A lifetime of secretive creation led the newly revealed Malcolm McKesson to create an intensely personal world of dark, emerging figures, each playing an eerie role in complex courtship rituals and obsessive ceremony. "To reroute, develop and elaborate -- albeit with an adult's capacity for concentration and perseverance impulses... springing directly from early childhood." Thus, Michel Thevoz's definition of the practice of the Outsider Artist. Later in the same essay Thevoz claims that the Outsider Artist "must grapple with the child within... rather than with Raphael, Rembrandt or Picasso." The New York artist Malcolm McKesson, in a body of work only recently revealed, seems to unite the intensity of obsessional personal vision with a style which is Rembrandt-like in its assurance and texture and which recalls Balthus and Bellmer in its dark eroticism.

McKesson, now 87 years old, lives alone in a set of rooms in an otherwise elegant Manhattan hotel where for years past he has been working in ecstatic seclusion to produce a series of finely wrought drawings of a timeless fantasy world; a world with its own secret narratives, ceremonies and rules. His voluptuous, anonymous, androgynous figures seem to emerge from a soft muffling darkness, taking on form like a photographic plate slowly yielding an image. These mysterious, indistinct, courtly marionettes pose, merge, bow and submit in a dream landscape where unknown rituals are enacted in a state of erotic trance. McKesson himself gives the onlooker the keys to this vision in the form of captions inscribed in his fine, classical calligraphy on the reverse of the drawings. "I slowly danced my little intimate love dance to win his heart," is one such, "Even lovers must part at a clap and pay deep reverence," reads another. The secret of McKesson's art is a remarkable inner mythology, nurtured and elaborated over a span of sixty-odd years. He has judged that the time is now right to share his images with an audience who, following an overwhelming response at Outsider Art Shows in New York, he thinks will be receptive to this particular series of drawings (he had previously exhibited only concentrated studies of galleons, architectural arches, details of furniture) and the subversive messages and ideas that they carry within them.

 

In person the artist is far from the stereotype of the inarticulate, driven outsider. With the gravitas and charm and occasional vagueness of advanced age, he is eager, even anxious, to explain the search for maturity and for liberation which is symbolized in the juxtapositions of his shadowy, fleshy beings of indeterminate age and sex. He is telling, he says, a story which is medieval and modern at the same time, and which harks back, too, to an Atlantean age before man and woman were separable and in conflict. The characters in this stately pageant: pages, courtiers, choruses, forbidden lovers, act out subservience, dominance and confinement, chastising and chiding, blessing and forgiving. They are muzzled, bound and corseted, disguising and effacing personal identities and the outward signs of sexuality; male finery becomes indistinguishable from femininity (McKesson strongly disapproves of the puritan masculine fashions of this century) and woman as mother, grande dame, or mistress receives homage from the willingly humbled man. McKesson imagines the hermetic chiaroscuro setting of this lingering dream as an exclusive, hidden society, an academy or perhaps a court. As he describes it, it becomes clear that he is exploring familiar, even obvious, sexual and psychological archetypes, but through an expression which is entirely without sensationalism, worldliness or crass overstatement.

When he talks of his outer "real" life McKesson is matter-of-fact, but somehow his observations on his early years -- a fairly privileged education, hints of parental disapproval, a period as a businessman in the Twenties and Thirties, religious disillusion, service in the US army overseas, are fleeting and rather uninvolved: he cites dates with an air of uncertainty and there are real or feigned memory lapses. Only isolated incidents -- the early death of a sister, the discovery in Bavaria of "ugly and ferocious" illustrations from Nazi literature-- seem real and engaging to him now. In was in 1961, with the support of his wife, the poet Madeline Mason, that Malcolm McKesson withdrew from the world of commercial, family and social commitments to dedicate himself to art and to a marriage which he says "revealed the strength and wisdom of the female" and only ended after 48 years with Mason's death in 1990. In his private meditations he set himself to confronting the inner dilemma, in his words, of "an adult, ill-equipped to establish a link with the spiritual."

Talking of the working processes McKesson says, "When I draw, I attempt to see the form of the undrawn... this is therapeutic for me." In terms of ideas, "I want to rediscover a buried tradition, to rediscover the female in the man; I've looked for a long time for a social dimension to all this; maybe now the world is ready for this sort of thing..."

The results of this process are the scores of drawings, each "labored over for an hour or so, in a state of intensely wonderful excitement," but McKesson has declared that the end-product of this life is to be a greater work; an epic illustrated autobiography, a fictionalized idealized and realized version of his lifetime struggle to define himself. The manuscript, entitled "Matriarchy", and consisting of more than twenty chapters, is heavily illustrated in pen and ink and is now virtually complete, in spite of the vertigo and nausea which has afflicted McKesson during its making, and despite his continuing doubts about the wisdom of self-revelation.

Without any thought of financial gain or celebrity and with a kind of innocence but none of the faux-naif about him, the reclusive McKesson is now coming into contact ("coming out" as he has put it) with more than one younger generation of appreciators, confessing that he is still surprised that his themes, with their overtones of bondage and transvestism as well as chivalry and courtly love, are today palatable to strangers.

Haunting, decorous, sinister but tender, the inhabitants of McKesson's pictures represents "a fantasy with a happy ending" and their world, according to their creator, is "powerfully sexual but always beautiful." The hero of both the drawings and the manuscript is, he says, "a confused young man who finds his strength in servitude." It is easy, if perhaps too glib, to see the parallels with the artist, old now, but still struggling with his dominant muse in the seclusion of his somber hotel suite. What astonishes is that this is not a momentary cathartic confrontation, but literally a lifetime of encounters; the real, urbane McKesson, in cap and muffler, diffidently moving about the New York interior, and his alter ego, the plump, powdered page straining to please his demanding mistress in the shadowy confines of the dream academy.

Forward to Chapter One

Tony Thorne is the author of "The Dictionary of Popular Culture" published by Bloomsbury, London. He broadcasts and lectures worldwide on issues of culture and language, and heads a department at King's College, University of London.

This article first appeared in Raw Vision in 1994.