34 The New York Review
Castle’s Kingdom
Andrew MartinJames Castle:
Memory Palace
by John Beardsley.
James Castle Collection
and Archive/Yale University
Press, 279 pp., $65.00
Every James Castle picture
seems to contain a secret.
Approaching one of his
works for the first time, you
peer into pockets of shadow
and smudge, examining the
depopulated landscapes and
interiors for explanations.
Here, an empty rural road,
with telephone poles stand-
ing like sentries at precise
intervals, stretching to the
drawing’s vanishing point;
there, a cryptic attic space
with a yawning doorway,
captured on disintegrating
paper that is then stitched to
cardboard backing with red string. A
series of drawings from multiple angles
depicts the walls of an unloved upstairs
bedroom, which seem to be shadowed
by cage- like patterns hovering behind
the brooding furniture arranged hap-
hazardly around the space. Another
piece shows two empty blue coats
standing upright in front of a farm-
house next to an overturned bottle, a
spiritual cousin of American Gothic.
Even after repeated viewings and an
immersion in Castle’s sprawling, insu-
lar oeuvre, these works refuse to yield
their intentions. Their power lies in
their ability to remain in one’s mind
like half- remembered dreams.
The circumstances under which Cas-
tle made his art have, since it was first
exhibited publicly in 1951, received at
least as much attention as the work it-
self. Central to its fascination, beyond
the appeal of the images, is the idea
that an ordinary American life, cut
off from the wider currents of artistic
influence by geography and disability,
could contain such a rich, multifaceted,
and mysterious aesthetic sensibility.
He was born in 1899, the fifth of
seven children to survive infancy, and
lived his entire life with his family on
a series of small farms and homesteads
in rural Idaho. He was two months pre-
mature—perhaps because his mother,
Mary, had rushed from the house to put
out a fire that started after a tree was
struck by lightning—and born deaf, or
became so soon after birth. Despite five
years at the Idaho State School for the
Deaf and Blind, Castle never learned to
read, write, or speak. There is evidence
that he knew some sign language, but
his family (with the exception of his sis-
ter Nellie, who lost her hearing around
the age of eight, perhaps as a result of
measles) did not sign. Another sister,
Julia, recalled that James was close to
four years old before he began walking,
but that he started drawing “as soon as
he could get up and use the pencil.”
For much of his life he made art only
for himself, his family, and the occa-
sional visitor, drawing on found mate-
rials with soot from a woodstove mixed
with his saliva. Only after his nephew
Robert Beach, an artist himself, recog-
nized the quality of his work did Castle
begin to show it in small regional ex-
hibitions that emphasized his deafness
and muteness. (Many were unfortu-
nately titled “A Voice of Silence.”) He
died in 1977, having spent the last years
of his life living in a small trailer his
family had purchased for him with the
proceeds of his art.
Decaying bundles of his drawings
and constructions, wrapped in twine
or string, are still being discovered in
the walls of his family’s houses. All of
his work is untitled and, with rare ex-
ceptions, undated, making it difficult
to assess his development as an artist
over time. What we have instead is a
huge body of work in a variety of forms
and moods—meticulously recollected
landscapes and interiors, surrealist
collages, modified copies of advertise-
ments and newspaper comics, rough-
hewn people and animals constructed
out of cardboard, and books written in
private codes of letters, numbers, and
images—that all seems to exist in the
same jumbled temporal moment.Though Castle’s work has received
major exhibitions in recent years at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art (2008)
and the Smithsonian American Art
Museum (2014), there remains some-
thing fugitive and unassimilable about
it when shown in the company of his
contemporaries. At the inaugural,
collection- spanning exhibition of the
new Whitney building in 2015, and in
“Memory Palaces,” a group show of
self- taught artists at the American Folk
Art Museum in 2019, Castle’s drawings
and constructions seemed, even amid
a wild diversity of approaches, to have
been beamed in from a parallel uni-
verse of art- making with its own his-
tory and traditions. His art exerts an
uncanny pull on the viewer’s attention,
a result of the combination of his sober,
technically adept draftsmanship and
his tendency to skew or obfuscate ele-
ments of a scene just enough to create a
sense of nagging disquiet.
James Castle: Memory Palace, the
beautifully designed and produced new
book of his art from the James Cas-
tle Collection and Archive, contains
many examples of this destabilizing
tendency. Trees in an otherwise realis-
tically detailed landscape are rendered
as blocky monoliths. A stark bedroom
interior, depicted from a low angle, fea-tures irregular, oval- patterned wallpa-
per that matches the framed, scribbled
pictures hanging on the wall in front of
it. (Throughout his work, Castle’s lively
decorative patterns often seem to tell
a different story from the rest of the
composition.)
