The National Museum of History is currently hosting an exhbition of one of the 20th century's most idiosyncratic artists, Gaston Chaissac.
Chaissac spent the first 27 years of his life drifting between odd jobs and stints in a sanatorium before being "discovered" by Otto Freundlich and Jeanne Kosnik-Kloss, a painter couple who at the time were sheltering the then destitute and homeless Chaissac. The couple happened upon paintings Chaissac had made in the their studio. With the encouragement and help of the couple, Chaissac left his wanderer's life behind and became an artist.
However, it was not until 10 years later that the shoemaker from the small town of Avallon won international renown -- owing to an encounter with the French painter and talent scout Jean Dubuffet.
Intrigued by turn-of-the-century psychological studies on artwork made by the mentally ill or socially maladjusted, Dubuffet formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut in 1948 to search for and collect innovative works outdside of the realm of "fine art." Dubuffet's concept of Art Brut, or Raw Art, was of works that were in their raw state, as if "uncooked" by art-school discipline and "unseasoned" by cultural influences. Chaissac was part of the association's first exhibition that year and since then, the unrefined originality of the artist's works has come to define the Art Brut movement.
The National Museum of History's current Chaissac solo exhibition covers works from different stages of the artist's career, beginning with his early simple and monochromatic portraits to his later, more colorful mixed-media collages.
Chaissac commented that he never tried to follow formal drawing technique, neither did he want to imitate objects in nature as traditional artists do. He wanted, instead, to express his thoughts and feelings in his own way.
This insistence on creative originality is manifest in the works in the exhibition.
Chaissac first worked with color pencils, with which he created a series of geometrical abstract paintings influenced by his patrons Freundlich and Kosnik-Kloss. In the 1940s, his works became distinguishable by the thick black ink outlines of their subjects. With one or a few colors in warm shades, Chaissac painted amusing scenes with free-flowing watercolor strokes that suggest a childlike imagination.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Chaissac began to switch to brighter colors in his paintings, which were mostly portraits of people composed of various geometrical shapes. At the same time, he began experimenting with different supports. He painted on everything from vines, stones and iron plates to household goods, like crushed pots, basins, and door knobs. A 1954 basket painting shows in primary colors a totem-like human head with a serene, yet cheerful smile. Using anything on hand to paint, he even turned a broom into a blushing genie.
Chaissac later went on to make mixed-media collages, using materials from daily life. In a paper collage titled La Joconde, a photo of the famous Salvador Dali parody of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is placed in the middle of the frame. The smiling lady with a pair of tentacles, seems to happily emerge from a magical storm of shreds of postcards, magazine pages, wrappers and other brightly colored bits of paper. The intentional inclusion of paper with words on it alerts viewers to the geometrical beauty the alphabet can convey when arranged in a new fashion.
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