Every once in a while those of us who don’t often make it to Africa have an opportunity to glimpse the continent’s extraordinary commercial visual culture. As recently as this summer vibrant examples of hand-painted movie posters from the 1980s and ‘90s were on view at the Chicago Cultural Center, which also mounted a show in 1996 of elaborate decorated coffins from Ghana. Both genres have books devoted to the,

African hair salon and barber shop signs, meanwhile, were featured in an Intuit show in 1994 and have become what might be the most widely collected hand-made trade signs since those of 18th and 19th Century American came into vogue. These signs are popular enough that many of the examples that end up for sale abroad are apparently made specifically for export.

African Signs is a broad survey of Africa’s commercially inflected vernacular art. It collects hand-painted signs, mostly photographed in situ, across a number of categories, including food, clothing, health, electronics and the ubiquitous hair. Among other things, the book shows off a scale of work that can’t be grasped from the individual signs collected in the U.S. That scale includes many mural-size images, but also remarkable photo that shows more than a dozen individual signs displayed outside a pharmacy in Togo. And these being health signs, the explicit representation of ailments – some obvious and some obscure but many just gross — is easily as disturbing as the kitschy violence seen in the low-budget movie posters featured in the Extreme Canvas book and the Chicago Cultural Center show.

There is certainly a kitsch element contributing to the appeal of some of these signs, but only some. The degree of talent evident in them also varies, reflecting apparently low barriers to entry for the signs’ producers. As the introduction notes, the continent is generally too poor to produce the art school graduates who might otherwise populate a commercial art industry. But the need for commercial art in the continent’s thriving local markets has produced a demand for creativity that is ripe to be filled in interesting and creative ways.

Paul Faber, the museum curator who wrote the book’s introduction, tracked down one of these artists, who goes by the interesting name of “Middle Art.” Faber notes that Middle Art is one “of the hundreds of professional painters in Africa who don’t see themselves as ‘artists’ in the romantic sense … but as craftsman who make a living with paint and brushes. This modesty can also be found in the name ‘Middle Art.’ … He doesn’t consider himself very bad but also not very good, just Middle Art.”

However accurate Middle Art’s judgment of his own ability may, the talent displayed in this book is impressive if unpredictable. Some artists can’t manage much more than caricature, other produce nuanced portraits. Some show flights of imagination, others lavish loving attention on the most mundane (or sometimes bizarre) subjects.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

A lovely collection of artistic shop signs, tastefully photographed and displayed.

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The Flirt, like so many Tarkington stories, is first of all an exercise in gentleness. Tarkington loved his characters to a fault. To his heroes and heroines he showed gentle affection, to his comic relief gentle condescension, and to his villains gentle contempt. All that gentleness throws up a fog of good feeling, but behind the fog there are crags and cliffs of unhappiness, struggle and decay. In the fog is nostalgic escapism to what seems like a “simpler” time and place. But life turns out to be the same depressing, uphill scramble it always is, especially amid the dislocations of the early 20th Century – Tarkington’s most persistent and greatest theme.

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Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern images of unexcelled symbolic intensity marked him as one of the most creative German artists of the mid-20th Century, but also an artist whose weirdly eroticized work was unlikely to be found on gallery walls in his own time. He was also hugely eccentric, putting in time as both a charlatan occultist and a mental patient, according to Pamela Kort’s essay in the recently published catalog for the exhibit From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist at Michael Werner Gallery in New York.

His serious production of art began with no training and minimal preparation, resulting in an effusion of highly idiosyncratic pictures. Combined with his mental health history it could sound like a typical art brut biography, but the story does not necessarily conform to the usual script. Kort argues that his time in mental institutions should not be taken at face value. He was troubled, certainly, and eccentric, but not necessarily insane.

Indeed, Schroder-Sonnenstern was hardly an isolate who labored in obscurity. Early in his artistic career he participated in a local art discussion group. More importantly, his work was recognized and promoted by such luminaries such as Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton and Hans Bellmer and exhibited in surrealistic shows. But Schroder-Sonnenstern’s art did not fit into the aesthetic conversation that dominated the post-war German art world, and he remained virtually unknown in his own country, according to Kort.

Kort devotes much attention to the artist’s medical history, but mostly to make thae case (a bit ironically) that his mental health should not be over-emphasized. Her view is that a focus on his purported schizophrenia only serves to marginalize his work, in his own time and ours, and that in any case may have reflected the man’s disrepute more than a real diagnosis.

If she spends a bit too much time assessing his mental state, in the process she provides plenty of interesting biographical details about a man whose life was in fact very interesting, art aside. In the years after World War I he was active as a mystic, clairvoyant and quack healer, although Kort does not think he had much belief in those callings. But this is a case where even the most fascinating biography pales in the context of the art itself.

His typically pulchritudinous figures appear in a variety more or less threatening scenes, with violence suggested or explicit but almost always understated. The titles are as cryptic as the symbols in the work – “The Moralistic Moon Dualism,” “Zynus Theory – whether Demon of Desiccation and Withering” and “The People’s Joyful Miraculous Shirt, or the Moralistic Scarecrow.”

