Matt Lamb E-Book

Richard Speer

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 528

Beschreibung

A revised edition of the tell-all biography of the businessman turned outsider artist In this no-holds-barred biography of controversial artist Matt Lamb, Richard Speer takes readers on an all-access tour of Lamb's life and times. With true insider access that includes interviews with family and friends and Lamb's own personal archives, the book offers a massively compelling look at the artist's life. The successful millionaire CEO of a family business, Lamb turned away from business and toward painting as a response to a diagnosis of grave illness. Whether that diagnosis was accurate or not, it was the basis for a massive personal transformation, from wealthy but little-known businessman to an artist hailed as the heir of Pablo Picasso. Thumbing his nose at the art establishment that dismissed his work and wealth as the antithesis of starving-artist chic, Lamb dedicated his work to world peace and redefined the art world in the process. * Revised to cover the years leading up to the artist's death in early 2012 * Tells the story of a truly unique character who succeed spectacularly in the wildly different worlds of business and art * This book offers an insider's look at the art world's ultimate "outside insider" For those who relish tales of larger-than-life personalities who break the mold, Matt Lamb: The Art of Success is a thrilling and enlightening biography of an unforgettable personality.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Endorsements

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Epigraph

Part One: The Prince of Paradox

Chapter One: A Portrait of the Starving Artist As Tycoon

Part Two: The Backstory

Chapter Two: Butchering Sheep and Sipping Tea

Chapter Three: South Side Story

Chapter Four: The Love Affair That Began in the Womb

Chapter Five: Family Business and Other Oxymorons

Chapter Six: The Sales of a Death Man

Chapter Seven: Drunken Days and Papal Knights

Part Three: The Crisis

Chapter Eight: The Funeral Director Picks His Own Casket

Chapter Nine: Misdiagnosis Or Miracle?

Part Four: The New Life

Chapter Ten: The Undertaker's New Undertaking

Chapter Eleven: The Jew, The Nun, The Architect, And The Old Irish Bastard

Chapter Twelve: Lamb Debuts to Rants and Raves

Chapter Thirteen: The Wake As Collage

Chapter Fourteen: Power Plays

Chapter Fifteen: The Tycoon Tackles Gandhi

Chapter Sixteen: Chaos, Rage, and The White Heat of Passion

Chapter Seventeen: Finding Faces in the Clouds

Chapter Eighteen: The Spirits Who Live in the Canvas

Chapter Nineteen: The Characters Take the Stage

Part Five: The Career Blossoms

Chapter Twenty: Getting Hammered

Chapter Twenty-One: Painting for Pierre Cardin

Chapter Twenty-Two: Finding Fassbender

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Doyenne in Leather Pants

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Dealer with Glow-Stick Nunchucks

Part Six: The Pope, The Princess, and The Giant Child

Chapter Twenty-Five: Painting for the Pope

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Spiritualist Takes on the Mall of America

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Knight and the Princess

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Giant Child

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Pollyanna Meets Patton

Part Seven: The Controversy

Chapter Thirty: Fuck the Puck

Chapter Thirty-One: The Straightjacket as Painting Smock

Chapter Thirty-Two: There Once was a Gallerist from Nantucket

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Media Sharks Tear In

Chapter Thirty-Four: Outsider, Outschmeider

Part Eight: The Present Tense and Future Perfect

Chapter Thirty-Five: The Maximalist Wrestles with Minimalism

Chapter Thirty-Six: Lamb Meets Picasso

Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Canyon Full of Ghosts

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Around the World in 80 Studios

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Pans and Praise: The Critics Look at Lamb

Chapter Forty: Always Further: Lamb Today and Tomorrow

Part Nine: The Epilogue

Chapter Forty-One: When the Saints Go Marchin' In

Part Ten: The Exit Interview

Afterword

Q&A: The Pony at the End of the Rainbow

Acknowledgments

Timeline

Selected Collections and Exhibition History

Contact Information and Galleries

About the Author

Index

Plates

The Critics on Matt Lamb's Art

“The brightly colored canvases come from the brush of a lively character named Lamb, a former funeral director who believes in reincarnation and the existence of a spirit world.”

—Ruth Gledhill, The Times of London, June 9, 2000

“Here is an artist who celebrates life with big, free shapes and unabashed color.”

—Sister Wendy Beckett, The Catholic Herald (London), June 3, 1998

“The paintings seize the viewer on an emotional level with freewheeling, joyous movement and exuberant, earthy colors . . . sending up a kind of hymn to universal forces and the ascendancy of natural order.”

