Franne Davids (1950–2022): Paintings
Ricco/Maresca Gallery
November 1–December 7, 2024
New York
“Outsider” is a stubborn category. We cling to it the way we cling to the expression “avant garde.” Both are products of a way of thinking about art that sees history as a ceaseless overcoming, with those artists positioned on the fringe of the future able to speak only to the happy few. But the artists themselves do not experience their work as a clash of categories. Whether they are sanctioned, opposed, or simply ignored by society, they are mostly engaged with the pursuit of absolutes – the absolute best way to do something only they at that moment can do. Looking beneath and beyond the labels we use to manage messy reality, we can see struggles with form and meaning, intuition and incarnation, as shared terrain. By paying close attention to the work of one artist, unknown until recently, I want to outline this obscure but common ground. Frances Beth Davids, known as Franne, was born in Connecticut in 1950. She took occasional art classes. A few of her works may have been exhibited. By the late seventies, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and moved back to her parents’ house in Waterbury, Connecticut, where she lived for the rest of her life. The basement of the house became her studio, and she immersed herself in painting. At her death in 2022, Franne Davids left behind forty-two large paintings on canvas and some 550 works on paper. By happenstance or providence, depending on your view of the universe, this legacy came to the attention of Frank Maresca, an expert and dealer in outsider art.
So she lived and worked outside the art world, and now that work has come into it. How does it speak to us from its isolation?
Kafka in Connecticut
Modern art has no subject. Its subject is no one, the invisible one, the person behind the curtain, the artist. Kafka’s Joseph K, on trial for a crime he does not recognize or understand, seeks knowledge of his case wherever he can, including from the artist, Titorelli, who paints portraits of the court judges. In a squalid garret room, beset by inquisitive young girls, K examines the work, but it is not what he expected to see. From under his bed, Titorelli pulls a strange and forlorn image, two trees in an empty landscape. “You seem to have an interest in the subject,” he says to K, then proceeds to pull out painting after painting, all nearly identical.
If there is only one subject, Titorelli’s true subject, not the judges but a personal obsession he can’t banish, how can there be anything but endless repetition?
In a basement in Waterbury, Connecticut, for nearly fifty years, beginning in the seventies, Franne Davids painted versions of the same picture again and again. Her subject was a woman, perhaps herself, or groups of women—three, five, more—which may have been projections of her, positioned in flat, fluid, heavily patterned spaces, so brilliant they nearly submerge these imagined figures. Imagined, like Titorelli’s landscape, with no obvious or familiar models, their faces are no more than minimal gestures: a mark for a nose, another for a mouth, and small circles for eyes.
Who are they? Her nephew says that she often sat staring at the images that peopled her basement room, especially later when she had more or less stopped painting. She talked to them as presences, yet perhaps more like a ventriloquist. Asking who they are is the interpretive dead end in any viewer’s search for a key to meaning that lies outside and beyond the paintings. Not to belabor the Kafka analogy, but soon after the visit to the artist, K meets his ultimate interpretive impasse in a shadowy church in which he is the only visitor. The priest? minister? rabbi? tells K a parable with so many conflicting interpretations K can’t recognize it is his story. And he leaves K with this admonition: “You look outside yourself too much for help.”
Just as we look outside for help in the face of these mysterious, suggestive works. There is only Franne Davids in them, and she is everywhere. When she was in the hospital with cancer, just before her death, she asked to have her purse brought to her from home. It was stuffed with all the ID cards she had accumulated in her life.
What’s she doing down there?
What is he doing in that rented room with the broken eyeglasses and the cartoons of little girls and the writing? What is she doing in that garden behind her house in London, putting up those strange paper banners with intricate figures, and dressed in those clothes that she makes herself? What is he doing in that rented carriage house with all the tinfoil and light bulbs?
No one ever inquired too carefully, and Henry Darger’s vast epic The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, Madge Gill’s mediumistic drawings, some dozens of feet long, and James Hampton’s dazzling altar, The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly (now in the Smithsonian Institution) were bequeathed to us in silence. As were the hundreds of works by Franne Davids.
What was she doing down there, with her paints and canvases and the people she seemed to be talking to when no one was there? “She’s painting,” her family said. Franne Davids came to spend much of her time in an area of the basement that she made her studio, painting pictures that few people ever saw. Those who did had little idea what to make of them. Forty-two large paintings and hundreds of smaller ones on paper. That’s the number of only the physical objects, but the actual number of images she painted was most likely several times that. Many of the canvases are palimpsests, their images concealing others underneath. When she ran out of canvases (or was it her sense of space?), she painted over what she had done. But not before she photographed the now invisible images. The point was to keep making the pictures, and if she made them, they would continue to exist, even if they could no longer be seen. She knew they were there.
