Essay by John Beardsley, Guest Curator
Senior Lecturer at Harvard Universities Graduate School of Design

Miniatures are almost invariably appealing. Many of them--ship models, doll houses, and diminutive trains--evoke associations with fantasy or play. All are satisfyingly whole. Through reductions in scale, they allow us to see complete and at once that which we would otherwise experience only in parts. But miniatures provide still deeper satisfactions. The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss thought miniatures had "intrinsic aesthetic quality" by virtue of their very dimensions. He even wondered, in his 1962 book The Savage Mind, if the miniature or the small-scale model might not be the "universal type" of the work of art.

Although cultural commentators are less likely to speculate about "intrinsic" or "universal" aspects of art now than when Levi-Strauss wrote--our era stresses difference over similarity--there is still much in his ideas to give us pause. Most representational art is indeed a rendering at a reduced scale of something observed in the world, be it a figure or a landscape. As Levi-Strauss observed, even a depiction at "natural size" implies a reduction in scale, "since graphic or plastic transposition always involves giving up certain dimensions of the object: volume in painting, color, smell, tactile impressions in sculpture and the temporal dimension in both cases since the whole work represented is apprehended at a single moment in time."

Some miniatures are more appropriately described as microcosms, as they are diminutive representations of entire worlds. Frequently, these alternative realms are religious or philosophical in inspiration; they are promised lands or peaceable kingdoms that are ordered, harmonious, and whole. Even the largest depictions of such systems will be small by comparison to their subjects. "The paintings of the Sistine Chapel," Levi-Strauss noted, "are a small-scale model in spite of their imposing dimensions, since the theme which they depict is the End of Time."

Both the miniature and the microcosm are pervasive in the work of self-taught artists. Many use small-scale models to reflect on community history or to honor the important events or institutions in their personal lives. Oscar Hadwiger, for example, a wood- and metalworker who lived in Colorado, made numerous wooden inlay models in the 1950s and 1960s depicting his church, river boats, trains, and musical instruments; he also created at least eighteen replicas of the "miraculous" unsupported spiral stairs in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which were reputedly designed and constructed by his grandfather. Similarly, J. P. Scott, an African American who worked on commercial fishing vessels in Louisiana in the middle years of the twentieth century, made models of the boats he knew from personal experience. By comparison, Joe Minter, whose yard show in Birmingham, Alabama, narrates a whole history of African American experience in scrap metal and wood, uses the ship model to comment on the horrors of the Middle Passage, when countless Africans died on their way to enslavement in America.

Other artists use models or miniatures to give poignant form to their aspirations. Leslie Payne, an African American from Virginia who was inspired by a life-long dream of flight, made a whole fleet of model aircraft in his backyard machine shop. Charles Dellschau also dreamed of flying. A German immigrant who settled in Texas in 1850, he began sometime around the turn of the twentieth century to fill scrap books with plans for elaborate flying machines; unlike PayneÕs planes, DellschauÕs remained on paper.

The work of John Gavrelos, a Greek immigrant who ran a steak house in Beaumont, Texas, fashioned a bridge between seen and unseen worlds, between miniatures and microcosms. Gavrelos carved hundreds of Biblical scenes and made models of both historical and legendary structures, ranging from the Pyramids to the Temple of Solomon and the Palace of Xerxes, that collectively telescope Western history and myth into an assemblage of emblematic architecture. He displayed these creations in an addition to his restaurant he called "The Eye of the World Museum"Ñthe name adopted for the title of this exhibition, as it evokes the sense of seeing an entire realm in miniature.

Sister Gertrude Morgan, There is an Eye Watching You, pen and qouache on paper, 6 3/4 x 11 in., The Jaffee Collection, New Orleans

Other self-taught artists have pictured worlds that can only be imagined, using the microcosm to reveal their visions of promised lands. Much of the art of Georgia bicycle repairman and evangelist Howard Finster presented his image of the heavenly city or New Jerusalem foretold in the book of Revelation; he made both paintings and sculptures representing his visions of celestial architecture. The New Orleans street preacher Sister Gertrude Morgan likewise drew from the Book of Revelation for her paintings of paradise, which she showed in an entirely white house she named the "Everlasting Gospel Mission." Picturing herself dressed in white as the bride of Christ, she too imagined her life among the faithful in the New Jerusalem.

Howard Finster, Castle of Words, wood and glass, 72 x 16 x 16 in., Collection of John Turner

Inspired by science fiction as much as the Bible, the man who called himself Prophet Royal Robertson painted visions of UFOs and space cities that were as utopian in ambition as FinsterÕs and MorganÕs works. San Francisco artist A. G. (Achilles) Rizzoli, a conventional architectural draftsman by day, was by night the creator of plans and elevations for a perfect city he called "Y.T.T.E.," which stood for "Yield To Total Elation." The imaginary city included symbolic portraits of important people in his life as buildings; his mother, for example, was represented as a cathedral. Other emblematic structures organized the lives of Y.T.T.E.Õs inhabitants into their proper sequences, from appropriate marriages to timely deaths.

The creations of these self-taught artists seem to confirm Levi-Strauss's contention that the miniature has "intrinsic aesthetic quality." The miniature is indeed among the recurring typesÑif perhaps not the universal typeÑof artwork among autodidacts. However, rather than being intrinsic, their quality appears to be a function of the rhetorical ambitions of the artists. These self-taught painters and sculptors condense personal narratives and shared history into emblematic representations that suggest far more than their scale might seem to allow. Miniatures and microcosms in the art of the self taught are used in the revelation of powerful religious beliefs or intricate philosophical systems. They are a way of picturing the cosmos; they are the eyes of the world: past, present, and still to come.

© John Beardsley Guest Curator