—Margaret Hawkins, Chicago Sun-Times, September 8, 2000

“These powerful protests against social and political injustice meld Christian beliefs with Zen Buddhist and Jewish echoes and Romantic contemplations of the American Indian.”

—Angela Tamvaki, curator, National Gallery, Athens, Greece, Agony and Hope: Matt Lamb's Optimistic Vision of the Universe, November 1994

“Lamb's paintings perfectly express the core of pure emotion unique to his sensibility.”

—Pierre Cardin, Visions, October 2, 1990

“. . . a remarkable body of work characterized by bright, clashing colors and dark, dreamlike imagery. These mysterious dramas are enhanced by the rich and often rugged surface textures he creates. Seemingly transforming from plant to animal to human to spirit, these figures take part in fragmented narratives drawn from Lamb's imagination.”

—Carol Damian, Art News, January 2000

“Lamb's work evokes a surreal, fairy-tale sense of the fantastic . . . integrating semblances of Chagall's poeticism with Lamb's personal symbology of primordial memory in an exquisitely sensuous vocabulary of pure, luscious pigment.”

—Olga Zdanovics, New Art Examiner, September 1994

“His rainbow-hued oil paintings . . . of folks, flora, and fauna recall the slap-dash, faux-naïve style of European postwar artists like Karel Appel and Asger Jorn.”

—Elisa Turner, Miami Herald, November 14, 1999

“For more than a quarter-century I have dealt in art. I know thousands of artists. But I have encountered only one true visionary: Matt Lamb.”

—Virginia Miller, A Life-Affirming Art Born of Death, November 2001

Cover design: Wiley Cover image: Courtesy of Richard Speer

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Speer. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Speer, Richard. Matt Lamb : the art of success / Richard Speer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-118-45085-7 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-45078-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-45082-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-45083-3 (ebk) 1. Lamb, Matt, 1932- 2. Painters—United States—Biography. I. Title. ND237.L255S65 2005 759.13—dc22 2004029112

For Patricia and Janie, my cheerleaders

INTRODUCTION

This is the life story of celebrated artist Matt Lamb (1932–2012), whose boldly colored, richly textural paintings and tireless activism for world peace earned him a place among the most fascinating public figures of late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the chapters that follow, I lay out Lamb's extraordinary life from his birth in 1932 up until the first publication of this book in 2005, when the artist was 73. During those seven-plus decades, Lamb rose from humble beginnings on the South Side of Chicago, overcame a learning disability, and turned a family-operated funeral home into a highly successful chain of businesses. In his late 40s, a trio of diseases hit him at the same time and threatened to take his life. This is where the story takes a fantastical turn. After his doctors advised him to put his affairs in order, Lamb made a fateful vow to his wife, Rose: “If I beat this, I'm going to sell all the businesses and paint.” He did beat it—his symptoms inexplicably disappeared—he did sell his businesses, and he did become a painter.

Roundly hailed for his lusciously textured compositions—filled with fanciful characters that were part-human, part-animal, and part-wraith—he was also demonized within the Outsider Art movement as the antithesis of the starving-artist archetype so ingrained in that movement's ethos. Lamb moved beyond the controversy, was proclaimed an artistic heir to Picasso, Miró, and Dalí, and became increasingly well-known as a peace activist. The “Lamb Umbrellas for Peace” workshops and peace parades he created in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were adopted as teaching tools throughout the world. Millions of children on six continents have participated in this uplifting program, which instills young people with the values Lamb considered paramount: peace, tolerance, hope, understanding, and love.

When this biography was first published, Lamb was entering the most productive period of his art career. All of the important developments that happened after the book was released are addressed in a new Afterword, which follows the original text. It charts the extraordinary surge in the artist's creative, critical, and popular appeal, including a groundbreaking exhibition at the State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg); the publication of a major essay about his work by that museum's curator, Dr. Alexander Borovsky; an exhibition in Barcelona, Spain, linking Lamb to the legacy of surrealist painter Salvador Dalí; his acceptance of the Gold Cross of the European Union, one of the Continent's most prestigious art awards; and his efforts to spread his message of peace on the Internet via his blog and Facebook fan page. The Afterword also discusses the development of Lamb's ideas about the relationship between his painting, spirituality, and activism. Finally, it chronicles his journey into the end of his life after a diagnosis with pulmonary fibrosis. Lamb approached dying with the same blend of realism, optimism, and humor with which he had lived his life. To the end, he remained a man who practiced what he preached. “This is a time for me to accept and be glad,” he said on his deathbed. “I'm on the move.” After his passing, hundreds of fans and friends from around the world convened in Chicago to bid the artist farewell in a funeral exquisitely choreographed by his daughter Rosemarie Lamb, complete with a Dixieland jazz band and representatives of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Islamic faiths. His artistic and spiritual legacy is being carried on by another daughter, Sheila Lamb Gabler, who has made it her mission to see her father recognized as a seminal figure in contemporary art and a visionary in the quest for world peace.

