Art sensation in state hospital for 50 years re-emerges

Thursday, June 23, 2011
"A Dixey Girl" is one of numerous drawings made in the early 19th century by a client at Nevada State Hospital. The drawings have created a stir in the New York City art world, selling for as much as $12,000 each at a recent auction. Photo from Web.

The story of the year in the East Coast and Midwest art worlds goes back to the old State Hospital No. 3, in 1925, when a 17-year-old Springfield boy named James Edward Deeds Jr. was hospitalized.

Known only as "The Electric Pencil" for decades until his identity was recently confirmed by the Springfield News-Leader, Deeds had illustrated 140 pages of ledger paper carrying the names the hospital was then known by: "State Hospital No. 3" and "State Lunatic Asylum No. 3."

Retired Missouri State Professor Lyndon Irwin of Springfield told the Daily Mail last week that he was meeting a New York City documentary film crew in Nevada at mid-day Monday to discuss the story.

Irwin said a 14-year-old boy had rescued the art, sewn into a leather and fabric album, from a trash heap in Springfield in 1970 and sold it to a Lawrence, Kan., book dealer more than 30 years later. The discoverer's identity was kept confidential at his request.

New York art dealer Harris Diamant bought the album from a St. Louis collector last year and sold 19 pages with drawings on both sides at the New York Outsider Art Show in February for about $12,000 each.

"The basic thing, other than the sheer beauty and refined forms, is the source," Diamant said in a Tuesday telephone interview.

"This is a person who had lost a considerable amount and was damaged by his experiences, but he retained the wherewithal to make art.

"He had a huge need to express himself that came out with this concise body of work, which is amazing."

With a 160-page book of all the drawings selling online for $60, Diamant said, "The interest level is high.

"Through osmosis, I get close to the spirit of the maker of this work, who is a major American artist. His book, 'The Drawings of the Electric Pencil,' has been astonishingly successful."

Diamant said more original pages will be sold in Chicago in November.

Diamant told Art & Antiques Magazine recently that Deeds was born in Springfield in 1908 and committed in 1925 for threatening his father, a Naval officer, with a gun and attacking his brother with a hatchet. Released in the 1970s, Deeds died at a nursing home in 1987.

Diamant said that "outside the hospital setting, the need evaporated" for the man to draw. "The art is charmingly archaic, not only for our time but for his, too," he said.

"Done with delicate black and colored pencils, the subjects include portraits, references to the Civil War, automobiles and rural townscapes."

Diamant said the works "lie somewhere between folk art and outsider art.

"They resonate with 19th century American folk art," he said, noting their references to China, Russia and Japan. "There's clearly some pathology there, but there is perfection in the forms. Given the choice between an angle and a curve, he always takes the curve."

Outsider artists are those who had little or no contact with the art world and whose works may indicate "extreme mental states, unconventional ideas or elaborate fantasy worlds," according to references.

On Feb. 9, the New Yorker magazine said the drawings "are charming depictions of women in quill hats, military men, deer and horses, speaking to a whimsical fascination with hillside animals."

New York art critic Lyle Rexler said Deeds "was meticulous in using rule lines of the stationery as a guide to make sure his figures were oriented on the page, though his dyslexia kept him from recognizing copying errors.

"His precision and rigidity are less about fidelity to models than trying to bring his visual fascinations into line with his ability. He may have models in mind, but they're transformed by his imaginative conceits. This is not conceptual design-making but something that lies much deeper in the body and psyche of the artist."

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