By Michael Gibson
Published: August 26, 2000

The painter Gaston Chaissac (1910-1964) was a self-taught, idiosyncratic product of the French rural working class. Living in Paris in 1937, however, he happened to meet two professional artists, Otto Freundlich and Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, his neighbors. They introduced him to modern art, encouraged him to paint and showed admirable constancy in helping him and promoting his work.

The merit of Chaissac’s art was quite understandably acknowledged by Jean Dubuffet

when he first came across it in 1946, but Chaissac, who was then describing his style as “modern rustic,” had already been corresponding for some time with such prominent French artists and writers as Albert Gleizes and Raymond Queneau.

Chaissac’s parents were small shopkeepers from Avallon, where Gaston grew up with his mother after his father had moved on to greener pastures. In the 1920s, along with his sister, he happened to take some drawing lessons from a local chatelaine, a Mademoiselle Guignepied, who through a peculiar coincidence, also happened to give a few lessons to Dubuffet — whom Chaissac would meet only 20 years later.

Penniless most of his life, he was also in chronically bad health and often inclined to depression. He did manage to marry a schoolteacher — a social promotion of sorts — went to live with her in Vendee, on the Atlantic coast, where she had been appointed, and in due course he won a remarkable degree of

international recognition, including shows at the Ekstrom Gallery in New York. Locally, however, he continued to be treated with scorn and, as he once reported in a letter, “People here shout ‘Picasso’ at me with the same intonation they would use to shout” a particularly offensive insult.

I hope you enjoy my piece I did in tribute to this artist today.  I had tons of fun…how can you not have fun after seeing his paintings?  Now it’s off to writing land and I’ll see you tomorrow on Day 123!  1-2-3!  Best, Linda