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An Artist's Success at 14, Despite Autism
January 16, 2002
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
In the strange world of outsider art, Jonathan Lerman, at
14, is already an insider.
Autistic yet prodigiously artistic in the way of savants
who display extraordinary talents, he suddenly began
drawing at 10, breaking through autism's isolating walls
with a deluge of intensely rendered, sometimes comical and
oddly familiar faces that one art writer compared to the
work of George Grosz and Francis Bacon.
He has had two solo shows and several group shows, and this
month he will again be in the annual Outsider Art Fair in
the Puck Building in SoHo, now in its 10th year of
exhibiting the creations of self-taught artists, including
the mentally disabled, visionaries, prisoners and hermits.
"Most autistic artists don't show faces," said Kerry
Schuss, whose gallery, K. S. Art on Leonard Street, has
represented Jonathan for four years and sold about 60 of
his charcoal drawings for $500 to $1,200 each.
Jonathan, retarded with an I.Q. of 53, is unusually gifted,
said Mr. Schuss, who also exhibits another autistic artist,
Chris Murray, and Aaron Birnbaum, a folk artist who died in
1998 at 103. "How the heck can this kid draw these things?"
he said. "It's almost like a musician with incredible
chops. It's kind of scary."
It is such artistic quality that experts say distinguishes
Jonathan's work from the creations of others who are
mentally impaired.
On a recent visit to the K. S. gallery, Jonathan, a gangly
teenager with sandy hair, bounded through its rooms,
clearly excited by his drawings on the walls but unable to
answer questions about them. "Hey, what's your name?" he
asked strangers again and again with the obsessiveness that
is a hallmark of autism. Repeatedly he dashed to the front
door, apparently expecting a crowd like the one that showed
up for his 1999 show. "Is anyone home?" he kept asking.
Jonathan's father, Alan, a gastroenterologist, tried to get
his attention. "Are you happy?" he asked. "If you're happy,
say you're happy." There was no response.
But soon, urged to do a drawing, Jonathan sat down at a
table with a fine-tip pen and a CD album and with sure
stokes and crosshatching deftly caricatured the cover
photograph of Nirvana with Kurt Cobain, one of his rock
star idols, complete with rude gesture.
Jonathan's oeuvre has yet to be critically reviewed, but
John Thomson, chairman of the art department at the State
University at Binghamton, near Vestal, where the Lermans
live, said his work "would not be out of place in my
classroom." He called it "really exceptional, characterized
by an amazing lack of stereotypes common to drawings of all
age levels."
Lyle Rexer, an art writer, said Jonathan's work has
elements of Grosz and Bacon "without the horror and shame"
and made comparisons to the caricatures of the Mexican
satirist Miguel Covarrubias, Carroll Dunham and Al
Hirschfeld.
Like Jonathan, outsider art defies easy definition,
overlapping in some cases with folk art and covering not
only the disabled and outcast but also ethnic artists and
rural imagists like Grandma Moses and Horace Pippin. First
applied to work produced by psychiatric patients in a Swiss
asylum in the early 1900's, it came to embrace a wider
genre, championed by the Surrealists and Jean Dubuffet, who
dubbed it Art Brut, raw art, uncooked by cultural
influences.
This year's outsider fair, from Jan. 25 to 27 at Lafayette
and Houston Streets, also features the work of the
reclusive fantasist Henry Darger and other untutored
masters of the intuitively offbeat: a onetime Tunisian
shepherd who made his first charcoal drawings on the wall
of a bakery, an Englishman who began painting after a
mystical experience in a churchyard, and a Romanian who
swam across the Danube to flee Communism and is obsessed
with painting flying saucers. (Further information on the
fair is available at www.sanfordsmith.com.)
Science is still struggling to understand what two Harvard
neurologists have called "the pathology of superiority,"
the linkage of gift and disorder that explains how someone
unable to communicate or perform simple tasks can at the
same time calculate astronomical sums or produce striking
music or art. Some studies have found that fetal damage to
the left side of the brain results in overcompensation by
the right side and special gifts.
People with severe mental deficits and such gifts are
called savants, from the French verb savoir, to know. (The
term idiot savant has been discarded.) Earlier renowned
child art savants included Wang Yani of China, who painted
an astounding panel of monkeys at age 5 in 1980 and 4,000
other acclaimed works within three years, and the autistic
English schoolgirl referred to only as Nadia, who at age 5
in 1973 sketched a foreshortened horse and rider worthy of
a Renaissance master.
Jonathan, born when the family lived in Queens, seemed
normal at first, said his mother, Caren, a surgical nurse.
But as she wrote in an unpublished memoir she called "The
Solitary Heart," he cried uncontrollably at his first
birthday party and soon began lapsing into long silences.
