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Robertson remained in Louisiana after his marriage ended and became a recluse. He was largely scorned by his neighbors and was overcome by misogynistic rage towards his former wife and women in general. Robertson developed paranoid schizophrenia and claimed to have had his first vision, a futuristic vision of a spaceship with God as the driver, when he was fourteen. When his marriage ended he began to record his visions in his imagery and writings. Numerous hallucinatory visions of space travel where aliens predicted the End of Days through complex numerological formulas and warned him about the dangers of adultery and fornication led Robertson to believe that he was a victim of a global female conspiracy. He believed that his ex-wife's betrayal would be the cause of the cataclysmic destruction of humanity, and that his art was divinely sanctioned. Robertson saw himself as a patriarch in search of a new Zion and a prophet whose legacy would consist of his apocryphal work. Robertson identified himself as "Libra Patriarch Prophet Lord Archbishop Apostle Visionary Mystic Psychic Saint Royal Robertson".
Robertson worked on materials like poster board and paper or wood using magic markers, tempera paint, colored pencils, ballpoint pens, and glitter. He studied the Bible and there are many references to it in his work together with references to "girlie magazines", comic strips and science fiction. He was preoccupied with numerology and biblical prophecies of the End of Days from the Book of Revelation. Frequent themes included images of aliens and their spaceships, Bible verses and religious references, fire breathing, godzilla-like monsters, snakes, architectural drawings of houses and temples in futuristic cities, superheroes, and portraits of Adell often identified with Jezebel and other Amazon-like "harlots". His colorful drawings often included rambling, judgmental, ranting texts, sometimes in comic book-like speech balloons, about "adulterous whores" and unfaithful spouses. He frequently referenced precise and painful moments in his life, particularly his wife's unfaithfulness to him, and produced calendars chronicling memories of his marriage in short journal notations scribbled in each date's block. Much of his work included images that conveyed a sense of the artist pitted against the forces of evil. His works were often double-sided and when he signed pieces, he would add "Prophet" to the front of his name, or alternatively "Patriarch".
Robertson's home and yard were decorated with hundreds of his signs, drawings, calendars, and shrines. The exterior was decorated with a variety of painted and rotating signs including warnings that "whores" and "bastards" should stay away and misogynistic messages denouncing "bad" women often addressed to his ex-wife Adell. The interior was decorated with his drawings pinned to every available wall. Many drawings inside his home were of his ex-wife and the interior included a number of shrines dedicated to her. According to Allamel, Robertson developed a "complicated spatial ritualization" before he would allow visitors into his "sacred/profane inner space".[16] His home was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in August 1992. Two collectors helped him file papers with the federal government to recover from his losses.
Robertson's work has been featured in many exhibitions and a number of works are held in permanent collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Mississippi Museum of Art; the Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana; the Brogan Museum, the American Visionary Art Museum and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas.
Robertson was found lying unconscious in the backyard of his home by his daughter Dinah. He had died suddenly from a heart attack on July 5, 1997 in Louisiana, aged 66.
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ART IN REVIEW
Prophet Royal Robertson: ‘No Proud Bastards’‘Project Stewart Home’
White Columns
320 West 13th Street, West Village
Through Saturday
Prophet Royal Robertson (1931-97) is not going gently into any outsider-art canon. As demonstrated by the first in-depth exhibition of his art in New York, the efforts of this Louisiana sign painter are too raw and unruly, his style too bristling and changeable. Looking at his work, you appreciate the sublime consistency of artists like Martin Ramirez or James Castle, but this in turn clarifies Robertson’s singular and noisome wildness, the volatile fusion of image, language and unvarnished emotion that he achieved.
He believed in space aliens and was fluent in the Bible and furious with his former wife, Adell. (“No Divorce Whore’s Allowed” announces one of the first signs in the exhibition.) Festooned with texts in tight, curling calligraphy, some drawings suggest pages from crazed illuminated manuscripts. Others isolate the complex geometric, implicitly metallic forms of spaceships, cars or weapons. In contrast he had a thing for sparkle and a penchant for sweetly colored futuristic architecture. In one of the best, more anomalous images, he uses shades of yellow and amber and patches of stippling to render a delicate vista of mountains whose thin, twisted peaks suggest narwhal tusks. There’s definitely a fingernails-on-chalkboard quality to Robertson’s sensibility that is part of its allure and perhaps a limitation. But as an introduction, this is a memorable show that whets the appetite for further exposure. It has been organized by the New York-based artists Scott Ogden and Erik Parker, who discovered Robertson’s work in Raw magazine when they were art students and met him the year before he died.
In terms of resistance to easy absorption, Robertson’s work is more than matched by White Columns’ second show: the first American exhibition devoted to Stewart Home, the British oppositional artist, latter-day Situationist, writer, editor, filmmaker, punk-rock musician, anti-art prankster and all-around contrarian who has been a thorn in the side of the British art and literary establishments for nearly 30 years. The exhibition includes a video interview concerning Mr. Home’s 1990-93 Art Strike, during which he purportedly abstained from cultural production, and copies of his fanzine Smile and his parodist pulp-fiction, including a sculpture made from stacks of his 2005 novel “Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton.” A brochure written by Mr. Home explains a lot, if not everything. For that, there is his lavishly detailed Wikipedia entry, which also appears to be his handiwork. In all, few cultural producers seem to have been as busily and consistently canon-averse as Mr. Home.
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