Malcolm McKesson
Born in Monmouth Beach, New Jersey to a wealthy New York City family, Malcolm McKesson (1909-1999), a Harvard graduate, served in the U.S. Army and was socially well integrated. However, in 1961 he withdrew from his business and social life in order to devote himself to his wife, the poet Madelaine Mason, and to art. He pursued his art in private, only revealing its existence after the death of his wife in 1990 and when he was well into his eighties. His exquisite drawings possess a general aura of sanctity and tenderness, but characteristically they also have an unremittingly sexual undertone.
McKesson said that when he drew, he wanted to 'see the form of the undrawn' and 'to rediscover a buried tradition, to rediscover the female in the man'. He professed to having 'never had any sexual development'. However, some drawings were produced in what one writer has described as a 'hypnagogic, febrile state of sexual excitement coupled with anxious torment' (M. T. Wilner, in Malcolm McKesson: An Exquisite Obsession). Yet the drawings content is usually only revealed in titles or short texts written on the drawings. McKesson's fantasy world of servitude at the hands of powerful women is precisely described in his 'autobiographical' novel, Matriarchy: freedom in Bondage, but it is in the drawings that he attains some kind of transcendence. His work is now in several collections around the world including the American Visionary Art Museum and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
2018 Vestigues & Verse, American Folk Art Museum, New York
2010 Raw Art, Halle St Pierre, Paris
2016 A Discerning Eye, Orleans House Gallery, London
