In 1990, a Berkeley, Calif., gallery owner, Bonnie Grossman, made one of those discoveries that specialists in outsider art dream about. Intrigued by a visitor’s offer to sell several strange architectural drawings by an artist named A.G. Rizzoli, she followed a trail of clues that led her to the artist’s great-nephew and a garage packed to the rafters with the work of a lifetime.
There were minutely detailed architectural drawings of imaginary buildings, as well as countless sheets covered with dense webs of prose, poetry, diagrams, and drawings. Some bore Rizzoli’s signature, while others were signed with unusual names such as Grandiscosti, Copenhagen, Angelhart, and Metermaid. Still others carried self-referential titles such as Chronicler, Idolator, Magnifier, Wanderer, and Messenger.
“Mother Symbolically Represented”
Taken together, the work constituted an imaginary world carved out at nights and on weekends by a quiet, friendless bachelor who lived with his mother and worked by day as an architectural draftsman. Most of his work had been done in the 1930s and 1940s, and at the time of the 1990 discovery, the artist had been dead for nine years.
During his lifetime, he had mounted small exhibits in the front room of his tiny cottage in Oakland, but these Sunday afternoon events – advertised by fliers posted in his working-class neighborhood – attracted only a handful of people, most of them children.
Now in an exhibit organized by the San Diego Museum of Art, and currently at Manhattan’s Museum of American Folk Art, Rizzoli has been given the exposure that eluded him during his lifetime.
It was a life lived, as he described it “in an unbelievable hermetically sealed, spherical, inalienable maze of light and sound, seeing imagery expanding in every direction.”
Growing up in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Rizzoli was inspired by the utopian spirit of the architects who helped to rebuild the city. In fact, his first creative endeavors were a series of novellas and short stories about a group of heroic and idealistic architects. Frustrated in his efforts to publish these works, he turned to large pen-and-ink renderings – many as tall as 5 feet – of buildings. These were unusual, not just in appearance – they combined beaux-arts Roman, Renaissance, baroque, art deco, and art nouveau styles – but in being symbolic representations of people he knew.
He described these as “the conversion of the soul into objects of monumental character.” He devoted a number of these to his mother, who is always represented as a Gothic cathedral or “kathedral.” The inscriptions and explanatory notes on these works are done in the flashy type of commercial advertising or P.T. Barnum posters, adorned with images of various seals and blue ribbons. Some buildings appear to be dramatically illuminated or crisscrossed with spotlights.
It’s far from easy reading the characters of the people “symbolically sketched” as buildings. A man praised for his “intellectual brilliancy” has a pyramidal-shaped temple, or church, that seems hewn from solid rock and adorned with delicate spires and finials. His mother’s cathedral is always a balanced structure, anchored to the ground with a solid foundation. In his portrait of a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Healy, there is a sense of two buildings melded together in a skyscraper that is an odd mix of medieval Gothic and 1920s art deco.
The strangest building by far is that devoted not to a person, but to the artist’s own sexual awakening. Rizzoli was apparently ignorant of the facts of life and of female anatomy (though he shared a bedroom with his mother till she died) until age 40 when he saw the genitals of a young child. So great was his shock that it gave rise to a skyscraper titled, and misspelled, “The Primal Glimse at Forty.” He invented new iconography for the sexes – a phallic gargoyle for the male, and a classical urn for the female – and described each rising tier of the building in terms of the stunning realization.
Once awakened to sex, he continued to explore the theme with “The Blusea House,” a 1938 drawing that charted the formula for sexual orgasm, symbolized and measured by a variety of graphs, diagrams, and gauges. The absurdity of a lifelong virgin delineating this concept was not lost on Rizzoli, and he credited the fictitious Victor Betterlaugh, John McFrozen, and Von Der Maidenberg with counsel and observations.
In another series of works, Rizzoli invented an imaginary world exposition – modeled after the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition – with a detailed ground plan, and drawings of some 80 buildings and 20 statues. He called the exposition Y.T.T.E., for Yield to Total Elation. The shrines in the exposition were devoted to abstract concepts such as life, poetry, happiness, and matrimony, while more practical structures included the “Temple of Welcome,” an orientation center, and the “Acme Sitting Station,” the restrooms.
This is a show that is at various times beautiful, odd, startling, and claustrophobic. The claustrophobia tends to set in with those works that contain large passages of text, such as the pages from his various novellas. The buildings, no matter how strange, have a logic and a whimsy that is pleasing to the eye. The concepts that animate these drawings, however, are not always so pleasing to the mind, and when the concepts get the upper hand, the viewer feels himself being pulled into a maze of wordplay and incoherent ramblings.
But Rizzoli was original, to say the least. Artists who inhabit their own worlds can hardly help being so. But, unlike other primitive or outsider artists, he had a sophisticated graphic vocabulary with which to express himself, and this gives his work a persuasiveness not often found in this genre.
The Museum of American Folk Art
1998
