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Matt Lamb: The Art of Success
By Richard Speer (Wiley, $24.95, 356 pages)
On Jan. 23, 2003, one of Matt Lamb's art dealers produced
an ad hoc, streetside exhibition of the painter's richly
textured, colorful paintings out of the back of a rented
Winnebago next to the Puck Building, at the edge of
Manhattan's arty SoHo neighborhood. What was Carolyn Walsh,
Lamb's Nantucket gallery rep, thinking? Inside the Puck,
Lamb's work had been rejected for New York's Outsider Art
Fair, the country's most important venue for the work of
"outsider," or untrained, non-mainstream artists, where Walsh
had regularly shown her artists' wares, including Lamb's
paintings.
In crafting a response to this slight, Walsh and Lamb
decided to address the situation on their own terms. While
Lamb retired to his Florida studio to paint, Walsh and her
crew braved the cold and set up the street exhibit-skillfully
employing the rejection of Lamb's work to draw attention to
the artist's exploratory creative process and rugged,
life-affirming philosophy. By the end of the fair, Walsh had
received public support from some of the art world's most
influential power players, while in phone interviews,
reporters found the artist to be a receptive, wisecracking
partner. The flair and brio with which both Walsh and Lamb
handled this very New York situation endeared them to old and
new audiences: Folks who may not have known much about Lamb's
art were impressed by his political savvy, passion and wit.
Lamb's rejection from the outsider-art
"establishment"-outsider art being a concept fraught with its
own complications-is just one aspect of the problematic but
celebrated place he occupies within contemporary American art.
In a new biography of the painter, Matt Lamb: The Art of
Success, WW visual-arts critic Richard Speer
powerfully illuminates Lamb's art, life and career,
deconstructing the influences that inspired this wealthy
funeral-home magnate to transform himself into a commercially
successful and unapologetically controversial artist. Speer
takes the reader on a detailed journey through the artist's
humble origins, personal struggles, and the birth and
development of his intriguing artistic techniques. Speer also
describes the painter's work with students and communities in
need as a critical aspect of his art, especially significant
in the face of the criticism Lamb has received for being a man
of means. Throughout the biography, Speer foregrounds the
painter's creative processes, careful not to overshadow Lamb's
studio practice and artistic vision while discussing the
social and political machinations of an art world that has
both embraced and rejected him.
As pointed out by critics and art historians, Lamb's work
often seems oddly disengaged from contemporary artistic
practice: Is he simply an artist born in the wrong century?
Yet simultaneously, Lamb embraces issues that inform the work
of contemporary, politically oriented artists-issues such as
intimacy, mortality, justice and righteousness. As Speer
assesses, the jury is still out on whether Lamb will be viewed
as a misunderstood genius or a talented painter who
capitalized on his business acumen to self-engineer a career
that would never have happened without his personal and
professional resources. Matt Lamb: The Art of Success
serves as catalyst for continued debate about artistic
authenticity, art-world hierarchies, and the right and power
of individual artists to express their vision, regardless of
what anybody-especially the critics-thinks.
Originally published on
WEDNESDAY, 5/4/2005
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