January 26, 2022

"For almost 25 years, Godie lived mostly outdoors and slept on park benches, even during subzero temperatures. She stashed her possessions..."

"... in rented lockers around the city. Her studio was wherever she happened to be — an alley, a bridge, atop a deli counter.... In the 1970s, she took hundreds of self-portraits in photo booths at the Greyhound bus terminal and in the train station. In these black-and-white snapshots — which she often embellished with paint or a ballpoint pen — she portrayed her many sides: a coquette; a Katharine Hepburn look-alike; a rich lady flashing a wad of cash; and above all an uncompromising artist whose work can be found today in American museums.... [A]t 60, [Godie] suddenly appeared on the steps of the majestic Art Institute of Chicago, declaring herself a French Impressionist who was 'much better than Cézanne.'... 'She lived in a fantasy world... In her mind she was a world-famous artist. And everything was about France.'... There were recurrent figures, including a woman in left profile with a topknot and bared teeth, the so-called Gibson Girl...; Prince Charming, or Prince of the City, a patrician figure with a bow tie and parted hair, often portrayed in front of Chicago’s John Hancock Center; and a waiter, a mustachioed man with sideburns, based on a real waiter whom Godie found handsome. Some of her female figures resembled the actress Joan Crawford. Other common motifs were birds, leaves, insects, grape clusters and hands playing piano. Godie sometimes wrote on her canvases too: 'Staying Alive' and 'Chicago — we own it!' appear with the frequency of personal mottos.... She reportedly earned as much as a thousand dollars a day, which she squirreled away in her shoes, underwear and hidden pockets of her coat. On brutally cold nights, she splurged for a $10 room at a flophouse."

From "Overlooked No More: Lee Godie, Eccentric Chicago Street Artist/A self-described Impressionist, she hawked her art on Michigan Avenue in the 1970s and ’80s and lived mostly outdoors. But her work is in museums" (NYT).

34 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

If you pay $10, you can stream the documentary here.

I see that my attempt to embed the *trailer* for the movie failed, even though it's a short trailer and the Vimeo served up the embedding code.

That seems so out of keeping with the spirit of the artist, so there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots.

Ann Althouse said...

You can watch the trailer (and see many images of the paintings) here.

Robert Marshall said...

Not being an NYT subscriber, I can't read how they explain running an obit now for someone who died (according to Wikipedia) in 1994, 28 years ago.

RideSpaceMountain said...

"...so there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots."

Frank Zappa once said "the world is rudderless". I like yours SO MUCH better.

RideSpaceMountain said...

Correction: Alan Moore made that quote, no Zappa

Bitter Clinger said...

That "art" is crap. My 7 yo can produce a better portrait than those. How are they even "impressionist?" This is why almost no one cares about art anymore. What the art community calls "art" isn't recognizable as art.

Howard said...

Similar story as the NYC homeless musician composer instrument fabricator Moondog. Hat tip to Crack MC.

tim in vermont said...

From the trailer: "A myth is created when truth hides." Well truer words are seldom spoken.

I kind of like her stuff, and I would have bought one, given the chance, I would hope.

tim in vermont said...

" there's a choke point somewhere, controlled by idiots."

These might be some of the "truer words."

Fernandinande said...

But her work is in museums.

Why?

mezzrow said...

How much art would get made without compulsive fantasists?

Art is things, but art is also the people that made the things. Entropy requires all involved to comply. In the interim, we can enjoy it. Or not.

Art Carney! Sheila MacRae!

rhhardin said...

Rudderless (2014) has a surprise middle. Not that it's a great movie but there is that.

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

Everyone has one life to live. Hopefully she was happy with her choices. Perhaps they lionize her to try to undermine the importance of having personal responsibility. If we all just turn ourselves over to the state, we can follow our impulses, live wherever we want to live, carry our money in our shoes and in the end we'll be taken care of, maybe even be in museums.

I didn't see anything about children, so presumably we should sympathize with her failure at having the Most Important Connection to Life, or something. But she is in museums.

What's emanating from your penumbra said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Fernandinande said...

This reminds me of Peggy Hill's Probots.

Gerda Sprinchorn said...

So what happened to all the extra money?

