This article is part Overlooked. It’s a collection of obituaries about extraordinary people whose deaths, which began in 1851, went unreported by The Times.
Anyone who passed through downtown Chicago in the 1970s or ’80s might have encountered a weathered blond woman wearing a rabbit fur coat and men’s orthopedic slip-ons as she hawked her art on Michigan Avenue. If you were a prospective buyer, she will slowly and seductively unfold her latest canvas as soon as you approach.
Sometimes she would recite an old tune in her lilting voice; “Oh! Frenchy,” a racy hit from World War I, was her favorite. If you were exceptionally lucky, she would treat you to hors d’oeuvres: Oreo cookies whose cream filling had been replaced with cheese; instant iced tea made with water from a civic fountain. The eccentric “bag lady,” as she was often called, was Lee Godie, one of the city’s most iconoclastic artists.
Godie lived outdoors for almost 25 years and slept outdoors on park benches even in sub-zero temperatures. She stored her belongings in rented lockers throughout the city. Her studio was wherever she happened to be — an alley, a bridge, atop a deli counter.
She was prolific and produced many paintings, drawings, and watercolors using a variety of materials, including canvas, cardboard, paper, pillowcases, cardboard, and paper. In the 1970s, she took hundreds self-portraits in photo booths located at the Greyhound bus station and the Greyhound train station. In these black-and-white snapshots — which she often embellished with paint or a ballpoint pen — she portrayed her many sides: a coquette; a Katharine Hepburn look-alike; a rich lady flashing a wad of cash; and above all an uncompromising artist whose work can be found today in American museums.
Jamot Emily was one of 11 children who were raised in a Christian Scientist family, and was born in Chicago on September 1, 1908. The Godee home was small, and the sisters slept upstairs.
Godie was very private and a fabulist about her own life. It can be difficult for people to decipher truth from self invention. Although she claimed to have been a telephone operator once, her real goal was to be a nightclub performer. She married George Hathaway in 1934. They had three children. One son died from pneumonia at 18-months, the other died of diphtheria aged 7.
Godie was married again in 1948, and she moved to Tacoma (Wash.), under the impression that Austin Benson would be her championing her singing career. She found herself pregnant again, and was left to her own devices on his chicken farm. She ran away soon after and left her family.
Godie disappeared sometime after that. Kapra Fleming, who last year released a documentary film, “Lee Godie: Chicago’s French Impressionist,” said in an interview that she couldn’t find any record of the artist between 1952 and 1968. Then Godie, at 60, suddenly appeared on the steps of the majestic Art Institute of Chicago, declaring herself a French Impressionist who was “much better than Cézanne.”
In a 1982 profile of her in The Chicago Reader, Alex Wald, an early collector, recalled for the writer Michael Bonesteel the first time he saw Godie: “She had big orange balls painted on each cheek, painted eye shadow and eyebrows painted above her actual eyebrows, all from the same paint box she was making her pictures with.”
It’s unclear when Godie began painting or what inspired her to sell her art in public. She claimed that a redbird had told her to pick a brush. Her first clients were students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They purchased her works at a bargain rate of $5 to $20 per piece. (Godie would write the “real” value of her art — usually $2,500 or more — on the verso.) To sweeten a sale, she sometimes included cheap brooches and live carnations. She sometimes made her photo booth portraits into a canvas to advertise herself.
“She lived in a fantasy world,” Marianne Burt, one of her student customers, said by phone. “In her mind she was a world-famous artist. And everything was about France.”
Godie even used a French accent to pronounce her name, as in go-DAY. In a 2008 exhibition catalog for Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago, where Godie’s art has been shown, the curator Jessica Moss conveyed Godie’s rapture over a French Impressionist show at the Art Institute. “To save herself from passing out in such a revered institution,” Moss wrote, “she devoured a small piece of cheese that she had been saving in her armpit in case of an emergency.”
