The story of artist James Edward Deeds has at least three beginnings and no ending at all. This presents challenges to its telling, though the consensus seems to be that beginning at number two is the place to start. It features a 14-year-old boy fishing a tattered portfolio out of a Springfield, Missouri dumpster. The portfolio contains 283 hand-bound pages of illustrations. They depict pastoral scenes full of fascinating peculiarities, like improbably proportioned wildcats and peacocks, intricately rendered drawings of boats and trains, and in one illustration a full baseball team. But the most striking works are mesmerizing, endlessly repetitive portraits, nearly all preternaturally wide-eyed, and overwhelmingly depicting women in Edwardian dress with thick, dark, center-parted hair. The portfolio is unsigned, but printed on each page is: Missouri State Hospital No. 3.
The boy who finds the illustrations at the dump doesn’t want to have his name attached to the works’ tale and its increasing fame. But he treasures them for 36 years, before finally introducing them to the world through an art market he’d hardly have been able to conceive of when he found them in 1970: eBay.
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Before we get to the art wheelers and dealers, the mysterious unknown artist, and the pages from a portfolio that was once literally consigned to the trash heap being exhibited and sold for $16,000 a pop, we should take a step back: The drawings are by James Edward Deeds, whose 1908 birth in the Panama Canal Zone is, of course, the story’s first beginning. Edward, as everyone called him, is the eldest of the five children of Ed and Clara Deeds, who later move their family back to Missouri. Edward is a sweet but socially awkward youth not cut out for farm life, according to his niece, Julie Deeds Phillips. Despite the images of rural idyll that so heavily pervade his drawings, Edward’s is a more artistically inclined temperament. He loves going to the movies and listening to music. “He just wasn’t meant for farm work,” Deeds Phillips tells The Creators Project. “That wasn’t what gave him joy.” Edward is often at odds with his father, who the family describes as being a hard man. After an altercation in which Edward allegedly threatens his brother Clay with a hatchet, Ed Deeds sends his 25-year-old son to the Missouri School for the Feeble Minded.
Clay’s daughter, Julie Deeds Phillips, believes that the gravity of the hatchet incident was exaggerated so that Edward would be put away. Edward, after all, is a prankster, and the threat could well have been joking. This is 1933, after all, and a male head of household could have members of his family committed under the flimsiest of pretexts. Clay isn’t afraid of his brother, nor is his wife, Julie’s mother, Martaun Deeds. They pay him regular visits at the institutions in which he would spend the rest of his life.
Silver.Smith. Courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press
Edward spends less than two years at the School for the Feeble Minded before being transferred to Missouri State Hospital No. 3, where he would pass the next 40. He’s diagnosed as learning disabled and schizophrenic, diagnoses his surviving nieces feel do not fit the man their family knew. (In 2011, Columbia University Professor Psychology Susan Scheftel posthumously diagnosed Deeds with an autism spectrum disorder, based on examination of his detailed and highly repetitive oeuvre.) The State Hospital was built in a fit of 19th century mental healthcare reform, but these better impulses have subsided by the time Deeds is a patient. The hospital, designed as a self-sufficient community where residents would reap the curative benefits of fresh air and honest labor, is overcrowded by more than 400 patients in 1930. It’s fire unsafe, unsanitary, and understaffed. Patients are reportedly abused and even beaten, with one dying from such injuries during Deeds’ tenure as a resident.
Ectlectrc Pencil. Courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press
But despite the horrors that surround him, it’s here that Deeds draws the works in his famous portfolio. The works themselves seem hardly related to life at the State Hospital. The people he depicts are dressed in the style of the 1900s, a time he’d barely remember, and the images suggest nothing of confinement, loneliness, or abuse. Instead, they take place in a tender world of their own, full of gentle ladies, mannerly gentlemen, verdant nature, and friendly-looking animals.
“A lot of this stuff is going to remain a mystery,” says Richard Goodman, author of the introduction to The Electric Pencil: Drawings from Inside State Hospital No. 3, a new book that reprints the works in Deeds’ manuscript. Deeds’ family knows that he draws, but don’t discuss his art with him. “They didn’t have conversations about, ‘Oh, Uncle Edward, why did you do this?’” says Goodman. The State Hospital where Deeds spent nearly all of his adult life has been leveled, leaving few clues of what his life there was like.
Now. And. Herafter. Courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press
Despite the halcyon world Deeds depicts, embedded in his drawings are hints as to what life at the hospital entailed. Three pieces contain the letters ECT, which, according to Brynnan K. Light-Lewis, who in 2012 wrote a thesis on Deeds’ life and work, may refer to electroconvulsive therapy. It’s also known as electric shock treatment. ECT is introduced to Nevada State Hospital No. 3 during Deeds’ time there, and is administered twice weekly to the average patient. When Clay’s family’s monthly visits to the hospital falls on the heels of one of Edward’s treatments, they find their brother and uncle disoriented and dazed. Deeds leaves us a heartbreaking hint to his medical care at the hospital in the form of a a portrait of a top-hatted man that’s captioned with the phrase “WHY DOCTOR.” “I think that [art] was a coping mechanism,” says Light-Lewis. “He created a personal world for himself—an escape.”