He knew a few words but mostly used gestures to convey his
needs. "When our friends would come to our house, he would
find a wall, lie along its side and stare at it for hours,"
she wrote. "We began to wonder why he ignored us when we
called out his name, and why he'd pull out clumps of his
hair when he became upset about something. He would sing
the alphabet song, count to 12 and even learned to identify
some body parts. Then one day, without any warning, those
milestones in Jonathan's growth simply began to fade away."
It was, Mrs. Lerman recently recalled, "like someone slowly
turned the water off."
Jonathan's parents took him from specialist to specialist.
Finally, before Jonathan was 3, a neuropsychiatrist on Long
Island diagnosed "autistic pervasive developmental
disorder," a life-long condition that would keep him from
properly communicating or understanding what he saw, heard
or felt. Autistic people, they learned, are prone to
extreme hyperactivity and unusual passivity, and 80 percent
fall below normal intelligence, although many display peak
skills in the arts, mathematics or memorization.
The Lermans - he by nature introverted, she extroverted -
went through intense grieving and searched for
explanations. (They are now divorcing but still closely
share Jonathan's upbringing.) Mrs. Lerman came to think his
condition was either genetic or virus-induced in utero.
They hired a speech therapist and other specialists, and
when Jonathan was 3 they moved to Vestal to enroll him in a
behavior-modification program at Binghamton.
Raising him was heartbreaking, Mrs. Lerman recalled. At the
circus he embarrassingly helped himself to his neighbor's
popcorn. In a restaurant he once grabbed a stranger's piece
of birthday cake. Mortified, she explained the problem and
the table sent over another piece for Jonathan. At a lake
he heedlessly stepped on the bodies of sunbathers to reach
his blanket. For a while his diet consisted exclusively of
hamburgers, french fries and Coke. Later he added pizza,
but the pieces had to be triangular with very little
cheese, no bubbles and no oregano.
He watched a lot of television. "He was the only 3-year-old
who knew who Ted Koppel was," Mr. Lerman said. "He knows
all the sitcoms. It looks like he's not paying attention
but he knows all of them."
Jonathan showed no particular aptitude for art but drew
strange doodles. His parents started taking him to museums.
Picasso at the Guggenheim Museum did not move him, but at
the Metropolitan Museum, he tried to touch the blank eyes
of the Roman sculptures. A van Gogh exhibition at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington mesmerized him. And
passing the White House, he asked if Hillary lived there -
and Ken Starr and Monica, too?
Meanwhile, the Lermans, wanting another child but fearful
of the risk, adopted a newborn girl, Alyssa, now 9. Mrs.
Lerman's father, Bert Markowitz, insisted that Jonathan had
promise. "He used to say, `He'll surprise you, you'll see,'
" Mrs. Lerman recalled. In 1997, when Jonathan was 10, his
75-year-old grandfather died. Jonathan became very upset,
his mother said, asking constantly where he was and when he
could be visited in Heaven.
Not long after that, while Jonathan was enrolled in a
program in the local Jewish Community Center, Mrs. Lerman
got a call from his helper, Eryn Hartwig.
"You got to come over to see what he's doing," she said.
Mrs. Lerman asked wearily, "What, holding the other kids
hostage?"
"No," came the answer. "He's drawing."
And what drawings. Flowing from Jonathan's clutched
charcoal, five and ten sheets at a sitting, came faces of
throbbing immediacy, harrowing and comical. Some,
hauntingly specific, seemed to portray people Jonathan
knew.
"I didn't know what I had on my hands," Mrs. Lerman said.
She thought her father's death might have unlocked
something within Jonathan. "I became spiritual," she said.
"Like, he's orchestrating this."
In the magazine Raw Vision, devoted to outsider art, she
looked up some galleries and called to see if any would
look at Jonathan's work. None seemed interested. Mr. Schuss
of K. S. Art gave her a hearing but counseled patience.
"Lady," he told Mrs. Lerman, "he's only 10 years old, let
him draw." But then, he said, "As soon as I saw the slides,
I flipped." Within two years Jonathan, at 12, had his first
solo show.
Meanwhile, Jonathan continued in school, mainstreamed as
much as possible. He reads swiftly, flying through the
words but often not understanding them. He grew enamored of
rock music and took up the guitar, struggling to play, and
tried his hand at painting and sculpture with indifferent
results. Clearly, drawing with charcoal and pastels is his
medium.
A second one-person show at K. S. Art was scheduled for
last September and was postponed a month because of the
World Trade Center attack. With downtown still in shambles,
few attended Jonathan's exhibition.
In his latest work, some of which will be shown at the
Outsider Art Fair, Jonathan expresses more of what is on
his mind, Mr. Schuss said. "He's putting in more
backgrounds, there are sexual references, people smoking,
adolescence and rock MTV references."
To what extent Jonathan knows the hit he has made is not
clear. "Jonathan's capacity to understand is not that
great," Mrs. Lerman said. "I said, 'People really love your
art,' and he was happy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/16/arts/design/16OUTS.html?ex=1012182373&ei=1&en=abd9b43a3de39ce2
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