Other images push more brazenly
into the territory of surrealism: a man’s
face is transformed into the siding of a
house; a huge bottle and drinking glass
are almost as tall as the barn they share
a landscape with. In one of my favor-
ite sets of images, Castle transposes
a giant redwood with a tunnel cut
through it, an image taken from a tour-
ist postcard, to the family farm, matter-
of- factly importing novelty to a familiar
landscape. And then there are those
countless works that pose bleak, un-
answerable questions. A heavily inked
ladder leads to a shadowy loft area, with
books arranged in rows on the floor
and tall, closed doors looming to the
right. Three striped barrels stand warily
against a checkered wall, seemingly
keeping their distance from a coffin-
like wooden box in the foreground. You
search these careful, monochromatic
pictures for evidence of a crime.
When Castle did depict people, most
significantly in a touching image of
himself in a doorway and in a pair of
self- portraits drawn on his deathbed,
the figures are ghostly and insubstan-
tial, both there and not there. An image
of a man posing on a front porch, hat in
hand, has the stiff, generalized quality of
a wax statue. The figures to whom he de-
voted more significant attention are the
freestanding humanoid creatures with
elemental or obscured faces that he con-
structed out of cardboard and included
in his drawings. His family referred to
these figures as his “friends”; some that
have survived are so crudely formed and
worn with handling that they resemble
a child’s dolls, intended more for com-
fort and direct engagement than as art
objects. They gain complexity and sig-
nificance, however, when we see them
portrayed in Castle’s drawings. Some
of my favorite pieces show the “friends”
socializing in various configurations,
hovering awkwardly around the room
like aliens in ill- fitting human disguises.
In American art, we are used to de-
pictions of rural life that make overt
political or cultural points, celebratingthe heartland or bemoaning
its plight. One thinks of the
photographs of Dorothea
Lange and Walker Evans that
foreground the individuals
who suffered during the De-
pression, or Grant Wood’s
camp classicism commemo-
rating and subtly undermining
the value of stoic forbearance.
Castle’s work unsettles in part
because, despite its apprehen-
sive or playful moods, it does
not easily yield its purpose or
meaning. The more examples
of it you see, the less confi-
dent you are in identifying a
key to the whole.
Art- making and catalog-
ing were themselves often at
the center of Castle’s project.
Some of his most engaging
works depict his studio, where
his drawings, constructions,
and books are displayed, sometimes
covering all available surfaces. Space is
off- kilter in these drawings, as though
Castle has created extra pockets in the
room to accommodate the multitude
of his imagination. His totemic figures
are lined up at attention, ready to be
admired or engaged. Like paintings
of nineteenth- century salons, Castle’s
works communicate the pleasure of
abundance, though his wobbly line and
stark color palette shade them with a
sense of melancholy. In a particularly
poignant drawing of this type, Castle
himself seems, with a creator’s anxious
pride, to be showing a room full of his
figure constructions to his brother- in-
law, Guy, in the process demonstrating
his familiarity with the emotional cli-
max of any artistic practice: the sudden
revelation of one’s inner life to a scruti-
nizing public.Castle was discriminating in sharing
his work. In her catalog essay for “Unti-
tled,” the Castle exhibition at the Smith-
sonian, the curator Leslie Umberger
writes, “Family members recall that his
text pieces and books were reserved for
private reflection, while landscapes, in-
teriors, and color washes were paraded
out to share with relatives, friends, and
visitors to the Castle home.” It’s a tan-
talizing glimpse into the way Castle
perceived, or perhaps even played to,
his audience. In his more straightfor-
ward images, he was giving his viewers
what he imagined they wanted; in oth-
ers, he was going deeper into his own
world, experimenting with new aes-
thetic possibilities. Umberger goes on
to posit the sharing of these works as
a way, deeper perhaps than that of an
artist with more conventional means of
communication, of conveying his phys-
ical reality. “To thrust a drawing into
the hands of another was to entangle
an outsider within Castle’s experience
of his world,” she writes.The recognition of a paper’s orig-
inal function, of its weight and
its thumbed, irregular edges, the
smudged and roughened surface,
the scent of highly acidic stock,
inks, and soot worked in league
to communicate viscerally James
Castle’s sensory surroundings.James Castle: Untitled self-portrait, undatedJames Castle Collection and Archive