Where Bad Art is in Good Company

DEDHAM — Following the disappearance of a key piece from a local art museum in 1996, officials pled for the return of the work and offered a reward for its safe recovery. They took to the streets, scouring the curbsides and junk piles whence many Museum of Bad Art masterpieces had been collected. The theft of R. Angelo Le’s “Eileen” disturbed curators and collectors whose search efforts were in vain.

“It was very upsetting. We didn’t pay money for it, but we really loved it,” MOBA Executive Director Louise Sacco said of the work, which museum curators describe as “an infinitely interesting and sometimes disturbing neo-primitive portrait” of a girl with green eyes and a red beret.

“Eileen” was reported missing after a party was held at the original MOBA location, a private residence in West Roxbury. Initial efforts to recover the painting included trash night search parties and local media pleas.

“Over the years we had pretty much given up hope on it. We still had a reward offered,” Sacco said.

However, ten years later the unexpected happened. The thief contacted the museum via email, demanding a ransom. After Special Assistant to the Museum Parker McGurl negotiated with the thief, MOBA was able to bring the masterpiece back into the collection, proudly placing it in the basement of the Dedham Community Theatre earlier this month.

According to Sacco, McGurl witnessed the thief pulling the painting from beneath a bed where he had kept it for ten years.

“He had a wife and kids. His wife was furious, ‘You’re trying to teach our kids good values and you’ve got this stolen painting under the bed,'” Sacco said of the recovery mission.

The $36.73 reward was not paid out to the unnamed criminal, who agreed to return the work to MOBA if he was not turned in to authorities.

Since its recovery, “Eileen” has assumed a prominent position in the collection — set on an easel, only a few feet from the men’s bathroom, the painting is favorably lit by the museum’s lone ceiling light fixture.

THE START OF SOMETHING BAD

Arts and antiques dealer Scott Wilson discovered the founding piece for the museum at a curbside in Boston. Perhaps he was struck by what curators call the “transcendent and compelling portrait,” titled “Lucy in the Field with Flowers.”

When Wilson’s friend Jerry Reilly saw the work of an old woman awkwardly frolicking in a field, he urged Wilson to hold onto it.

“You can’t throw that out. That’s so bad it’s good,” Sacco said her brother Reilly told Wilson.

When Reilly moved to a new house in West Roxbury, he hung a collection of bad paintings and invited friends to view the collection. By the night’s end, 200 people had shown up.

As the museum’s reputation spread, bringing in larger crowds, including an unannounced “busload of 25 old ladies from Rhode Island,” MOBA arranged a move into the basement room adjacent to the men’s lavatory of the Dedham Community Theatre, where the rent is the perfect price (free) and the concession stand sells MOBA posters and T-shirts.

Although the museum is usually unstaffed during the day, visitors are invited to browse the work whenever the theatre is open and showing movies. Admission is always free.

THE BEST OF THE WORST

After seeing a movie upstairs, Dinna Yap, of Chicago, stopped into the museum. Her friend, Kevin Krueger, of Dedham, said “I’m showing her the best.”

Yap and Krueger laughed at the art and curatorial work of the museum. “The write-ups are the best,” Yap said, reading the descriptions that Curator-in-Chief Mike Frank creates.

“I’ve seen really bad art that I can’t believe was put in a nice museum,” Yap said, adding that some pieces she saw during a recent visit to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art could join the MOBA collection.

Krueger was disappointed his favorite MOBA work, “Sunday on the Pot with George,” a pointillist work of a man, who Krueger claims looks like former US Attorney General John Ashcroft on the toilet, was not currently on display.

MOBA rotates its 300-piece collection in various shows of 20 to 30 pieces in the museum.

“I would tell any guy, if you want to take a girl on an interesting date, this is it,” Yap said.

“There’s always laughing,” Sacco said of visitors’ response. “There’s about one person in 20 who just stands here and says, I don’t get it, I don’t get it.”

To those who question the museum’s judgment, Sacco replied, “If all art is good, then why is there a fine arts museum? Obviously some art is better than others. If we can’t say what’s bad, you can’t say what’s good.”

BUILDING THE COLLECTION

While most pieces in the collection have been gathered from garbage piles and thrift stores, others like Sarah Irani’s “Mama and Babe” were donated by the artists.

“The deal is that the artists figure if we turn them down, they weren’t that bad. And if we accept them, then they’re in a museum,” Sacco said of the self-deprecating submissions.

Some of the artists enjoy experimenting and sometimes donate pieces gone awry. “Sarah just about finished this and realized this did not work out like she expected,” Sacco said of Irani, who produces and sells serious artwork. “That’s what makes it interesting; she knows what she’s doing.

“We believe that any artist can produce a bad painting,” Sacco added, although “there are some characteristics of bad art that you see again and again.” Unnatural, identical trees and streams without logical beginning or end often appear in bad landscapes. “Overwrought symbolism” often qualifies a piece for admission to the collection, as does the unnatural representation of nudes.

“We have this nude,” Sacco said, showing “Pauline Resting,” a work not currently on display but included in the MOBA book and website. “If you look at this, her breast is suspended from her shoulder and her hip is dislocated. It’s like someone who never saw a naked woman imagined this.”

ART MOVEMENTS

While MOBA may have been the first to celebrate art at its worst, it’s not the only such institution around. The Museum of Particularly Bad Art in Australia modeled itself after the Massachusetts original.

Debbie “Stitchy McYarnpants” Bisson created an Internet museum, the Museum of Kitschy Stitches, and authored a book based on her love for kitschy knitting patterns from vintage magazines.

Bisson said she enjoys MOBA and shares in its artistic judgments. “We have a similar sensibility. We’re lovers of all things bad, so bad it’s good.”

In her own collection, Bisson noted the first item she collected as knitted, crushed beer-can hats: “I love the badness of them.”

Monica Kjellman-Chapin, an assistant professor in art history at Emporia State University in Kansas, said she plans to present “Collecting the Visually Reprobate: The Museum of Bad Art” at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations’ conference in February.

While studying kitsch painter Thomas Kinkade, Kjellman-Chapin came to think about exhibition spaces and “the common art world pronouncement that Kinkade is bad art,” she said in an email. Kjellman-Chapin first encountered MOBA as a graduate student at Boston University.

“[MOBA] provided me with an interesting corollary to Kinkade’s bad art – that is, it deliberately cultivates badness, both in terms of the work exhibited and manner of display,” Kjellman-Chapin said.

Kjellman-Chapin, who earned her Ph.D. with a dissertation on J.M. Whistler’s depiction of nudes, said she is now studying kitsch art work and movements like MOBA. “I am interested in how those phenomena intersect with more traditional art historical topics.”

Kjellman-Chapin emphasized the role of MOBA’s setting on the art viewer.

“Everything about the space and its contents — the basement, the men’s room, the bad lighting, the tongue-in-cheek labels and interpretations, the authorial anonymity — alerts the visitor to the bad quality of the work,” she said.

“The viewer then has an idea of what bad looks like, so that he or she might also be able to understand what good looks like, which will have as much to do with the quality of the hanging as with the quality of what is hung.”