The Bad Art Cafe

ALL THAT WE DO NOT KNOW IS GREATER THAN WE ARE

A sante, mes amis.
(To health, my friends.)

Sa nou pa konè, pi gran-n pase nou.
(All that we do not know is greater than we are.)

Nude with Cupids (1944)

She stands there and looks at the viewer in a sweet, pretty idealized way. She has highly stylized breasts and almost a doll-like parts to her legs and sex. She has no sex, just an indicated one. It’s as if Barbie Doll was the live nude model for the artist.

She’s joined by cupid figures on either side of her; flying little men, and she’s displayed by a curtain trimmed in an elaborate panted gold lace trim, adorned with blue and gold flowers.

The artist who created this idealized feminine figure was a Polish immigrant to America who worked as a manufacture of women’s slippers in NYC. He took up painting in late middle age and in retirement.

There is no art category for an American artist like Morris Hirshfield (1872 – 1946), primitive, self-taught, pretty, sweet nudes shown of in idealized form. His family thought his paintings were crazy until the time came a New York Art Dealer found out about him, (and the rest is art history).

The Story of the Vivian Girls

"The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion."

It's a 15,145 page multi volume work with water colors. We've covered him before. He's the old guy who had arguements with himself who lived on Webster Ave. in Chicago, and when he died, they found these pictures no one could make heads or tails out of.

"Readers will find here many stirring scenes that are not recorded in any true history, great disasters that are awful in magnitude: enormous battles, big fires, awful tragedies, adventures of heroes and heroines, many of them fatal, great war and storm disasters, and readers will be taken through accounts whcih they will never, never, never forget," is one of his intros.

Henry Darger was his name. He grew up in a Catholic Boys school, left there by his father when he was 8 years old.

Henry Darger – Realms of the Unreal

When they finally moved old man Henry Darger from his one room apartment on Webster St. in Chicago to a nursing home around 20 years ago, the landlords cleaning out his space found out the hard way, what an “outsider artist” is. Everyone in the neighborhood thought that Darger was just a cranky old coot, but it turns out, he was an accomplished, self taught artist.

Amid boxes of newspaper, carefully stored Virgin Mary statues, and Pepto-Bismol bottles, were piles of original artwork, watercolors Darger painted to illustrate his on-going novel, Realms of the Unreal. It’s about 7 little girls who save the world and manage to escape the torture from their home planet. The watercolors look like 30’s comic strips on acid.