Ugly Thrift Store Art

What do YOU find in local thrift stores? At Avenue Thrift, my favorite place in Ventura (which, incidentally, supports the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Ventura), I found an ugly brutalist folk art-style wood carving – two feet tall and depicting a one-legged man seated with a cane. For years I have been searching for the piece’s artist. Everyone who came to my house said it was the ugliest thing they had ever seen. I have a habit of picking up “orphans” – unsigned, ugly art from thrift stores.  

Here’s how I found the artist. Years ago, a high school friend leased a flat on Bleecker Street in NYC from a developer who saw in The Village of the 1970s great potential. When developer Ira Weissman died in 2023, my high school friend, who had befriended him years ago, inherited a naïve-art wood carving in the mid-20^th century folk art style; a piece created by Ira himself. When my friend sent me a photo of this work asking for an opinion of value, the work looked like my ugly thrift store find. I learned that Weissman’s mentor had been the Swedish sculptor Emil G. Janel (1897-1981). Janel, after a long career in California, was known for his Brutalist caricatures in the Scandinavian style of woodcarving. The Maxwell Galleries of the American Swedish Institute, located in the Phillips West neighborhood of Minneapolis, contains 35 carvings by Janel, donated by Ira Weissman. Bingo! From Ventura, a Swedish style naïve wood folk carving done by a 1920s immigrant to California was discovered.

Janel was awarded the Royal Order of Vasa by the King of Sweden in 1965. His technique was idiosyncratic. In the 1930s Janel had a summer house on the Russian River, where he gathered alder wood. He would soak the collected wood in a bucket to keep the medium wet (to Janel, wet alder wood was living flesh). The folk-art carvings, slightly grotesque, were termed “exaggerated realism” by the artist. Janel’s work fits nicely into the l970s tradition of handmade crafts, a direct reversal of austere Scandinavian design, angular and clean, which predates the 1970s crafts revival. The 1970s revolution in craft and folk art turned away from American mass-produced culture. The true expression of a person, it was discovered, was creativity, shown by a handmade work of art, especially if the artist had no formal training. Remember the early 1970s Isley Brothers’ hit: “It’s Your Thing; Do What You Want to Do! I Can’t Tell you Who to Sock it to…” 

During this period, museums began to realize that ‘artifacts’ and ‘artisans’ were indeed ‘art’ and ‘artists,’ blurring the lines between fine art and craft. An example of this was the founding, in 1961, of the American Folk Art Museum on Lincoln Square in NYC. The museum was dedicated to folk and self-taught artists; those who, like the Swedish American Janel, created art as an expression of individuality. A subtle political message was behind this movement, which eschewed the machine-made object (post-WWII furniture and décor) and turned towards “outsider” art. Unconventionality, as far from mainstream as possible, was reconceived as a statement of uniqueness. “Authentic” (a difficult term to define) American folk art was only a categorizable ‘field’ after the mid-20th century, when self-taught art was synonymous with American individualism, the strong influence of the counterculture, and social movements that shaped the post-50s decade. The early 1970s began a legacy of respect for non-educated creatives of all kinds: poets, musicians, woodworkers, shaman, dancers – those whose unique skills  and artistic identity brought ‘craft’ into the broader art world. If not for the ‘self-taught’ revolution of the 1970s, my 30-somethings would not be experts after reading an AI Google search. We trust non-experts today because of the “self-taught” revolution of the 1970s!

Many of Janel’s works were sold as “folk,” “outsider,” or “self-taught naïve” art, and I notice his human figured sculptures sold in both California and Swedish auction houses in the 2020s, as he has been rediscovered. Closely resembling my “lame” man, Janel’s Bodybuilder is equally imposing, and sold at Toomey Auctions for an estimated at $1k-2k. An old gentleman perched on a toilet at 5” tall sold for $1,747 at Stockholm’s Auktionsverk, and a dapper but ugly “Gentleman with Walking Stick” sold for $5,250. A carving created in 1922 called Skalvridning (twisting the bowl) at 8” high, shows two figures holding a massive bowl. The piece sold at Stockholm’s most famous auction venue, Bukowski’s, for $8,400.

Thus my “outsider” folk art in the Swedish caricature tradition, found in Ventura at Avenue Thrift – the Boys & Girls Club thrift store – is worth $4,000. Ugly, sure; but to me, interesting and emblematic of the 1970s (weird) folk craftsmanship revolution.