The Beauty of the World, the Paragon of Animals

Pearl Blauvelt was an outsider in the most complete sense of the word. In the small Pennsylvania town where she lived reclusively in a house without central heating or running water until the 1950s, she was known as the village witch. But the hundreds of drawings on notebook paper discovered in the house long after she died are more childlike than occult. Her carefully made pictures of clothes, furniture, buildings and invented pieces of paper money on view at Maxwell have a sweet, playful charm.

It seems that Blauvelt lived happily in a world of her own, blessedly oblivious to the rules of professional and academic fine art. Whether she really was content with her hermetic existence, no one will ever know, but her drawings make outsiderness seem a state of grace.

Slide Show

( NYT Review of Outsider Art Fair )

The pictures of the PIBs at the opening of this show make me cry with envy.

I went for a four mile hike through the Bosque (strip of forest along either side of the Rio Grande formerly fertilized by annual floods, like the Nile, checked since 1941 by channelization by the Great Satan Our Friends the Army Corps of Engineers) yesterday. I went with 50 fifth graders, who were heavenly (14 inch hips, 50 lb. back packs, Hannah Montana messenger bags with cowlick hair and checklist of natural wonders to be seen carefully inscribed in crayon). The group was led by a plant docent and a kid wrangler, a young woman who is a former teacher of high school in Brooklyn.

She was tough. I told her that. She said, you made my day. She's a Bostonian, and while teaching high school in Brooklyn among the fourth generation tecatos she wore black, she said, drank martinis and smoked cigarettes. You're making me cry, I said. I'm a huge art hag. I actually considered how bad I would feel moving out here to be 2500 miles away from the nearest Rembrandt,* I said. You're the only person I could say this to. She nodded, and laughed, said, I've left here four times, and returned four times. You have to have both. I'm just dying for the museums. I said, And the felafel stands. We dapped.

In the Bosque we saw cliff swallows, beaver slides, mergansers, crane and raccoon tracks, equisetum, and five porcupines sleeping at the tops of the cottonwoods. And the Rio. Sing away, Rio!

I see a Thelma and Louise road trip developing.

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*Or Gorky/de Kooning/Ingres, who are related. Gorky and de Kooning used to argue all night at the lower east side automat about the handling of the paint in the grey satin skirt of Ingres' countess at the Frick. Whatevs.

Jack Daniels, with whom relations are settling down, is an art historian by trade and showed me a $10,000 book on Rubens he has checked out from the uni library. All the color prints have been razored out by the local art majors.