The Philadelphia Museum of Art will present the first comprehensive museum exhibition of the art of James Castle (1899‱977), one of the most enigmatic and remarkable self-taught artists to emerge in the United States during the Twentieth Century. “James Castle: A Retrospective,” on view October 14 to January 4, will examine the full visual and conceptual range of the artist’s work, bringing together almost 300 examples from 60 public and private collections.
The exhibiion will explore the variety of modes Castle employed throughout his life, from drawings and colored wash pieces to handmade books, assemblages and text works, for all of which he used found pieces of paper or cardboard and homemade inks and colorants primarily of his own invention.
That Castle left behind at his death a huge and varied body of work is exceptional, as he was born profoundly deaf and did not adopt speech, sign language, lip-reading, writing or any of the usual modes of communicating with other people. He did not marry, travel or hold a job, but lived with his family on the three small farms in Garden Valley, Star and Boise, Idaho, that the Castle family occupied successively during his lifetime.
He attended the Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind in Gooding (about 100 miles southeast of Boise) for about five years (1910‱5) but for unknown reasons, he resisted its teaching program, instead pursuing art as his primary means of communication.
From early childhood onward, Castle drew nearly every day of his life. He invented an idiosyncratic “ink” medium by combining wood-burning stove soot with saliva and sometimes water, the mixture applied with sharpened sticks and homemade cotton or paper swabs. The papers and cardboards that he used were household throwaways, such as empty food containers, product packaging, old letters, used envelopes, the homework pages of his nieces and nephews or empty flattened matchboxes.
Many of his soot and spit drawings show rooms in his family’s farmhouse and outdoor views of buildings on the property, usually represented from memory, sometimes depicted literally but often embellished with odd surrealistic images. These works exhibit a superb handling of stick-applied line and deft tonal washes. He achieved an absolute mastery of linear perspective and took pleasure in delineating interior spaces with floorboards and ceiling beams receding in space.
Castle produced remarkable color works as well, sometimes using home-found materials, such as laundry bluing, face powder or color leached out of crepe paper by soaking. These compositions are often characterized by startlingly “surreal” shifts in scale or are peopled with fantasy figures such as women with cat heads or wheel feet, or they may appropriate images from mass-produced printed materials and popular publications.
The artist also created three-dimensional “constructions,” or assemblages of people, barnyard fowl, articles of clothing, household objects and furniture and architectural elements, such as doors or windows. Small, simplified, abstracted explorations of the structure of various things, they are also complicated, requiring skillful cutting, tearing, folding, stitching and gluing of his found papers and cardboards.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street. For information, 215-763-8100 ort www.philamuseum.org .