Kort takes her best shot at interpreting the mind-bending symbolism, but it’s not easy. The complexity of her explanations, however admirable the effort, simply can’t keep pace with the art she is attempting to interpret.

The one thing that can be said clearly about this enigmatic artist is that his status as a true outsider is unshakable. Not because of anything about this personality or work but for the simple reason that he was twice refused membership in the Bildender Künstler Berlin, the Berlin Association of Visual Artists.

This review originally appeared in The Outsider, magazine of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.

If the test of a good business book is how many ideas inspire you to take notes, this one passes quite nicely. I especially like the arguments for replacing a prioritization culture with a test culture.

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If you’re interested in the history of Rome, with a bias toward the artistic history, this book is entertaining and engaging, even if poorly edited. There are numerous instances of redundancy and inaccuracy. As you get into the modern period, Hughes’ critical biases come a bit much to the fore. But still, I mostly enjoyed it.

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I grew up in a suburb where the kinds of houses described in this book provided welcome variation from the dominant ranches, colonials and split levels. (Indeed, I grew up visiting one of the houses featured in the book.)

These buildings grasped at the actual promise of suburban living that, through lack of imagination, was thoroughly obscured where I typically commonly spent my childhood days. They were invariably set on heavily wooded lots. Their flat roofs and wide expanses of glass facing the trees meant they did indeed blended nicely with the landscape, as their designers intended. That mattered even at the time, since in my suburb woods were the primary respite from youthful ennui. That the houses’ interior flows and furnishings often reflected the same refinement of taste as their architecture was less apparent to me at the time, but it still must have affected how these homes felt to move around in. In any case, they were one of the ways that the 20th Century artistic avant-garde infiltrated my corner of cultural conformity, though that only became meaningful many years later.

It’s a tragedy of residential architecture that what we knew as the “contemporary” style fell out of fashion as the main upgrade path for subdivision living. When all is said and done I don’t think the ubiquitous faux chateaux and their turrets are any worse than the upper-middle-class homes of my youth. It’s just that the only apparent upgrade today is to a full-on McMansion. The modernists houses were truly an aesthetic alternative to commodity construction. McMansions are simply more of the same, just more aggressive in their ostentation.

The case for that older 20th Century vision of gracious living is always helped when the photography is provided by Julius Shulman. The luminosity in his photography is literal, and his ability to communicate the graciousness of modernist houses, starting in the 1930s, did a lot to sell them to a wider audience. Thanks to multiple books in recent years, he is getting full credit for bringing that vision to life.

Shulman was 95 when he worked on the photos in this book, which was a labor of love by Chicagoland devotees of the modernist residential style. It goes without saying that the book is lovely; you want to see more of the houses or even live in one yourself. The writing is a bit choppy, but still informative, and that’s good enough given the visual richness of the work.

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Jacksonville, Florida, like many southern cities, is a treasure trove of roadside art

I got interested in Booth Tarkington via the credit from Orson Welles at the end of his adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons. I assume that’s about the only way anyone becomes interested in Tarkington, except for academics seeking thoroughly eclipsed literary figures to investigate.

Even in its studio-truncated form, Welles’ Ambersons was, well, magnificent, and I wanted to understand the literary source of this masterpiece. It was visually stunning and as literary a film as I’d ever seen. That’s not always a comfortable combination, but it was Welles’ genius at work.

A good deal of Tarkington remained in the movie, particularly the way he uses bittersweet nostalgia to set up a cold-eyed assessment of advancing modernity. I proceeded to read dozens of his books. Between the famous Strand Books in New York and the not-so-famous but still wonderful Johnson’s Bookstore in Springfield, Mass., they were easy to find. It’s not like they were flying off the shelves.

Reading Tarkington was consistent with my growing taste for artistic discovery, and I was always proud to think I was one of the few non-academics (or non-Hoosiers) in the world who could pass the Booth Tarkington service area on the Indiana Tollway and know why it was there.

I appreciated the writing talent that made him an important author in his time. Even the more old-fashioned stories that contributed to his ultimate dismissal as a lightweight, like Seventeen and Penrod, were still charming enough to entertain as period pieces. And works like The Plutocrat and Ambersons were compelling without qualification.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read Tarkington, and the short fiction of Beasley’s Christmas Party falls on the lighter side of his work. But on returning to this author after 20 years I understand better how much appreciating Tarkington is like learning to appreciate your parents. They are bound to seem old fashioned when it comes to everything a 17-year-old really cares about and they don’t. Later, you discover that’s the extent of their naïveté. And on what mattered to him, Tarkington was as sophisticated as fellow two-time Pulitzer Prize winners like William Faulkner and John Updike.

Even in his lighter work, Tarkington’s craftsmanship creates a backdrop of verisimilitude that he and his readers undoubtedly took for granted, but that gives a 21st Century reader a direct line of sight to life in the early 20th, before World War I soured the happiest of novelists.

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