March is pleased to announce 1995, a lesson in life drawinga presentation of previously unseen works from the last year of Charles Steffen’s life. The works of the devoted illustrator and diarist are populated with figures from his memory, his imagination and his daily life.
prolog
In 1885, after months of preparation, Vincent Van Gogh completed The Potato Eatersa portrait of the De Groot family, whom he knew well and often worked with. The work was an ambitious foray into figurative painting, and the sophisticated composition and darkness of the scene were to be seen by many as proof of the artist’s great talent. For others, the work was a failure, full of inconsistencies and unattractive to the eye. Today The Potato Eaters is celebrated as a masterpiece and studied by artists all over the world. That’s life.
1995, A lesson in drawing with living models
In 1995, Charles Steffen enrolled in a drawing course at Truman College. His last art instruction had been over four decades earlier at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he had first encountered abstract expressionism and the dangers of bohemian society. Steffen’s return to education came at an unprecedented time. His mother, a cherished figure, had died the previous year, after which the artist had moved to an apartment elsewhere in the city. Steffen was entering the last year of his life. He was also on the verge of a creative breakthrough.
Steffen’s works were historically delicate, reminiscent of botanical illustrations, while his final drawings are weighted – they move and breathe, anchored in the immediacy of their creation. These works demonstrate the artist’s stylistic sophistication, balancing luxurious marks with spare compositions. While most of the artist’s work was based on family and acquaintances, his drawing lessons with live models provided the opportunity to make portraits of strangers and focus on technical elements, a skill that would be reflected in all of his subjects.
Parallel to these formal sessions, Steffen continued to draw figures from art history, the past, and his everyday life. Rebecca, a certain bank clerk, was central to these, appearing dozens of times in the artist’s drawings. Steffen documents Rebecca in professional attire, sitting at her desk in the bank where they met; in other scenes she is introduced elsewhere, sometimes fully clothed, often naked. Comments on these artistic liberties take on a shameful tone, as Steffen admits his vices (“there really is something wrong to do”) and conflicts with an innate curiosity.
While the impact of his drawing lessons was undeniably powerful, Steffen’s drawings from live models are inextricably linked to his drawings from live models. The anonymity and formality of a classroom enriched only Steffen’s most personal subjects: his family, his lover, and himself. From portraits of Rebecca to repetitions of The Potato Eaters, Steffen’s process consists of careful studies of each subject, focusing on specific moments, exploring details and testing his skills and imagination in the process. Greater precision and analysis emerges in these works, tempered by playful curiosity. Self-portraits provide a methodical and honest starting point, while the red and white squares nod to Steffen’s roots in abstract expressionism and the experiences of his youth. The art historical studies take on larger narratives of subverted history, and in conjunction with Rebecca, the works blend reality with imagined lives.
Chicago-born artist Charles Steffen probably saw his first paintings in the basement of his family’s Catholic church. As a young man, he continued his artistic education at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where the relatively irreverent abstract expressionism had taken root. It was at this time that he met Hugo Weber, an avant-garde artist and professor whose work and teaching would influence Steffen’s drawings throughout his life. He was also influenced by the writings of Lewis Carroll when he Through the mirror (1871), a story of exploration, alienation, and a world turned upside down.
After a deterioration in his mental state, Steffen left art school early in 1949 and later continued his research into the works of Van Gogh, Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso during visits to the Art Institute of Chicago. For over four decades, Steffen made drawings constantly. He was committed to the quality of his work and would occasionally criticise or praise his efforts in the form of notes on paper. Interwoven with these reflections are accounts of the day’s events: what he ate, how he felt, his worries, expectations and desires. At times he longed for the structure of a formal education and wrote of his desire for better materials and better results. He worked in the line of his inspirations; as Van Gogh did with The Potato EatersSteffen drew characters not only from memory, but also from his daily life. His mother, siblings and romantic interests appear again and again in his works, rendered in varying degrees of detail and often treated at length. The drawings themselves are sensitively stylized, while the artist’s annotations are comparatively crude.
Charles Steffen’s work has been exhibited at the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland), the American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY), Reyes Finn (Detroit, MI), Russell Bowman Art Advisory (Chicago, IL), the Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, WI), the Museum van de Geest (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 3331 Arts Chiyoda (Chiyoda City, Japan), the Andrew Edlin Gallery (New York, NY), the Dean Jensen Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), the Good Luck Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and the Galerie Christian Berst (Paris, France). His work is in the permanent collections of the Collection de l’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland), the Museum van de Geest (Amsterdam, Netherlands), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, GA), Intuit (Chicago, IL), and the American Folk Art Museum (New York, NY). Steffen is included in Lucienne Peiry’s L’Art Brut (2016), Body: Art Brut/The Collection (2018), Revue de Belles-Lettres, 2022, 2 (2022) and Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut: the Origins of the Collection (2016).
