Old World, New Country: The Art of Joseph Garlock
October 15, 2004 - January 15, 2005

Press release:
Exhibit of Joseph Garlock opens October 15

Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art will present the exhibition Old World, New Country: The Art of Joseph Garlock from October 15, 2004 through January 15, 2005 at Intuit, located at 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday; admission is free. The show will open with a reception on Friday, October 15 from 5-8 p.m.

Joseph Garlock (1884-1979) was a Russian immigrant who lived in the New York area, working as a shoe repairman, driving a private bus, and selling fruit and vegetables at a store he owned. He began painting at age 65 when he retired, while spending time at a cabin his daughter owned in the Catskills.

Garlock's artwork was inspired by elements of American popular culture, such as Life Magazine, as well as classic American and European art and memories from his native Russia. He considered his art a hobby and showed his work at community arts and craft shows. In the 1950s, he received a one-man show at a small New York gallery and was featured in a story in the Newark Star Ledger, but was largely forgotten as an artist after that. A large number of his unknown works were stored in a shed near his daughter's Catskills cabin. When she died, Garlock's grandchildren discovered the treasure trove of work that had been in storage for 25 years.

Running concurrently in Intuit's front gallery is Genesis: Gifts and Promised Gifts from Intuit's Permanent Collection through December 30.

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Curatorial Statement
by Martha Watterson

His grandchildren said that his motto was "Everything in moderation," but Joseph Garlock's artistic output was an exuberant and prolific expression of his two cultures. Born in 1884 outside of Minsk, Russia, Garlock arrived in the United States in 1904 at the age of twenty with his wife Anna, settling down in Manhattan, where many Jewish immigrants lived. He moved to Bloomfield, New Jersey in approximately 1905, where he worked privately as a bus driver and then an owner of a fruit and vegetable market, supporting five children.

When he retired from a lifetime of hard work at age sixty-five in 1949, Garlock experimented for fifteen years with a variety of artistic styles, techniques, and media. His subject matter reflects a special bridge between turn-of-the-century Russia and post-World War II America. While his two countries were locked in cold war, Garlock was passionately melding his contrasting cultural experiences together.

Regardless of the subject matter, his paintings often convey an overriding sense of loneliness and solitude: empty highways, serene landscapes, still lifes, travel and nature images, portraits and self-portraits, memory scenes of his native country, and depictions of Jewish life and culture. Although he spent his life in crowded circumstances, both in Russia and with his growing family in America, Garlock maintained a quiet disposition and communicated on canvas an expansive world.

It is unlikely that Garlock owned any art history books, and it is believed that his replications and alterations of modern masterworks derive from reproductions in magazines, such as the copies of Life (1), published as a weekly from 1936 to 1972. Garlock's outdoor scenes frequently reveal a small person dwarfed by a massive and beautiful mountain or natural wonder. In many cases, the landscapes take on a strong abstraction, perhaps a nod to the abstract art that was championed by the publishers of Life as a representation and cultural symbol of American freedom(2).

Although his many high-contrast black and white paintings drew upon the magazine illustrations he saw, Garlock was also a proficient and highly intuitive colorist and used many different media, including oil, watercolor, gouache, and colored pencils. He would paint on canvas and Masonite, as well as on common household materials such as cardboard, wallpaper, oilcloth, and tablecloths. He made his own frames or salvaged them from discarded pictures. Garlock experimented with many styles, such as impressionism, abstraction, and realism, as well as more individualized techniques, such as cartooning, a "stained glass" format, and a device of vivid rainbow patterning emanating from figures and objects.

Many of the artist's works celebrated America and its public spaces, including bridges, highways, and beaches. These were the free and marvelous wonders of America. He created images of a thriving and booming postwar country. Garlock's life experience was limited to his small village in Russia and the New York and suburban New Jersey area. He journeyed to Coney Island in Brooklyn with his family and his beach scenes are some of his most inspiring works.

The story of Garlock's art cannot be told without stressing the impact and influence of his oldest daughter Rose, who encouraged his artmaking activities and preserved his body of work. Just a few years after he started painting, Garlock was recognized in April 1950 with a one-man show at the Albert Van Loen Gallery in New York City. He was also featured in an article in the Newark Star Ledger in the 1950s and in other local newspaper articles, but received no major public recognition after this show.

For years after Garlock died in 1979, his children and grandchildren believed everything their grandfather had created was accounted for in their homes and in Rose's Woodstock cabin. In the spring of 1999, however, his grandchildren pried open a shed on the Woodstock property and found it packed with hundreds of Garlock's sculptures and paintings. The discovery brought to the surface a forgotten world. Garlock made each image his own and communicated his visual insights in a highly personal way. Although he believed himself a hobbyist, he transcended this modest role with his intense persistence and innate talent. After a lifetime of work, he found a way to present the beauty of his dual worlds-Old and New- as he wished to experience them, in a solitary way.-Martha Watterson

1. Nannette V. Maciejunes, "Self-Taught Artists and the Old Masters," in Joseph Garlock: Paintings and Sculpture (St. Louis: Cecille R. Hunt Gallery, Webster University, 2003), p 5.

2. See Erika Doss, ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001).

Intuit would like to thank Joseph Garlock's grandchildren: Ann Frazier-Winfield, Stefana Paskoff, Gregor Sirotof. Intuit would also like to thank James Cox of James Cox Gallery in Woodstock, New York and all the lenders to this exhibition.