In this time of rising real estate values in the major cities, artists find themselves in the life and death search for space and light, there to produce the great work, which must certainly follow. And the bigger the better. But art does not come from studios and galleries, it comes from the smallest possible space, inside the mind. And if it seems constrained by garage doors or rented rooms or low ceilings and cinderblock walls with tiny windows—or no windows at all—these are not constraints, because the mind bends to the available area with the one goal of filling it. Necessity drives artists to the garage, the attic, the kitchen, the basement and yes sometimes even the studio, all bounded but infinite universes to be explored and populated. No wonder that the people who finally do venture into the basement or the rented room after the fact, often only to clear out what has been left behind, the dried paint tubes, the desiccated brushes, the canvases stacked in corners and stuck together, may react with fear and even revulsion. All this activity, repeated over and over, to which they—we, everyone—are irrelevant. Such egotism, nullifying time, circumstance, and responsibility. It appears not as a revelation but as the symptom of an illness, to be pitied, and as an affronting, incomprehensible burden.
So this is what she was doing. Now, what to do with it all, all that was left of Franne Davids and that much greater part, all that was beyond knowing about her. Did these paintings redeem her difficult life? And if they were scarcely understood or appreciated, if no one saw them and they were in danger of being discarded, who would redeem them?
“They are stealing everything from me”
It is a truism that every new work of art revises the past. But it does not revise the past, it creates it. It makes the art of the past possible. Every copy, forgery, desecration, rip-off, homage, passing glance, total immersion, or angry defensive dismissal reauthors the past and its works because they are either possessed or they are forgotten, they are not stable, immutable things.
Franne Davids authored many more paintings than she ever painted, or painted over, and they didn’t all bear her signature. From the time she was a teenager, she visited New York City. Later on, when she began to suffer from more serious mental illness, her parents would say that she disappeared into New York, for periods. Her parents created a protected habitat for her, in which she was free to paint and diverge, psychologically speaking. But Waterbury was not New York City. New York was anonymous and free. And it contained the most important thing (or the second most important thing, after the promise of sex and romance): art. Davids had briefly attended Skidmore College, traveled to Paris, taken art courses. She knew the museums. But there was something wrong with what she saw. Her paintings were already hanging there, especially in the Museum of Modern Art. The works had different names on them, but she immediately recognized them as hers. How had they gotten there? Who had taken them? She wrote angry letters when her own works were rejected by those museums. She returned time after time, and still her paintings were there, the true artist unacknowledged, regardless of the signatures.
She was convinced she had painted them herself. In her basement, she painted the Matisses, the Picassos (an artist she apparently didn’t much care for), the late Impressionsists, the Soutines, the Fauvists, the Ensors, and who knows what else. The smattering of art books she kept barely gives a clue to her channeling, her assimilations, her reauthoring. She did not imitate or copy and did not think anyone was copying her. It was all her work, her museums, her.
Woodstock
Well I’m going down to Yasgur’s farm,
Gonna join in a rock and roll band.
Gonna get back to the land,
And set my soul free.
–Joni Mitchell
Born in 1950, Franne Davids was a child of the 1960s. She went to Woodstock, or at least she had a program from the festival, “three days of fun and music and nothing but fun and music,” in the words of Max Yasgur, whose farm hosted the event. Her brother is convinced she took psychedelics. In the family there was speculation that the drugs may have induced the onset of her schizophrenia. Such a charge has often been leveled at LSD in particular, and lurid stories of the period detail a descent into madness as the downside of forcing open the doors of perception.
But what about the work? Considering the popularity at the time of pattern art, mandalas, light shows, and other forms of psychedelia, not to mention the dawning popularity of paintings by outsider figures such as Adolf Wolfli and their artistic promoters—Jean Dubuffet above all—calling Franne Davids’s paintings “visionary” or “hallucinogenic,” and slotting them into the language of altered consciousness feels right. But such descriptions say little. What form of creative activity, fully engaged, does not arise from an altered state of consciousness? What does visionary even mean?