If she earned as much as $1,000 per day and only spent about $10 a day (and only then, when she splurged on a flophouse), where did all the other money go? She put some in her shoes, but after a few years, those shoes would have gotten packed with bills.

Something is off. The accounting doesn't add up. Either she put the money somewhere else than her shoes and pockets, or she spent much more than $10 per day. This narrative needs to be more closely interrogated.

And no, I'm not going to read the article. Like Maynard G. Krebs, that sounds like WORK?! [Footnote: Whenever the word "work" was mentioned to Maynard G. Krebs, even in passing, he yelps "Work?!" and jumps with fear or even faints. -- Wikipedia]

Ann Althouse said...

"Not being an NYT subscriber, I can't read how they explain running an obit now for someone who died (according to Wikipedia) in 1994, 28 years ago."

The NYT has an ongoing program of doing obituaries for people who were not properly acknowledged at the time of their death. Often women and/or people of color or outsiders who have come to be more important than it seemed at the time.

Ann Althouse said...

"Correction: Alan Moore made that quote, no Zappa"

Oh, it's so much better with Zappa. But on the other hand, it's more trite than I like to associate with Zappa.

And, also, thanks!

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

"Often women and/or people of color or outsiders who have come to be more important than it seemed at the time."

OMG. Please.

who have come to be more important than it seemed at the time = who we want to try to make seem more important because Everything Is About Politics

tim maguire said...

I might go see a retrospective at my city's museum, but that trailer did not make me want to watch the movie. Not even a little. It told me nothing about Gody or why I should be interested in her art or her life (and I am the target audience).

If we're talking outsider art, Henry Darger deserves more serious treatment than he's gotten.

JAB5ORS said...

My wife worked at the Art Institute in the 80s and saw her every day on smokebreaks. 20 years later a neighbor is throwing a painting in the dumpster. She retrieves explains what is and w agree to donate to an auction for a charity. It sold for $4000 that night. The neighbor still cant believe it.

Gerda Sprinchorn said...

I looked at Godie's pictures online. It's kind of interesting, and I would be mildly interested in looking at it in a museum. It doesn't seem like a travesty to hang it in the modern wing of a museum, though, because much of what is there now is mildly interesting and I don't mind looking at it for a little while.

And this isn't just an anti-modern-art thought. A lot of classical art in museums is only mildly interesting. The supply of Madonnas With Child is much higher than my demand for them. So I guess this is just a statement about the low power of high art. At least for me.

Big, Big, Caveat: The masters! Yowza! Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer! At the MOMA in NY, there are floors and floors of tepid artwork, and then you get to the top floor and stumble on Starry Night. Thunderbolt! The prints are pale imitations. [Footnote: Van Gogh, at the urging of Gaugin, sometimes used cheap paint out of solidarity with the working class, so some of his masterpieces have dramatically changed color (but not Starry Night).]

But I digress.

A big take-away from Gilot's book about Picasso is how hard Picasso worked and how much time he put in. I think this shows up in his stuff because he always seems to have the most skillful execution of whatever style he is working on. And sometimes the sheer craftsmanship is enough to produce a gorgeous piece. But he's working a low-grade vein of ore, so even at his best, his art rises to kind of the level of good wallpaper or a really well-designed toaster. Which is not nothing, but it isn't Starry Night.

On the other hand, maybe art has been devalued today because our wallpaper and toasters are of such high quality now that we are surrounded by fairly good art. This would be another example of how the world today is extravagantly wealthy by historical standards: all of us live like Louis XIV in some ways.

But again I digress.... Whatever.

Joe Smith said...

Talk about your primitive art.

She was mentally ill.

Anyone can be made famous if enough snooty critics collude and enough snooty patrons believe them.

Do an image search...she is less talented than my reasonably able 13-yo niece who has a good sense of color.

What's emanating from your penumbra said...

"The NYT has an ongoing program of doing obituaries for people who were not properly acknowledged at the time of their death. Often women and/or people of color or outsiders who have come to be more important than it seemed at the time."

I enjoy writing like this in informal settings like blogs. No need for a complete sentence when the meaning is easily understood. But I didn't realize the Queen o' Wordsmithing would do it. Probably I just haven't paid attention closely enough.

Joe Smith said...

