Ele D’Artagnan

1911-1987 · Rome, Italy

A vagabond actor who drifted through Fellini’s Rome posing with Dalí and de Chirico, and left 400 psychedelic drawings hidden in a steamer trunk in a wine cave.

The life

Born Michele Lombardi-Toscanini in Venice in 1911, D’Artagnan trained as an actor and lived as a self-invented flâneur on the edges of the Italian Surrealist scene. He met Federico Fellini in 1955 and took a role in Il Bidone, and his scrapbook holds photographs of him with Dalí, de Chirico and Gina Lollobrigida. He spent his last years in Testaccio, the Roman quarter where Fellini often filmed, and died in 1987. Years later a steamer trunk holding roughly 400 of his works was unearthed from a wine cave in the neighbourhood. His first exhibition came posthumously in 2003 at KS Art in New York, and the Museum of Modern Art acquired five drawings.

The work

Drawings and paintings on whatever was to hand: found paper, board, matchbook covers and packaging, in pencil, crayon, marker, watercolour, gouache and enamel. The line is psychedelic and the content charged with a cosmic, libidinous energy that looks decades ahead of its time. MoMA showed the work in its 2008 exhibition Glossolalia.

Why we love them

He acted the part of a great artist all his life and secretly was one. The trunk in the wine cave is the best plot twist in outsider art.

Go deeper

• Ele D'Artagnan at the Outsider Art Fair
• Ele D'Artagnan archive
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

← Back to the field guide