Charles Steffen
(1927–1995)
BornChicago, Illinois, United States
DiedChicago, Illinois, United States
BiographyIn Charles Steffen’s graphite and colored-pencil drawings, human limbs are as gnarled as ancient trees, skin has a reptilian texture, and heads morph into radiant sunflowers. Even his most direct portraits of himself, his family, his neighbors, and other people he saw—from a bank teller to a burlesque stripper—have an uncanny appearance, with elongated necks, inhumanly large eyes, and deeply lined flesh. He used pieces of found paper as his surfaces, frequently covering both sides: cigarette packages, notebook paper, and brown wrapping paper that allowed him to work at a monumental scale, with some drawings measuring over eight feet tall. Each includes paragraphs of text reflecting on his life, whether memories of art school before he was derailed by mental illness, or quotidian details such as what he had for lunch that day. On a 1990 drawing annotated as a “self portrate [sic] smoking a pipe,” he notes, “I have enough paper left for another drawing and I do not know what to draw, but the lord will give me the inspiration . . .” A seated nude from 1994, in which the lines of a woman’s body ripple like currents, includes his recollections of a life-drawing class he attended years before and his “attempt to capture the feeling of the model.”Steffen spent most of his life in Chicago, where he was born, one of eight children, in 1927. In the late 1940s, he studied art and art history at the Illinois Institute of Technology. A nervous breakdown around 1950 forced him to drop out. In the years that followed, he was treated for schizophrenia at Elgin State Hospital. He subsequently lived with his family. He spent most of his time drawing, although much of his early work was destroyed. The surviving pieces mainly date from 1989 to 1994 and were preserved by a nephew interested in his art. In 1995, the final year of his life, he enrolled in a life-drawing class at Truman College, his first return to formal study in over four decades, resulting in drawings of people with more realism but still warped body forms.
Just over a decade later, his work emerged from storage, with its earliest presentations including solo shows in 2006 at Russell Bowman Art Advisory in Chicago and in 2007 at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).