Hello.Kid. Courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press
Amongst the almost hypnotically repetitive portraits of large-eyed, dark haired men and women, a few are markedly different. One such drawing is captioned “CAMP CLARK,” and the sketch’s realism makes it singular. It’s a portrait of former Speaker of the House and 1912 presidential candidate James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark. Light-Lewis’ research indicates that the drawing was copied directly from a carte de visite photo of Clark. This piece is important not just for its own merits, but from what it tells us about the rest of Deeds’ work. It suggests that the other portraits sprouted from Deeds’ mind and memory, rather than from reference images, and proves that he could faithfully render representational portraits, but elected not to.
As Deeds ages, arthritis curbs his drawing, and he gives his treasured portfolio to his mother, who passes it onto his brother, Clay. It finds its way to that Springfield dump after Clay’s family moves and accidentally leaves it in their attic, the contents of which Clay suggests the movers pick through and keep or discard as they liked. The Deeds are devastated by the disappearance of the beloved heirloom, the portfolio seemingly lost to them forever.
Deer. Boy. Courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press
But for years, the portfolio was just a few states away: in Texas, in the possession of the anonymous man who’d rescued it from the dump as a child. He posts the portfolio to eBay in 2006, and it’s quickly acquired by a Lawrence, Kansas book dealer (who has also requested anonymity).
“I came home for lunch one day during work and decided, on a whim, to check eBay, as I often did,” St. Louis-based artist, designer, and art collector John Foster tells The Creators Project. “Sitting there at my computer, eating a sandwich, I saw a listing showing several drawings and I knew immediately the drawings were special.” Foster sets off to meet the dealer in Lawrence that day, and he and his wife dip into their retirement savings to buy the portfolio for more than $10,000 cash, the most expensive purchase of his career as a collector. “Financially, I do not have the luxury of holding on to great art objects,” he writes. “I have found many great things in my life and I enjoy them for a while and if I get an offer that is right I don’t have a problem with selling it. I enjoy the discovery and the hunt. I knew that when I sold the portfolio the work would go places. I just had to let them go to the big city—New York.”
The. Black. Snake. Courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press
The big-city dealer that Foster sells the portfolio to is artist and collector Harris Diamant. Diamant dubs the anonymous artist “The Electric Pencil” after the caption of one drawing that he guesses might be a self-portrait, and hires a private detective to try and determine his identity. The detective hits a dead end, so in 2011 Diamant reaches out to the Springfield News-Leader, Springfield’s largest paper. They run images of works from the portfolio, and these pictures catch the eye of Julie Deeds Phillips.
Deeds Phillips hasn’t had much access to the portfolio before the family loses it—it was too precious to be touched by little hands—but her mother, Martaun, mourns its loss and tells her children about Edward’s drawings. “She talked about how he drew feathers really well,” Deeds Phillips says. One of the images the paper runs features a woman with feathers decorating her broad-brimmed hat. “So when I saw these feathers in this drawings, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, these are so elaborate. This must be Edward’s work.’”
Miss.Snider. Courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press
The artist’s anonymity hadn’t hampered the portfolio’s popularity. Before Deeds Phillips spots the drawings in her local newspaper and contacts Diamant, he had taken the works of “The Electric Pencil” to New York’s Outsider Art Fair, where they’re signed for representation by the Hirschl and Adler Gallery. Finally, the increasingly well-known artist has a name. It’s nearly 15 years too late for Deeds to know of his art world fame—he dies of a heart attack in a nursing home in 1987. But the discovery is nevertheless thrilling, both for fans of The Electric Pencil, who wanted to know more about the artist enigma, and the Deeds family, who never imagined that they might see the works in Edward’s portfolio again. It even contains a special gift—one of the dark-haired women Edward drew is accompanied by the caption “MISS MARTIN.” Despite the misspelled name, Deeds’ nieces recognize their late mother Martaun, who had been Edward’s sister-in-law.
This is a tidy enough place to leave things, though the story of James Edward Deeds will never truly be settled. “In the end, there’s going to be something elusive about this man,” says Richard Goodman. “And in a way that’s kind of humbling that we don’t know everything about him, as much as we would like to know his complete story, he’s going to remain elusive.” All we can know for sure about Edward is what his works tell us: that despite the fact that he spent the majority of his life in cold and sometimes cruel institutions, he was able to create through his art a gentle world for himself. His was a world without violence or unkindness, one deeply rooted in nostalgia for a time he’d hardly remember. “We’re not going to be ever able to understand everything about the pieces of art,” continues Goodman. “It will remain with him, and maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
Clay Deeds
(left)
visiting his brother, Edward Deeds. The family made the trip every few weeks, often picnicking on the grounds of the hospital. Credit: Courtesy of Julie Deeds Phillips & Tudie Deeds Williams
The Electric Pencil: Drawings from Inside State Hospital No. 3 by James Edward Deeds Jr., Introduction by Richard Goodman and Foreword by Harris Diamant is published by The Princeton Architectural Press
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