Apart from the Mainstream: James Castle

What compels someone to make art? The question remains fascinating and perplexing. We can invoke the simplest—and possibly truest—explanation and say that it's a fundamental characteristic of what makes us human, citing Paleolithic cave art to prove the point, but in the 1950s, the French art historian and critic (and archaeologist, resistance fighter, politician, and novelist) André Malraux suggested a more precise answer. "What makes the artist," he maintained, "is that in his youth he was more deeply moved by his visual experience of works of art than by that of the things they represent—and perhaps of Nature as a whole." The notion seems plausible, perhaps because of its similarity to the notion of "imprinting," the phenomenon described by animal behaviour specialists about the same time that Malraux published his once widely read book; researchers found that newly hatched goslings, for example, regard the first thing they see as their mother and will follow whatever or whoever it is, whether avian, human, or anything else. Since art is often about other art as much as it as about appearances, the natural world, or emotions, whether the connection takes the form of refutation, questioning, or expanding the ideas posited by the "other art," Malraux's theory that the desire to make art is itself generated by existing art appears credible: a sensitive young person is "imprinted" at a formative age by a painting or a sculpture, so that, like goslings following a surrogate parent, the future painter or sculptor remains more impressed by the work of art than by real experience.

Yet Malraux's seemingly persuasive formulation is wholly inadequate when we try to apply it to those remarkable men and women who are driven to paint or draw or to make sculpture without having had any crucial, early encounters with significant works of art—or with any works of art at all. The history of recent modernism is full of examples. The sculptor David Smith to name only one, grew up in the Midwest before the start of the World War I. He recalled that although he was interested in an illustrated Bible, as a child, and received praise for modelling a lion in clay, he had never seen any art in Decatur, Indiana, where he spent his boyhood, or in Paulding, Ohio, where his family moved when he was 15, "other than some very, very dark picture with sheep in it in the public library." But Smith knew that he wanted to be an artist.

And there are many other examples, most notably the histories of self-taught vernacular artists such as James Castle (1899–1977). Castle is an enigma. Born profoundly deaf in rural Idaho, he spent his entire life on the family farm. Since he was not sent to a special school for the deaf until the age of 10—much too late, according to experts in teaching the hearing-impaired—he never acquired speech or learned to read. As far as anyone knows, the closest thing to "art" that he experienced in his silent world came from newspaper and magazine illustrations, mail order catalogues, cartoons and advertisements, even the decorations on commercial packaging—his parents ran the local post office, at one point—yet image-making was his sole, lifelong preoccupation and his main means of communication.

Castle spent all of his time making art. Exempt from farm chores (he is said to have refused to participate), he retreated to his "studio," first an unused chicken coop, later a trailer, devoting himself to drawing haunting, poetic landscapes and interiors notable for their convincing perspective and sensitivity to tonality, to making constructions of animals, stylized people, and objects, and to creating hand-drawn "books" and "photo albums," adopting, first out of necessity and later by choice, scavenged paper and home-brewed mediums. Most mysterious are his hand-drawn "books," "photo albums," and word pieces, with their inexplicable letters and "messages." Another mystery is the difference between Castle's moody, naturalistic farmyards and interiors and his rigid, frontal renditions of people. It's usually impossible to decide whether he...