As Lisa posted in Frank Walter: Capturing a Soul, this important Frank Walter exhibition will run until September 15, 2024. Drawing Center (35 Wooster Street, New York, NY) The following is an excerpt from a review by Walker Mimms (The New York Times).
in “Frank Walter: Capturing the SoulIn this “treasure hunt” around the exhibition at the Drawing Center in Manhattan, you encounter an aspect of so-called outsider art that is difficult to convey in museums: coercion.
Born in Antigua, of mixed European and black descent, Walter (1926-2009) ran his family’s sugar plantation, farmed in the Dominican Republic, ran a photography studio and a sign studio, worked as a carpenter and framer, trained with the Royal Air Force in Britain, where he studied chemistry, and ran for his country’s prime minister in 1971.
And he documented himself and his world prolifically: His archives, now in Maryland, contain 468 hours of tape, 600 wooden sculptures, 1,000 drawings, 5,000 paintings, and 50,000 pages of memoirs and poetry, according to the Drawing Center.
Since representing Antigua and Barbuda at the 2017 Venice Biennale, curators have understandably sought to reinstate Walter into art history as a forgotten Expressionist who painted pseudo-imagined Caribbean worlds in explosions of color on recycled surfaces that reflected the artist’s resourcefulness.
Clare Gilman and Isabella Kapoor of the Drawing Center are continuing this revival, choosing 220 small paintings, drawings, and woodcarvings in consultation with Walter expert Barbara Paca. Walter rarely dates these works, and the titles are mainly curatorial. You’ll also find a huge amount of archival material and documents, including poems, posters, notebooks, and diagrams that we wouldn’t normally call art. [. . .]
But his most common landscapes seem to be oil paintings on postcard-sized pieces of paper; Walter hastily riffed on them like a musician playing a three-part formula: daubs of water in the center, a blob of sky above, trees framing the scene; garish colors; in “Red Sun,” a sphere sinks centipede-like into a field, 10 long rays of light fluttering in the breeze. The landscapes on display act as exclamation points on the idea of a place: the Caribbean.
Most of the works are painted on photographic paper or in the small plastic frames of Polaroid cartridges left over from the photography studio, making them an ironic kind of record, works of fantasy painted on materials designed to convey fact. Walter often painted from memory, Gilman writes. [. . .]
Wishful thinking or humor? Walter began having hallucinations at age 28. His inventions may reflect the adaptive reflex described by colonial theorist Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. Denying any African ancestry, Walter viewed his fellow black islanders as an adapted form of Europeans called “Europoids.” His notebooks reveal an obsession with British heraldry, armour, nobility and law. His written memoirs portray him as a loner at home and a victim of racism abroad.
All artists value freedom, but Walter’s Antigua seems especially blessed with the soil that values it. Walter was a rare plantation manager of color, a British citizen who continued to live on after the island’s independence, a descendant of both slave owners and slaves, and therefore entitled in spirit to the British culture that was out of his reach. Fanon also said that “Europe is literally a creation of the Third World” – through forced labor, sugar, and other resources – but the rapid metabolism of the Drawing Centre suggests a subject intent on reclaiming the colonial reality of his birth, and expanding his private world to match. Who’s to say that wasn’t reality?
Read the full article below https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/arts/design/frank-walter-drawing-center.html
[Shown above: “Profile of a Man in Striped Shirt,” undated, oil on card. Credit: Photo by Kenneth Milton…via The Walter Family, Barbara Paca, OBE, and The Drawing Center, New York.]
