There are many examples of outsider artists whose work was unknown in their lifetimes, consigned to the trash at their deaths, and almost lost to the world. The work’s survival is always a fluke and hence miraculous, which makes us think of all the art that wasn’t so lucky. These artists nearly always had tragic lives — and the final tragedy is that they never lived to enjoy their work’s recognition, not to mention the fortune being made from it.

A lovely short film was made about one such discovery: The Electric Pencil. In 1925, James Deeds Jr. was committed at 17 to a Missouri “Lunatic Asylum” which he never left.

Another quite different version of this story is that of Vivian Maier, a NYC and Chicago nanny, whose stash of thousands of photographs was discovered in a storage container, when the contents were sold at auction. Maier never showed her work to anyone in her lifetime, never even developed most of the film. She’s been the subject of several exhibits and books and is now recognized as a hugely talented street photographer, perhaps even one of the very greatest. Most fascinating, is that while she lived a life on the margins and chose to remain anonymous, she maintained a passion for discovering her own image in shadow or reflection in the outside world. Her passion seems to have been for “catching” the image, not for producing it, since Maier seems to have felt no need to see the photos printed. She was not an outsider artist; she visited photography shows at museums and bought the catalogues and books. But what she thought of her art-making will never be known. Tragically, all her journals were discarded by the purchaser of the archive.

topics: art