“What I Saw,” a riveting retrospective of drawings by the late artist Joseph E. Yoakum, is on view at the MuseumModernArt through March 19th.
Categories in art can be confounding. The term “Impressionist” was coined by a Parisian critic to make a laughingstock of Claude Monet. Donald Judd, who is considered the consummate Minimalist, always rejected the label. The thorniest designation of all may be that of “outsider artist.” Just as the word “primitive” was once dismissively used to yoke together artistic geniuses who were not European, the category of outsider has an inherently lower-rung ring to it.
Yoakum’s world is populated by countless trees, but tends to be untroubled by people—until you register that some of the rippling mountains and rocks are sneakily anthropomorphic. Their craggy surfaces open into elliptical caves whose placement can suggest an eye or a mouth, lined with copses rather than teeth.
. One of them was so taken with Yoakum’s distinctive vocabulary of marks—dashes, close parallel lines—that he made a chart of them.Art work by Joseph E. Yoakum / Courtesy MOMA’s show, at the age of eighty-one, but his drawings have returned to the museum in “What I Saw,” a riveting retrospective of a hundred or so indelible works on paper .
The show’s excellent catalogue includes a carefully researched chronology, confirming some biographical details of an artist with a fabulist’s gift for embellishment. Born in Missouri, in 1891, to a formerly enslaved mother and a father with probable Cherokee heritage, Yoakum, during his art-making years, identified himself as Navajo. He ran away from home at the age of nine to join the first of four travelling circuses, as well as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show.
Trains and ships are frequent motifs in Yoakum’s drawings; as for the flying saucers that hover in his landscapes from time to time, the artist explained those with an anecdote about his only flight on an airplane, which, he said, was required to make an emergency landing in Arizona after being “buzzed” by aliens. As the artist told a reporter in Chicago, shortly before his death, “Wherever my mind led me, I would go.
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