Some might think David Wilson a folk or outsider artist because he was isolated and self-taught. His work however shows a debt to French Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s era. As the Bizarro cartoon shows outsider artists usually use found materials instead of professional paints like Wilson.
Both Doug Freed and John Hawkins thought /David Wilson had been influenced by Picasso. Neither had any knowledge of Wilson’s exposure to modern art or even if he had any training. Painting by a self-taught itinerant from a middling Midwestern town would normally fall into the Outsider Art category. Indeed, Wilson’s socio-economic status is well outside middle class perimeters. He was an unemployed, poor, alcoholic with a penchant for challenging authority and landing in jail. Without clawing through the history of outsider art definitions (like any esthetic marker it shifts over time, especially when it becomes a marketing term), there are some shifts in its meaning but also commonalities, none of which characterize Wilson’s work. Outsider Art is quite often crude and that naïveté constitutes its charm. Wilson’s paintings do not have this slapdash look. Placing them alongside a Pablo Picasso canvas tends to confirm Freed’s and Hawkins’ linkage. Wilson adheres to a flat picture plane and his fractured Cubist and biomorphic shapes and use of a kind of pointillist brushwork are characteristics of School of Paris works, not folk or outsider efforts.
Yet Wilson’s paintings are not in the Museum of Modern Art of New York City, or any other prestigious urban temple of high art. Sedalia’s Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 2002, has nine galleries of “thoughtful grouping of paintings by renowned artists such as Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, and Gene Davis, and abstract sculptural ceramics by the likes of Peter Voulkos, Jim Leedy, Jun Kaneko, and Ken Ferguson,” it has no David Wilsons. Doug Freed, former director, pointed out the reasons for this oversight, confirming also his affinity with Modern Art: “I think you are correct in connecting it with the 1920 school of Paris. His work has not been available. He didn’t have a dealer. Maybe with the attention he is getting a painting may be acquired by the Daum eventually.”
Occasionally a frame shop in Sedalia would accept consignment paintings, but efforts at marketing wall art have floundered. In the May 29, 1974 The Sedalia Democrat was a display ad for “Sedalia’s New Crimson Gallery, Home of Fine Arts” at 507 W. 16th St. David Wilson is listed as one of the six “fine artists.” The August 2nd newspaper ran another, smaller display ad announcing the gallery’s closing. Modern Art might have been an especially hard sell. Images that depart from sentimental realism rarely graced the walls of mid-Missouri domiciles. Critic Leo Steinberg said modern art “is always born in anxiety” and its purpose is to “translate this anxiety to the spectator.” That’s not an emotion middle class Americans wanted from the pictures above their sofa.
If Picasso somehow inspired David Wilson Scott Joplin influenced a modernist luminary, reversing the transatlantic flow of culture. Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, around the first world war, heard ragtime piano music and got his hands on ragtime sheet music, some of it likely by Scott Joplin, its most prominent composer. Stravinsky wrote nine pieces incorporating elements of ragtime.
Picasso did the sketch for the sheet music of one of Stravinsky’s ragtime influenced compositions. Modernism was a global phenomena that involved a middling town in central Missouri. David Wilson was influenced by it and Scott Joplin’s music had an effect of one of Modernism’s giants.
In 1919, the year David Wilson was born, Stravinsky published a piano version of his Ragtime for Eleven Instruments. His friend Pablo Picasso supplied a sketch for the cover of the sheet music. Just as Wilson’s work isn’t a clone of Picasso’s style, the famous modernist composer didn’t write a rag, but used elements of the American popular music. Alexy Viegas, in his 2018 PhD thesis, Stravinsky’s Ragtime for Eleven Instruments, believed Joplin indeed was Stravinsky’s source:
Stravinsky uses the American genre in Ragtime for Eleven Instruments as a basis for creating unique and quirky music. According to Taruskin (1996: 1307), Stravinsky borrows Joplinesque clichés in this piece to create a unique musical text. Through the study of this work, we notice clichéd adaptations not only of Scott Joplin’s compositions, but also of stylistic features of traditional ragtime.
In Stravinsky and Jazz (2017), Andy Jarema states this incorporation of the “freshness and novel rhythm” of music of “Negro origin” is indicative of modernism’s appetite for arts of non-Western origin:
Stravinsky’s interest in jazz is also representative of a fundamental core belief held by not just other composers in the 20th century, but artists flying under the banner of the modernist movement as a whole. The modernist movement emerged out of the need to find the reconciliation of two dichotomous worldviews: One which attempted to capture the nearly infinite pluralism of local cultures in the world, the other that saw the industrial age paving the way towards a futuristic, machine driven society. Artists were seeking out the myths and legends of cultures as faraway from their own as possible, sources capable of, “transcending contemporary local traditions, of speaking of the very source of culture.” However, by pulling this culture from its source and appropriating it in a different context, authenticity was almost guaranteed to be lost. In place of the lost authenticity, though, he gained a new perspective by bringing it into tension with the vision of modern day society. … In the vein of many other modernist artists, he was a pluralistic connoisseur who attempted to encapsulate and internalize authentic looks at cultures outside of his own into his own style as an artist.
David Wilson’s work (left) has an inexplicable similarity to Picasso’s painting (right). We haven’t a clue why or how.