'Big, Big, Caveat: The masters! Yowza! Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer! At the MOMA in NY, there are floors and floors of tepid artwork, and then you get to the top floor and stumble on Starry Night. Thunderbolt! The prints are pale imitations. [Footnote: Van Gogh, at the urging of Gaugin, sometimes used cheap paint out of solidarity with the working class, so some of his masterpieces have dramatically changed color (but not Starry Night).]'

We went to an exhibition of Dutch painters a few years ago and were able to stand about two feet from 'Starry night.'

It is one of the most stunning things I have ever seen on this earth.

farmgirl said...

“compulsive fantasists?”
I was going to say “delusional” but I like this much better.

Whiskeybum said...

I didn’t remember the name, but the circumstances sounded familiar, and when I pulled up samples of her work online, I realized I had seen a solo exhibition of her work at the John Michael Kohler Art Center back in 2015.

mikee said...

I have on my home office wall a painting of my wife, done by my daughter in her early years, which looks remarkably like a Godie portrait. It may never hangin a museum, but I shall treasure it as long as I live.

Robert Cook said...

"That 'art' is crap. My 7 yo can produce a better portrait than those. How are they even 'impressionist?' This is why almost no one cares about art anymore. What the art community calls 'art' isn't recognizable as art."

What do you think art is? What should it look like? Why?

Robert Cook said...

"If we're talking outsider art, Henry Darger deserves more serious treatment than he's gotten."

Darger has received tremendous appreciation and exposure by the art world. I have a five pound book about his work at home, as well as a biography, (only two of many books published about his and his work), and a very good film documentary about him was produced some years ago, which I saw at Film Forum in NYC and own on dvd. He is the Picasso of (so-called) outsider artists.

StephenFearby said...

NYT Comment by:
Jim Chicago 2h ago

"I remember looking at her art and speaking with her on a street corner in the late 80's. Someone told me once that John Madden would spend his time in Chicago during the football season since it was centrally located and he wouldn't fly to the games. He supposedly liked her stuff and had one of her pieces on display in his hotel [room]."

Bigger-than-life John Madden had Aerophobia.

"The fear of flying, known as aerophobia, is a type of anxiety disorder involving the extreme sense of fear and panic some people experience when they fly, or anticipate flying."

https://www.psycom.net/aerophobia-fear-of-flying/

So, everyone has some kind of quirk.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@ Robert Cook, Re: "What is art?"

I was a theater major at an elite institution in the 1970s. You have no idea how many times I have participated in discussing those questions, which appear to elevate the exchange but are just evasions. Artists and art critics now startling often want the art to spark a conversation and ask questions - mostly because they want to talk endlessly. Yawn.

Bitter Clinger said...

What is art? Kind of like porn, we know it when we see it.

If you're going to say something like, "art is any expression by an artist", then I would ask, by what objective criteria would that woman's "art" be judged superior to the idle drawings of an average grade schooler? Saying that many people choose to collect her work is not an objective criterion relating to the work itself.

Someone above mentioned Darger. I'd never heard of him so I did an image search. His art is not my cup of tea, but it is recognizable as art rather than scribblings.

Robert Cook said...

"What is art? Kind of like porn, we know it when we see it."

This is not so...as demonstrated by the strong conflicting opinions about many artists modern artists, even many who are in the pantheon of accepted important artists.

I took life drawing courses for over 25 years at the Art Students League in NYC and I was always startled when I heard students (or, occasionally, instructors) assert that Picasso was a fraud. It's not that everything Picasso created was memorable or even good--given his volume of output, that would have been impossible--or even that one is required to like any of his massive body of work, but he was, without question, a highly skilled painter/draughtsman who made his work with intelligence and intention. To dismiss him as a fraud simply reflects the extremely limited parameters by which the accusers are able to see art, or the world.

"Someone above mentioned Darger. I'd never heard of him so I did an image search. His art is not my cup of tea, but it is recognizable as art rather than scribblings."

Others might disagree with you re: Darger. Are you aware that much or most of his work is traced from other sources? Does this change your opinion of him? Does this make his output less "art" than if he drew every bit of it freehand himself?

There is "well-made" art that is bankrupt of feeling, meaning, or beauty, and crudely-made/amateurish (truly so or only apparently so)/"primitive" art that is rich in feeling, meaning, and beauty.

What is art? It's an unanswerable question.