Charles Steffen
Messages from beyond
Charles Steffen, born in 1927 in Chicago, was one of those creators of art brut who, like a Louis Soutter, began studying art before mental illness took them elsewhere, further, deeper. Where, far from clichés, genius and madness interpenetrate, where suffering sometimes makes the bed of beauty.
From the beginning of the 1950s, without leaving his home, he never stopped creating, sometimes more than three drawings a day, until his death, which came less than a year after his mother’s death in 1995. Only the works of the last few years have survived: his sister, for fear of fire, destroyed them as he went along.
Each drawing, made on wrapping paper, forms a piece of the puzzle of his existence. Uprooted flowers, bodies covered with reptilian skin, the symbols and texts that accompany them add to the feeling of strangeness that emanates from this creation whose “purity of approach is truly moving” (Artforum magazine).