The New York Times
October 3, 2003
Ele D'Artagnan
Like Henri Rouseau, Ele D'Artagnan (1911-1987) was a self-taught artist who lived near the center of things, an outsider on the inside. Good-looking, dapper, slightly mad (especially about women), for a while he was a regular bit actor in postwar Italy, in films and on radio and television. His life was an unraveling Felliniesque mixture of fantasy and reality that began in an orphanage and included extended bouts of unemployment, poverty and homelessness, as well as the continued reliance on the kindness of strangers who often became his friends.
He spent his last years living on the streets of Rome. His innate instability was worsened by an obsessive quest for recognition from a birth family that refused to acknowledge him; this ended in his belief that Toscanini, whom he resembled, was his father.
These ups and downs are reflected in the photographs in the catalog to this stunning little show, the first in New York devoted to D'Artagnan's work. In one, he is holding an umbrella in the closing scene of Fellini's "Amacord." Elsewhere he stands cozily beside de Chirico, then with Dali - wearing a Dali mustache. Toward the end, he vamps gamely for the camera from the door of his tiny shanty, which was eventually bulldozed; finally, we see him in a bar looking disheveled and old.
Along the way, D'Artagnan began to draw and paint and occasionally exhibited his work, while also refusing to sell it. His vagabond lifestyle destroyed untold artworks. Those surviving were salvaged mostly by Pietro Gallina, a music critic and teacher whose family boarded D'Artagnan in the 1950's.
But hope as well as desire spring eternal in D'Artagnan's joyful, frazzled somewhat desperate art. His mixed-media drawings throw forth a teeming cosmology in fabulous colors and patterns, structured by jabbing marks and raw pencil lines. There are fecund, tropical landscapes, spangled harpies, phalluses both anchored and free-ranging, exotic birds and delightful gingerbread houses and villages. There are symbols within symbols, signs of the extended narrative that pulsed through D'Artagnan's mind.
Visually, these works evoke artists as diverse as Warhol, Dubuffet, Chagall and Twombly. They are also part of the rich tradition of European outsider art, operating somewhere in the gap between Madge Gill and Friedrich Schoder-Sonnenstern. But their fervent, exquisite wildness is surely D'Artagnan's own, sustained through thick and, mostly, thin.
- Roberta Smith