In Franne Davids’s case it meant the triumph of visuality, of pattern and symbol over representation of the perceptual world. Her pursuit of techniques for conventional organization of pictorial space, as in one painting that seems to contain a set table around which figures have gathered, only makes her distance from mimetic standards all the more obvious. Her models, whether in museums or Disney cartoons, were already two dimensional, hieratic, and this very lack of depth opened her images to untethered formal impulses, impulses that have nothing to do with the attempt to tell a story, even when the apparent goal is to tell a story. A complicated frieze of interlocking figures in red, pink, and black and white stripes overlays a pink background with a green grid. Their gestures seem frozen into a purely formal arrangement. In another painting, among her most elaborate, gowns of what could be royal or at least regal presences take on lives of their own, their patterns and thick impasto threatening to engulf the subjects. And in so many of the paintings, large and small, there are outbreaks of organic form that don’t relate to any other elements but, like invasive species, take up residence and begin to multiply.
The groupings and gestures of the figures invite analysis and suggest meaningful intention, the way they do in medieval religious paintings, but the energies of line and color subvert any kind of allegorical reading in favor of optical immersion. They depose knowledge in favor of experience, opening the doors of perception beyond and before any significance. True psychedelia.
Perhaps, but this brief against interpretation is disrupted by the handful of obvious self-portraits, obvious in the sense that their simplified expressions bear uncanny resemblance to photographs of Davids herself, in which she stares intently into the camera. Their intensity suggests that a deeper familiarity with all the paintings and their spectral figures would reveal her distinct emotional investments, the specific projections of romance, desire, and fear that are the true subjects of this art.
Sex in the City
In a journal entry, Franne Davids wrote, “I’ve got to stop thinking of myself as a boy.” How did she think of herself? She had no long-term relations with men or women. There may have been boyfriends, but as her illness worsened, she could only have warned off anyone looking beyond the bright immediacy of her beauty. Her involved, sometimes disturbed speech, the obscure reticulations of her increasingly magical thinking, would have foreshadowed an emotional labyrinth. Nevertheless, at least twice she returned from New York pregnant, and underwent abortions. So often mental illness is represented as a barrier to desire, as distorting or even precluding desire. But Franne Davids desired and acted on that desire.
But when did she think of herself as a boy? When she didn’t desire? When she was painting? When she was writing in one of her notebooks? Her imaginary visual world was gendered, its archetypes (so her family has said) taken from a medieval world of queens and princesses, experienced primarily through the movies of the Walt Disney studio. Were there negative archetypes as well in her paintings, the wicked stepmothers and poisoning witches? Were there congeries of ethereal spirts? Did she look at them as a boy might—that is, a person without a gender?—and speak to them that way? Was she at times a knight? Or did she, when immersed in the images she was making, simply dismiss the notion of anything male at all, so there really was no gender because there was only one.
And when she painted herself, assuming she did, did she look into the eyes of the figure in front of her and ask if she was there, in that woman, like the magic mirror in Snow White?
Orphans of Silence
She also wrote, down there in the basement. That is the missing part of her story.
Thoughts that breathed, words that burned surrounded her work and flowed through her life. Franne Davids wrote as much as she painted, but all those words were lost after her death. It would have been easy and probably necessary for family members, clinical specialists, almost any outsider, to see the writing as a symptom of illness, the logorrhea of a mind not in control of its experience. Notebooks, loose leaves, lined paper essays and ruminations, all were sacrificed to a postmortem clean-out. Aside from scraps, all that remains is a photograph of various papers. Only a single phrase can be read clearly: “All science begins as philosophy.” Yes, of course, and then what?
In solitude, Henry Darger produced thousands of pulp novel pages, Frida Kahlo her illustrated journals, and Hilma af Klint theosophical writings. The words never explain the pictures, even if they seem to or seem to want to. They stand next to whatever images exist, augmenting, complicating, even refuting them, as another repertoire of gestures galvanized by the need to communicate reality—to make the unseen visible, the unheard audible, and the unknown evident. What might these missing words of Franne Davids have communicated, their “matter and impertinency mixed,” as Shakespeare put it?
“The fridge stopped working because it didn’t want to,” she once said. “But it will again.” There must have been much magical thinking in her writing. It puts carts before horses, effects before causes, intentions where there are none. For 200 years or more in the West readers have plumbed the poetry of tangled thought for ways to imagine and feel beyond the limits of rational categories. From the reversals of sense and the juxtapositions of words we intuit new relations among phenomena, unsuspected intimacies between the human and the non-. Disposal of her papers foreclosed these intimacies, leaving us with the silence of Franne Davids’s images. But the images, too, are a path to new relations with reality. What Friedrich Hölderlin wrote in the poem Once Gods Walked might stand for the life Davids endured and the work she left.
The earth will take back those concerned
With impermanent things: others climb higher
To ethereal Light who’ve been faithful
To the love inside themselves, and to the spirit
Of the gods. Thus they master Fate
In patience, hope and quietness.