At first glance, Godie’s work can appear childlike, her figures rendered in a cartoonish style that verges on grotesque. She was primarily a portraitist, although one less interested in capturing a subject’s likeness than in evoking moods, like wariness or anxiety, as evidenced by the clenched teeth she depicted in a work such as “Tidle — Gay Artist Lee Godie a French Impressionist.” Her images have a deliberately exaggerated expressiveness, as in “Sweet Sixteen” (1973-74) or the undated “Smiling Girl.” Both her men and women sport garish red lips, wide eyes that are lusciously over-lashed, and hair that can be unnaturally blond or orange.
“The uncanny nature of her people is arresting, sometimes disturbing and even alarming, but as authentic as the artist herself,” Bonesteel wrote in a 1993 exhibition catalog. “In the course of making her work, she psychically imprints her emotional state upon it.”
There were recurrent figures, including a woman in left profile with a topknot and bared teeth, the so-called Gibson Girl inspired by Charles Dana Gibson’s turn-of-the-century illustration of idealized feminine beauty; Prince Charming, or Prince of the City, a patrician figure with a bow tie and parted hair, often portrayed in front of Chicago’s John Hancock Center; and a waiter, a mustachioed man with sideburns, based on a real waiter whom Godie found handsome.
Joan Crawford was a common inspiration for some of her female characters. Other common motifs included leaves, insects, birds, grape clusters, grape clusters, and hands playing the piano. Godie sometimes wrote on her canvases too: “Staying Alive” and “Chicago — we own it!” appear with the frequency of personal mottos.
Godie hosted themed parties in order to showcase her new work. The “red party,” for example, was held around dawn in Grant Park and featured red appetizers and art with red palettes. She simplified her business by selling copies of the compositions she had created and tracing them. This allowed her to mass-produce her greatest hits. According to some reports, she earned up to a thousand dollars per day. She kept the money in her shoes, underwear, and hidden pockets of her jacket. She spent $10 to get a room at a flophouse on cold nights.
There were many reports about Godie’s aggressive behavior as word spread about her. She was well-known for refusing sale to buyers who did not agree with her mood, or who were otherwise dissatisfied by her. Women who wore trousers instead of dresses were also blacklisted.
Frank Zirbel was a bike messenger back then and recalled Godie throwing a pizza at police officers. Marga Shubart, who developed a friendship with her, once saw Godie smash a stranger’s camera in front of a Bonwit Teller department store. “It was a windy day,” Shubart said by phone, “and Lee said, ‘Pictures don’t turn out on windy days.’”
But Godie had a soft side. She was known to dispense quirky advice, like telling people to eat crunchy peanut butter so that they would “possess the refreshing breath of peanut aroma at all times,” according to Bonesteel.
Godie made friends with Carl Hammer, a Chicago gallerist, in the mid-1980s. He gave Godie her first solo show in 1991. (A new exhibition, “Sincerely … Lee Godie,” His Chicago gallery will host the exhibit from February 26 through February 2. 26.)
“I had a love affair with her work,” Hammer said in an interview. “She was one of the most special people in my life. She was the epitome of what I was doing in the gallery.”
In 1993, a retrospective was held at the Chicago Cultural Center.
People also covered Godie in their articles Magazine and The Wall Street Journal The Journal piece caught the eye of Bonnie Blank, Godie’s estranged daughter by her first husband; she hadn’t known of her mother’s career on the streets of Chicago. Blank lived in Plano Ill., where she was reunited to her mother, who was already showing signs of dementia. Blank was granted legal guardianship by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1991. (She says that she is currently writing a memoir about her mother.
Godie was quickly moved to a nursing home. She died on March 2, 1994. She was 85.
Her work can be found today in the permanent collections at the American Folk Art Museum, New York, Smithsonian, Philadelphia Art Museum, and other institutions.
Godie was a tangle of contradictions: a flâneur in patchwork clothes and safety pins who considered herself a fashion plate; a short-tempered bohemian who insisted on decorum; a camera-shy woman who ruthlessly dramatized her interior states. She was an artist who enjoyed beauty in spite of her concrete surroundings.
“I always try to paint beauty,” she wrote in her journals, “but some people say my paintings aren’t beautiful. Well, I have beauty in mind, but it isn’t always easy to make paintings beautiful.”
Source: NY Times