Matt Lamb lived larger than life, and he died that way, too. His is a sweeping narrative of risk-taking, bravado, integrity, compassion, and conviction. As his biographer, I grew to know and respect him over a 10-year period, during which his artwork underwent a sea change from figuration to abstraction and back again, and his work's philosophical underpinnings grew ever more mystical and ethereal. His unshakable, glass-half-full attitude remained an inspiration to the end. I learned a lot from him, and I believe you will, too. So, as he loved to say at the beginning of his peace parades, “Strike up the band, and away we go!”

Richard Speer November 13, 2012 Portland, Oregon

“What I want is to be able to live like a poor man with plenty of money.”

—Pablo Picasso

PART ONE

THE PRINCE OF PARADOX

“We need our art fictions. We need Paul Gauguin dumping his career in stock brokering to paint in Tahiti. We also need that which ties the Gauguin myth to a contemporary saga in which a Chicago entrepreneur named Lamb sells his corporation to spend time among the flowers, gnomes, and archangels that materialize under his paintbrush.”

—Michael D. Hall (“Just A'Looking for a Home,” Raw Vision, Summer 2000)

CHAPTER ONE

A PORTRAIT OF THE STARVING ARTIST AS TYCOON

There are demons in the gallery. Swooping up from the underworld, sulfur clouds in their wakes, they bolt up in front of us, only to be met and repelled by archangels descending with flaming swords. Other creatures pile into the mêlée: things that look half-man, half-insect, wielding umbrellas like shields against the angels' onslaught; and a Cossack on horseback, galloping alongside a Cherokee brave in full headdress; and a troupe of harlequins tossing confetti into the air as if to conjure a glittery fog of war; and a woman with a pink beehive hairdo, emerging from a plume of smoke, her mouth agape in some unknown horror or rapture. It's not clear whose side these motley combatants are on, the demons' or the angels', but clearly they're locked in some sort of winner-takes-all cosmic conflict—and while in reality these creatures are confined to canvases on the gallery walls, something about the angry insistency of their forms, colors, and textures allows them, seemingly, to puncture the picture plane and blaze forth into three-dimensional space.

This is not the kind of battle normally waged in an art gallery. But then, there is nothing normal about the painter Matt Lamb, who brought these Manichean warriors into being, nor is there anything remotely normal about the art itself. Make no mistake, this is some majorly weird stuff. Fellini freak show meets fine art. A menagerie of the damned and the redeemed. Garishly hued, splattered as if in a mad rage with oil paint, cement, turpentine, and a toxic, secretive mix of other ingredients, the paintings portray their armies of good and evil atop an undulating, puckered background. Indeed, the canvas itself is scarred and charred, as if the artist had thrown it wholesale into the mouth of a volcano, fished it out, then immediately freeze-dried its lava-layered surface only a split second before the whole shebang would have burst into flames. This artist, this Lamb fellow, must be either profoundly inspired or profoundly disturbed. His technique is as sophisticated as his imagery is primitive, his demons as fearsome as his harlequins are droll. It's as if he's walking a tightrope over the great eternal questions, holding for balance a steel bar weighted with profundity on one end, whimsy on the other.

Lamb is standing tonight in the center of the battles he's painted, here amidst the Syrah and brie and hardwood floors of the Judy A. Saslow Gallery in Chicago's River North district. I'm standing next to him, watching him mingle with the city's most prominent art collectors, because it's my job to follow him around for a year, to find out what makes him tick and uncover the combination of skill, inspiration, and luck that transformed him from a dyslexic gang member on the rough-and-tumble streets of 1940s Southside Chicago, into the CEO of one of the Midwest's largest family-owned businesses, and then, improbably, into one of the world's most revered—and reviled—painters. To figure Lamb out will be an epic challenge, because his has been an epic life.

But the woman who's talking to him now, the one with the obnoxious voice and the attitude to match, doesn't know anything about Lamb, except that he made the paintings all around us. She's not impressed.