Now known as the most collected artist in Chicago, she was in her 50s when she started popping up on Chicago’s streets in 1968, sitting there on the steps of the Art Institute and turning out her portraits and still-life paintings of colorful birds or stylish women or whatever suited her idiosyncratic fancy. A shrewd businesswoman as well, she would relentlessly hawk them to passersby who weren’t put off by an encounter with, as people of her circumstances were then known, a bag lady.
Over the next two decades, Lee Godie would also hang out along North Michigan Avenue-she especially liked the spot in front of Neiman Marcus- and in Grant Park and around the Drake Hotel. She would live mostly outdoors, sometimes checking into transient hotels, and even in the dead of winter, refused to wear slacks because it wasn’t ladylike. Her taste in food was unusual. By selling her paintings and newspaper-stuffed canvases (“pillows”)-presumably, several thousand of them-she always made enough to provide for her needs, including her favorite, sardines on raisin bread. Not that she sold to everyone; if she sensed she didn’t like someone, it was no sale. And God forbid if someone offered her a handout; she might just chase them for a block.
At the moment, Godie is 85 and residing in a nursing home in a northwest suburb, having developed what are apparently symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. But her art has not been forgotten. Gallery owners from New York to New Orleans are seeking out her work, she is being featured in coffee-table books on “outsider” art and the largest exhibition of her work, “Artist-Lee Godie: A 20-Year Retrospective,” opened last weekend at the Chicago Cultural Center, where it will run through Jan. 16.
It’s all there, on loan from 24 private collectors-the primitive drawings of ducks and daisies, flowers and birds, men with lots of sideburns, women with garden-party hats, representations of Princess Margaret and Marilyn Monroe (with, for some reason, two bananas on her head).
Godie herself showed up at a special preview, walked around and talked to some of her long-time admirers, one of whom said she seemed to enjoy the hour or so she was there. “When she arrived, her hair was done and she was wearing a fur coat,” the observer remarked. “It was like the Queen of England walked in.”
Godie has been called an eccentric and a bohemian; some would say she was just plain, well, bananas. “There’s various diplomatic and non-diplomatic ways of describing her personality,” says Michael Bonesteel, guest curator of the exhibit and Pioneer Press art critic. “I prefer to use the term `divinely touched.’ “
She also has been called-somewhat curiously-the Grandma Moses of the Midwest, a designation with which Bonesteel firmly disagrees. “First of all, Grandma Moses was a folk artist. Lee is not. She is also much better than Grandma Moses-far more original and innovative. I think Grandma Moses would be horrified to look at work like this, which is much more threatening, in some ways, much more on the edge. Grandma Moses is safe, secure, cutesy. There’s nothing cutesy about this stuff.
Lee wasn’t just a street person trying to sell something, Bonesteel adds. “People were fascinated by her. They enjoyed interacting with her on the street, but as they began to buy her work, and look at it, they found that there were real beauties and they’d go back and get more. Like many things in art, though, it’s a learned taste. A lot of people just don’t get it.
Godie-her real first name is Emily-was a Francophile, down to pronouncing her name “Go-DAY” instead of the generally accepted “GO-dee.” Renoir was her favorite artist-she especially likes his “The Bathers.” Very likely she became enamored when she would hang out in the Art Institute bookshop.
“She created a mythology around her,” says Michael Thompson, one of the earliest collectors of her work. “In her mind, she became a French Impressionist, and she acted as if she were an artist from the ’20s in Paris.”
The people in the bookshop were among the first to notice her. “It was about 1972, and she was sitting outside on the steps,” says Thompson, who worked in the store and is now in the landscaping business. “I had first seen her in 1968 on Wells Street, and turned down her offer of a sale. To tell the truth, I was pretty taken aback by her.”
A kind of mythology, indeed, has swirled around her, much of it self-created. She has written in her journals that the Wright brothers flew their early planes in a prairie near her house. She has told Bonesteel and others that she was reared by affluent parents, had piano lessons with Paderewski and that her father shot guns at a country club with Marshall Field. She also stated she wanted to be a nightclub singer (she is said to have a marvelous voice) and agreed to marry a young man who promised to get her an orchestra, but that he was secretly planning to buy a farm instead and raise vegetables.
