About the artist
1908–1994, lived and worked in Chicago
Lee Godie insinuated herself into the annals of American art history by going directly to the source—around 1968, she became a fixture on the steps of the Art Institute of Chicago on South Michigan Ave. (Later, in the 1980s, she stationed herself outside Neiman Marcus department store.) A homeless artist and a self-proclaimed French Impressionist, she sold her canvasses to passersby, museum-goers, eager collectors, shoppers, and generations of curious art students for almost thirty years, employing an arcane and mercurial system of pricing and client selection. Very little is known about her life before the 1960s, but Godie cultivated a mythic and heroic persona of regality and glamour bravely assembled from the narrow material means available to her. She lives on as an enigmatic Chicago legend, honored with a career retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1992, with her work surviving in numerous important international collections.
Godie’s imagery, all representational, rely on her lyrical, sure-handed use of black ink outlines, stark on broad white backgrounds and filled with pale, mottled pastel colors. She painted still lives and nature scenes—particularly birds, bugs, jugs, and flowers––but remains most renowned for her paintings of people. Her staring, wide-eyed portraits, always either in profile or head-on, tend toward stylized shoulders-up portrayals of imaginary fashion plates, both male and female, and sometimes in line-up. Godie’s keen eye for sartorial detail, especially hats, hair, and jewelry, individuate her otherwise stock characters. Her repeated assertion that she was, in fact, a French Impressionist may reflect more about her carefully crafted identity than about her actual aesthetic and paint handling, which do not address optical perception or light in any dedicated way. Given to wearing elaborate costumes and heavy stage makeup, Godie cultivated a proud front, conveyed in her alluringly idiosyncratic (and seemingly anachronistic) paintings of style. The artist’s self-styled persona is memorialized in a series of fascinating photo booth self-portraits. In a vernacular analog to the staged, cinematic alias photography popularized by Cindy Sherman and others, these powerful and unsettling images depict Godie in full theatrical mode, made-up and posed, ready for her close-up. She sometimes drew or painted on the surface of the photographic print itself, further personalizing these intimate glimpses into a woman’s perceived self.
—Brendan Greaves
Above: Steve Kagan, Lee Godie (Holding Rolled Canvases), 1985, Silver Gelatin Print, Edition 1 of 25, 17 1/8 x 20 7/8 inches, Stevekagan.com
Bibliography
Art in Chicago 1945–1995. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995.
Art Outsider et Folk Art des Collections de Chicago. Paris: Halle Saint Pierre, 1998.
Artist Lee Godie: A 20-Year Retrospective. Chicago: Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 1993.
Bonesteel, Michael. “Lee Godie.” Raw Vision 27 (Summer 1999): 40–45.
Common Ground/Uncommon Vision: The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art. Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1993.
Lee Godie: French Impressionism from a Bag. Chicago: Carl Hammer Gallery, 2004.
Maresca, Frank, and Roger Ricco. American Self-Taught: Paintings and Drawings by Outsider Artists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Off Center: Outsider Art in the Midwest. St. Paul: Minnesota Museum of Art, 1996.
Outsider Art: An Exploration of Chicago Collections. Chicago: Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs/Intuit, 1997.
Personal Intensity: Artists in Spite of the Mainstream. Milwaukee: Art Museum, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1991.
Personal Voice: Outsider Art and Signature Style. Chicago: American Center for Design, 1991.
Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Zolberg, Vera L. and Joni Maya Cherbo, eds. Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.