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Marvels of Monceaux
Jewels of the self-taught visionary artist's work capture the likeness -- and the essence -- of jazz greats
By Glenn McNatt
Sun Art Critic
Originally published March 25, 2007
Visionary artist Morgan Monceaux's delightful portrait drawings of jazz musicians and royal historical figures, on view in the exhibition The World of Morgan Monceaux at New Door Creative gallery, offer admirers of his large-scale paintings another perspective on this prolific artist's output.
Monceaux, a Vietnam veteran and former homeless person, first achieved recognition in the early 1990s for a series of colorful, highly inventive works on paper depicting all 41 American presidents up to that time, from George Washington to George H.W. Bush. (He had begun the series while living in an abandoned building in the South Bronx, N.Y.)
Monceaux, who is a self-taught painter, followed those works with other series on black cowboys and Indians of the Old West, black dancers of screen and stage, royal historical figures and the jazz greats.
In these whimsical works, intricately layered with bits of foil, ribbon and other found objects, Monceaux is more concerned with imaginatively re-creating the personalities and character of his subjects than with capturing the specifics of their appearance.
The show at New Door Creative centers on the jazz portraits published in Monceaux's 1994 children's book Jazz: My Music, My People, published by Knopf (a copy of that now-classic work is on display in the gallery).
The portraits of jazz greats include lively collage images of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong, as well as several wholly abstract drawings that express Monceaux's personal responses to their music.
Monceaux's portrait of tenor saxophonist Ornette Coleman, for example, is a sophisticated mixed-media concoction of drawn and painted forms fancifully embellished with found objects such as the shiny buttons the artist used to represent the mother-of-pearl hole covers on Coleman's instrument.
In the book, the abstract images were printed alongside the figurative portraits; the New Door Creative show reunites several with their original partners for the first time in more than a decade.
Monceaux says both the figurative and abstract versions of the jazz greats can be read as portraits.
"The abstractions are images of the personalities, but they also incorporate the music as well," said Monceaux, who also is a musician and dancer.
"It's a two-sided coin," he said in an interview last week. "There's the portraiture aspect on one hand, and the abstract image of the music on the other. I think of them as a combination of both at the same time."
The show also includes several of Monceaux's large drawings of royal historical figures, including the Emperor Hirohito and Empress Nagako of Japan; an Oba, or traditional ruler of the ancient kingdom of Benin, and an over-the-top Marie Antoinette decked out in the sort of fabulous, gold thread-and-sequin-embroidered finery that eventually provoked her starving subjects to overthrow the monarchy.
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