One of her close friends, David Syrek, associate design director at the Tribune, spent a great deal of time talking with her on the street, before and after work and even late at night.
Only recently has Syrek pieced together some elements in her life that he thinks might be true-that she had three children, two of whom died, that one husband left her, that another was abusive and that a third, an attorney who was much older than she and was very nice to her, died. “All of these things added up, and at that point she apparently just kind of flipped out and went out into the streets.”
In the late ’80s, a daughter, Bonnie Blank, who had been raised by her father and stepmother and hadn’t seen Godie since she was 3, searched for her mother, discovered her on the streets, and was reunited with her. (Blank declined to be interviewed in order to protect her mother’s privacy.)
Godie observers agree that she didn’t have to be a street person. She made a decent living selling her paintings-maybe $5 or $10 in the early years to maybe $200 or $300 for the larger pieces in the ’80s, but mostly it seemed to be $50 and under. At the Carl Hammer Gallery, which has represented her for several years, prices for her pieces range from $450 to $6,500.
However, she would frequently get robbed. “She could easily have paid rent in an apartment,” says Syrek. “I mean, she wasn’t loaded, but fincially she was fine. But she couldn’t make that kind of commitment to live a settled life.”
One problem was finding places that would take her in. Reportedly, she occasonally did stay at the Drake and other good hotels, but more often when she did come in from the cold, it was into transient places. Syrek says they often refused to take her because of her housekeeping habits. Thompson remembers her calling him in the middle of the night from a hotel that did take her and she told him she was very frightened. No wonder. “I went over there, and it was one of the worst places I had ever seen. The room they had given her was burned out, and it was also leaking.”
Her peculiarities were well known. (Thompson recalls her telling him she’d see ghosts on the street, particularly that of Marshall Field.) So were her mood swings. When Syrek first encountered her at the Water Tower, he eased over to her and started talking.
“She started yelling and screaming at me, and I thought, there’s no reason I should be yelled at and I yelled right back. When I did that, she just opened up. We had some tea, and from then on we became friends. She thought of me as a fellow artist; I think our friendship is built on that. I found her really fascinating and really devoted to what she was doing. I knew all along there had to be more to this woman than appeared. I mean, she was just too interesting and too passionate to just be this common street person who happened to draw.”
Initially, she would use tempera or anything she could get her hands on. Toward the end, she preferred watercolor. Her materials included canvas, cardboard, window shades, shopping bags and even fast-food Styrofoam cartons. “Maybe she’d do a little pen drawing on the Styrofoam with ketchup on it,” says Bonesteel. “I had the opportunity to put one in the show but I thought, `Nah.’ I wanted to make it a little more sophisticated than that.”
Her favorite recurrent male figure seems to be a Prince Charming, or Prince of the City, and during a certain period she was drawing what came to be known as The Waiter. Favorite female subjects included those in the style of Gibson girls, flapper and vamp types and young women with Mary Pickford-style sausage curls. In the ’80s, Bonesteel is convinced, her women are modeled after Joan Crawford. Some people think all these women are idealized versions of Godie herself.
Bonesteel agrees with those who criticize her work. “Her best, arguably, came before 1980. There’s no question that a lot of it overall is redundant and even mediocre. You can fault her for selling those things, but I guess you could also fault the people for buying them. I mean, she wasn’t too proud to make a buck. There have to be several thousand images out there, and I would guess maybe a third of those are probably pretty bad, another third are probably OK and another quarter to a third are really very good.”
He adds that she isn’t painting now, but when he went to visit her at the nursing home, “she still wanted to sell me a piece.”
“Lee’s paintings will have an intensity that is not found in a great deal of outsider art,” says Syrek. “I think they’ll stand the test of time. The show will exhibit the best of her work, and open up the eyes of a lot of people who wondered what the fuss was all about. She’s an extremely intelligent woman, and I think she knows that with her work getting respect, that means she is getting respect.
“I’m just glad she’s alive to meet her family and her grandchildren, and know that this wasn’t all in vain, that there are people who not only love her art work, but love her as a person. And I think she really does know that, too.”
