Achilles G. Rizzoli

1896-1981 · San Francisco, California, USA

A San Francisco architectural draftsman who drew the people he loved not as faces but as buildings: his mother, rendered in his grief and devotion, became a cathedral.

The life

Rizzoli was born in 1896 in Marin County, California, and spent his working life as a draftsman in San Francisco, where he lived with his mother until her death in 1937. His father had disappeared in 1915, and his remains were found, with evidence of suicide, in the same year his mother died. Rizzoli absorbed the blow into his private project: through the 1930s he held little exhibitions of his drawings at home, the Achilles Tectonic Exhibit Portfolio, for neighbourhood visitors. He also published a novel, The Colonnade, in 1931 under the pen name Peter Metermaid. Nobody guessed the scale of what he was making, and recognition came only after his death in 1981.

The work

Immaculate ink drawings on rag paper in a grand Beaux-Arts idiom: portraits of his mother and neighbourhood children as fantastical buildings, plans for an imaginary world exposition he called Y.T.T.E., short for Yield To Total Elation, and hybrid sheets of architecture and poetry studded with coded phrases and initials. His work is held by the American Folk Art Museum in New York, Collection abcd in Paris and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.

Why we love them

He answered the hardest question in portraiture, how do you draw a soul, with an elevation drawing. Total elation, achieved by ruler and pen.

Go deeper

• Achilles G. Rizzoli at the Outsider Art Fair
• Achilles G. Rizzoli on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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