominantly in oil on canvas. He studied each location he chose to paint, and, using photographs for reference, spent hours drawing on canvas and then painting flattened forms of unmediated color in a shallow picture plane. He said, “You’ve got to make a song of a painting, you’ve got to give it a sweet melody,” and, indeed, Davis’s New York is a merry place. In 1950, Davis participated in the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit. Morris Weisenthal, owner of the Morris Gallery, saw the paintings and decided to represent Davis. Davis’s works are in many important collections, including those of the American Folk Art Museum, New York; the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Milwaukee Art Museum. One of his Coney Island paintings was used as the cover for the September 6, 1958, issue of The New Yorker magazine.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, December, 2018.

Dwight Mackintosh was committed to a mental institution at the age of 16 and released a lifetime later in a mass displacement at the age of 72. On his release he was encouraged to attend sessions at the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California. Always introspective and limited in his verbal communication, he began to draw with great focus and concentration, paying attention to little else. He used felt-tipped pens and colored pencils on white paper, drawing sure lines that intertwine to form forceful compositions of figures, vehicles, buildings, and other recurring motifs. Lines of unintelligible writing, which he was never willing or able to translate, constitute another important element of Mackintosh’s drawings, floating over his images like unraveled yarn. Mackintosh’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in many private and public collections, including the Anthony Petullo collection, Milwaukee, MI; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; and the Collection de L’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, December, 2018.

Born into poverty, Minnie Evans was raised in North Carolina by her grandmother. Too poor to continue in school after the sixth grade, despite loving history and “reading about the Gods”, Evans labored as a fish-seller on the Delaware River Sound. In 1918, she became a domestic worker at an elegant estate whose beautiful surroundings inspired her first wax crayon paintings in 1935 (now at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art). By the 1940s she was producing hundreds of works at the gatehouse of the estate and selling them to tourists. Her talent was recognized by a collector and patron of the arts who bought over five hundred paintings and arranged art shows and sales. Most of Evans’ paintings and drawings are similar, yet no two are identical. They represent a cosmos in which God, man, and nature are inextricable: God is frequently winged, encircled in a curvilinear garden paradise of butterflies, eyes, trees, plants, and flora painted in soft, clear colors. Often, the encircled object is not God but a face with piercing eyes and full lips. Evans produced about one thousand visionary paintings and drawings in her lifetime. Her work has been collected and shown by museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and many more.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Edward Mumma (who called himself Mr. Eddy) was born in Milton, Ohio, in 1908. Mumma and his wife, Thelma, farmed and ran an antiques and junk business until her death in 1966, when he retired to Florida to be near his daughter. Mumma joined an art class with his daughter’s encouragement, then quit when his teacher called his work “too sloppy”, continuing to paint on his own. Most of Mumma’s work consists of wide-eyed and close-up faces or hands, repeated with variations in color, hand placement, and dress. He also produced boats, animals, mythical creatures, cars, and a series of portraits of kings. He painted in acrylic, often on both sides of his canvas or board, and made crude frames of scrap wood or plastic. Mumma rarely sold his work. By the time of death in 1986, he had amassed between 600 and 800 works. Work by Mumma can be found in the Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Don Nice made monumental single images of familiar American animals and objects, inspired by the meticulous precision of the 19th c. illustrators John James Audubon and Ernst Haeckel. While he is known for his American buffalo, commissioned for the United States Bicentennial in 1975, it is the animals with whom he shared a Hudson Valley home that are the icons of his work. He draws attention to how extraordinary they are by depicting them of heroic size and by eliminating the distraction of backgrounds. The subject of many solo exhibitions, Nice’s work is also featured in institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; as well as the collection of Chase Manhattan Bank. He was the 2018 Recipient of the Lee Krasner Award in recognition of a lifetime of artistic achievement.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

Jack Savitsky, also known as “Coal Miner Jack” is best known for documenting the hard life of the Pennsylvania coal miner in detailed, colorful, almost cheerful paintings, but his subjects ranged wide, from animals to religious scenes. He worked from memory on canvas as well as found materials, his style always illustrative and often warmly humorous. Suffering from black lung disease, Savitsky retired in 1960 and began to draw and paint full-time. His son brought his father’s work to the nearby home of artist and collector Sterling Strauser. Strauser introduced Savitsky’s art to the legendary collector Herbert W. Hemphill Jr., whose interest propelled Savitsky’s work to fame. Today his works are in many well-known collections and museums. These include the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum of American Folk Art, New York, NY: Abby Aldridge Rockefeller Collection, Williamsburg, VA; and the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI.

Information Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019.

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.