In 1950, the year after he began his studies in art at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Charles Steffen suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for schizophrenia. Over the next 13 years, he would alternate between living at home with his mother and three of his seven siblings and at Elgin State Hospital, where he would make art in between receiving electroshock treatments. In 1963, Steffen settled permanently at his mother’s house and continued to make as many as three drawings a day. Of limited means, he frequently executed his graphite and colored pencil works on found paper, including lined pages, envelopes, and brown paper bags.
Steffen made thousands of drawings over the ensuing years, though they were periodically destroyed at the insistence of his sister Rita, who deemed them a fire hazard in their small Chicago home. (The artist, it seems, was given to smoking and drinking.) In 1994, when Steffen’s mother died and he was impelled to move to a men’s retirement home in northern Chicago, a nephew volunteered to take custody of the remaining works. The following year, he enrolled in a life drawing class at Truman College; he would die from throat cancer a year later.
Charles Steffen: 1995, A Lesson in Life Drawing gathers nearly four dozen works on paper from the final year of his life, each accompanied by the artist’s written commentary, sometimes reflecting on a particular challenge the subject presented, other times noting what he had had for lunch that day, and usually signing off with “god bless, chas.” Though other surviving drawings are decidedly weirder, with human bodies sporting impossibly long necks and one-eyed, alien-like heads, the works in this show, as the title suggests, hew more closely to life.
That is not to say they are realistic. Steffen’s distinctive style lives somewhere in between the surreal and the cartoonish, his subjects depicted in undulating outlines with a delicate, wavy netting covering their bodies. Faces are aggregations of emphatic curves, with bulbous noses and with round pupils set inside eyelids shaped like gravy boats; fingers and toes are garishly long and curled, often with harsh red or yellow nails. Different anatomies can appear on the same person; small orange circles can stand for both nipples and belly buttons.
Steffen’s subjects range from the models of his life drawing class to the people he encountered in his daily life, such as his mother or the friendly bank teller, Rebecca, often (but not always) clothed. In three self-portraits, Steffen portrays himself in progressive stages of undress, a wittily literal interpretation of the layers of personality or selfhood we are thought to possess. Though he notes that two are based on memories of nude drawings he saw years ago at the Art Institute of Chicago, the first, he writes, is “in memory of no one.” This comment, together with the tender and downcast expression in his self-portrait, should inspire compassion in anyone for the diligent artist.
In his final year, Steffen also devoted time to copying classic works, albeit in his own inimitable way. Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters” (1885) was of particular fascination, inspiring multiple drawings and studies. Steffen’s sinuous lines, cross hatching, and shading feel at home here, in large part because a light source (the hanging oil lamp) bends the shadows within the darkened room and illuminates his subjects’ blank faces. He drew the work on six smaller pieces of paper and fastened them together with scotch tape, a poignant echo of the humble occupations of van Gogh’s subjects. Across the gallery hangs Steffen’s graphite drawing of a slice of white bread on a circular plate, surrounded by his written commentary and signature benediction (“god bless”). There’s no cartoonish amplification, no bracing color, just a simple rendering, a practice as sustaining as daily bread.
Charles Steffen: 1995, A Lesson in Life Drawing continues at March Gallery (62–64 Avenue A, East Village, Manhattan) through October 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
