Norris Embry

1921-1981 · Baltimore, Maryland, USA

He studied under Kokoschka, befriended Wols in Paris, lived with schizophrenia, and has been called the first American German Expressionist. The word outsider barely holds him.

The life

Embry was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1921 and grew up outside New York and Chicago. He studied at St John’s College in Annapolis, spent a summer at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the late 1940s studied in Italy with Oskar Kokoschka, whose influence never left his work. From 1947 he gave his life to painting, fifteen nomadic years through Europe, Turkey and North Africa, befriending the painter Wols in Paris. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he sought treatment at Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore in the mid-1960s and made the city his home, painting until weeks before his death in 1981.

The work

Ink, watercolour, crayon and oil on paper, densely wrought and lavishly coloured: edgy figures, totemic faces and scrawled notations running together as one continuous visual diary. Cultured, well-read and widely travelled, he made work shaped by his education as much as his illness. It is held by the Guggenheim, the Hirshhorn, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Speed Art Museum.

Why we love them

Proof that the border between trained and raw is a line drawn in water. He stood on both banks at once and painted the river.

Go deeper

• Norris Embry at the Outsider Art Fair
• Norris Embry 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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