JOSEPH E YOAKUM: WHAT I SAW AT MOMA The Museum of Modern Art, New York November 21, 2021 – March 19, 2022 In November 1972, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented a solo show of drawings by the self-taught, 81-year-old artist Joseph Elmer Yoakum, just a month before he died. It wasn’t his first exhibition in New York, as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had featured his work previously in a group show. Now one of the most celebrated US outsider artists, Yoakum returned to MoMA earlier this year with “What I Saw”, a travelling solo show of 100 drawings that opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in summer 2021 and closes at Houston’s Menil Collection in August 2022. Born in 1891 of African, European and alleged Cherokee ancestry, Yoakum grew up in Missouri. He travelled widely, served in France in WWI and worked as a station porter and salesman back in the US. He only began drawing in 1962, motivated by a dream, he claimed. He hung his landscapes, inspired by his travels, on a clothesline in the shop window of his storefront flat in Chicago. Seeing the work, a college professor was impressed and set up Yoakum’s first show, in a church basement in 1967, so introducing him to the emerging Chicago Imagist artists. In a local newspaper story, Yoakum said,“The drawings are unfolded to me, a spiritual enfoldment. After I draw them, I have a spiritual remembrance and I know what is pictured.” This spiritual enfoldment is evident in the poetic drawings on view in “What I Saw”. Strikingly displayed, the show is divided into clusters of similar subjects: Yoakum often used carbon paper to make duplicates
EXHIBITIONS
that he finished in different ways, and worked thematically, depicting mountains, trees, rivers, waterfalls, oddly with no beginnings or ends. The earliest (undated) drawings are in pencil or ballpoint pen, without colour. For the detailed landscapes from his most productive period in the mid-sixties, he rubbed pastels and coloured pencils with balls of toilet tissue to get a watercolour effect. And, while his forests and mountains have a simple, surreal, imagined look to them, his later works (including some still in sketchbooks) are more abstract. Back Where I Were Born 2/20-1888 AD – depicting a cabin in a rural landscape – shows his use of varnish (which has caused some of his work to darken over time). A Rock in the Baltic Sea near Stockholm Sweden E. Europe – depicting the sun rising over a mystical mountainwater setting – exposes the eternal optimism of his work. Ella Fitzgerald Moovie Star, a rare portrait that he traced from a Breck shampoo advert in a magazine, tells us that his sources included more than travel brochures, atlases and encyclopedias. Meanwhile, a pair of flying saucer drawings disclose Yoakum’s belief in alternative realities, which he was most likely depicting in all of his artworks. Bar a large, pastel-coloured seascape, the drawings on show come from the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA and the collections of artists Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson, Christina Ramberg and Philip Hanson, as well as art historian Whitney Halstead. This latter group had been members of the Chicago arts community that befriended, were inspired by and supported the visionary artist until his death on Christmas Day in 1972. PAUL LASTER
ÉCRITS D’ART BRUT
Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Manto da Apresentação (inside), n.d.
Museum Tinguely, Basel October 10, 2021 – January 23, 2022 “Écrits d’Art Brut”, at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, focussed on the little-known genre of art brut writings – creations which are often just as inventive as the drawings, paintings and sculptures of the same artistic genre. Swiss artist Jean Tinguely was fond of the Italian art brut creator Giovanni Battista Podestà (1995–1976) – it was the admiration of a sculptor for another sculptor, one who was even freer and more subversive than himself. In this fascinating exhibition, curated by ex-director of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Lucienne Peiry, the museum presented a selection of Podestà's flamboyant works, all containing sermons, imprecations, admonitions and other moral advice on signs, in letters of varying sizes. Surrounding these exuberant ex-votos, were the "written paintings" of twelve other self-taught artists. Although collected by Jean Dubuffet and other enthusiasts since, the writings of art brut remain relatively known. They are however the product of the same conditions of creation, psychic resources and expressive desire as those used for other works by
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Yoakum, A Rock in the Baltic Sea near Stockholm Sweden E. Europe, n.d.
Yoakum, Mt Grazian in Maritime Alps near Emonaco Tunnel France and Italy by Tunnel, 1958
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