McNease was a self-proclaimed “feral artist” of the bayou — a true self-taught Outsider who lived alone at the edge of Honey Island Swamp, Louisiana. Early on he gained serious critical recognition for his abstract natural photography. He then invented an entirely new technique of pigment...
“Were I to have more faith in and familiarity with the Eternal Muses, might I not find that there is an intergalactic aesthetic reality to be espoused? Not the latest artist arrival on the current of popularity & esteem, but the spaceman of all time. Great comfort would be in...
Rare is the artist who could claim to have dived as deep into the unconscious and survived the journey — bringing back images of intense imagination and technical brilliance. As proof, this recluse kept his life’s works buried in a dilapidated shack in the hills of Eugene, Oregon. The...
Fredericksen was a Norwegian American who during the 1940s studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago under Moholy-Nagy and Archipenko. After a 1947 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago he never actively exhibited his art — with the exception of at least one show at André Emmerich Gallery in New...
Just after World War II, a raucous group of artists in New York City known as the “The Irascibles” wrested away from Paris the title of capitol of the art world. Many art historians have written about those first ten years of Abstract Expressionism and the creative group who have been...
This early AbEx painter suffered three tragedies that resulted in a depression that made him become agoraphobic. Even the entreaties of Leo Castelli failed to draw out the prolific recluse. He wrote that his paintings opened a “back door” to aesthetic secrets held in the universe.
This survivor of the Armenian genocide wound up in a Cairo orphanage in 1927. He rose to fame as one of Egypt’s great modernists, but after moving to Long Island late in life he withdrew into anonymity. Now his compelling story is being told.
Don ZanFagna might be the most famous visionary artist you never heard of. Buckminster Fuller admired him as “a great visionary, artist, and architect.” He was 60 years ahead of his time in predicting the impact of technology on the environment. This idiosyncratic genius was eerily prescient...
This Figurative Expressionist lived the Bay Area for two decades before settling in Greenwich Village in 1957. He was a regular at the Cedar Bar with his AbEx friends and exhibited at several New York galleries. He even taught at MoMA but soon became a reclusive painter living what he called “a...
Leo is the only American artist who actually grew up in the circus. He became a pioneer in Pop Art in the early 1960s, and was the first to create kinetic Pop sculpture. Here’s a fascinating and truly unique chapter in the history of American Art.
Yes, a street artist can become a master. “The Wizard of Brooklyn” was a completely self-taught artist who was also a holistic healer at one of the world’s largest mental hospitals. Psychoanalysts said he fit the profile of a classic reclusive hoarder. Bartnikowski found it...
Geoffrey Moss has led double lives ever since he earned his MFA in the 1950s at Yale under Josef Albers. Twice he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his political drawings — yet, he has also remained a prolific abstract painter.
After this master glassblower emerged with a new transgendered self the result was a series of powerfully compelling sculptures and installations. Here are expressions of transformation where sex has nothing — and everything — to do with it.
That Feldsott's supercharged paintings bring something new, brash, vital and exciting into the generally self-conscious, sometimes even precious realm of contemporary American art should not surprise us. They ask us, urgently, to reconsider the role of the metaphysical in our lives and art in...
Richard Timperio is a rarity because while he is painter of compelling imagery he is also a pioneering gallerist. In the late 1970s he was at the forefront of a small group of artists who left Manhattan to settle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By the mid 1990s he had created an alternative exhibition...
Starting in 1963, Kokoschka inspired this protegé, Wayne Ensrud, to dig deeper than other young contemporary artists, most of whom had been misled into thinking that a focus of massive energy and emotion was enough to become a great painter. Instead, his epiphany was that painting is a metaphysical...
In 2013, ABC’s “Good Morning America” featured the Pinajian Discovery of thousands of paintings rescued from a Dumpster as “the unlikely discovery that has rocked the art world.” Here’s the compelling story of how a master’s life and works were nearly lost forever.
This visionary outsider created pictures depicting the “spiritual atoms world controlled by magnetic light.” The planetary worlds he painted were “controlled by the differential movement of magnetic light” or the “proto-plasma” of light.
