He drew what he saw

By F.F. | ATLANTA

IN 1928, when he was well into his 70s, Bill Traylor moved from the Lowndes County, Alabama plantation where he was born to the comparably booming Alabama metropolis of Montgomery. There, the illiterate, often homeless former slave picked up a pencil. For the first time in his life and for inexplicable reasons, he began to draw. At night Traylor slept in a funeral parlour or a shoe shop. Each day he sat for hours drawing in the swampy Southern heat, shaded by a pool-hall awning in Montgomery's African-American neighbourhood called “Dark Town”. An elderly man with a white beard and bowed posture, Traylor captured humanity's passing parade using whatever material was at hand—though he preferred to draw on weathered pieces of cardboard.

These whimsical portraits of feuding couples and street preachers, charismatic farm animals and scenes of drinking, promenading and tomfoolery, on scraps of cardboard and wood, have made Traylor one of folk art's most celebrated visionaries. His graphic, minimalist images in charcoal, coloured pencil and poster paint recall both the most elemental and the most sophisticated expressions of creativity, from the prehistoric drawings in France's Chauvet Cave to the stark compositions of German Expressionist film directors Robert Wiene and F.W. Murnau.

Traylor is now the subject of the largest exhibition yet of his work at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. This stunning, comprehensive show features 33 drawings culled from the High's Traylor collection—the largest in the world—and 30 works drawn from the second largest Traylor collection at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. “Bill Traylor” conveys the full scope of his work, from spectral charcoal and pencil renditions of an elderly woman bent and hobbled on a cane, to frenetic scenes rendered in vivid indigo and brown poster paint, like “Fighter”, of a man in top hat and agitated posture punching one balled fist into the air.

The High show is divided into three of Traylor's principal fixations: people, animals and what the artist called “exciting events”. In the latter, often inexplicable but undeniably thrilling moments unspool. A typically animated, engaging work features bodies hurling off of what appears to be a diving platform, their bold blue hues turning black in the shade. In another a blue man waves his hands above him in a feverish gesture as smaller figures tumble off or cling to a mysterious red tree-form that anchors the scene like a theatrical stage. Traylor's drawings boil over with excitement, whether in such energised moments, or in the teeth-baring dog fights and street theatre scenes of marital discord he observed and chronicled on Montgomery's avenues.

Traylor died in 1949, leaving behind 1,200 drawings, many of them given away to passersby. But his work has endured thanks to Charles Shannon, a white Cleveland School of Art grad who met Traylor on the streets of Montgomery in 1939 and recognised the idiosyncratic beauty of his art. The majority of images in the High collection were acquired from Charles Shannon in 1982 for just $10,000. Thanks to Shannon's boosterism, individual Traylor works now command prices up to $225,000 according to the High's curator of folk art, Susan Crawley. Shannon, who died in 1996, did his best to rescue Traylor from his obscure nook in a small Southern town, though he was often rebuffed by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, which wouldn't commit to a Traylor show but did offer to buy some of his works at prices Shannon found disrespectful.

“Without Charles Shannon, there would have been little or nothing to interpret—most or all of the work certainly would have been lost,” notes Margaret Lynne Ausfeld, a curator at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. In the presence of Traylor's singular, powerful work, it feels kind of like a grace that it has been rescued from the dustbin of history.

"Bill Traylor: Drawings from the Collections of the High Museum of Art and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts" is on view at High Museum until May 13th 2012