For the American businessman who died on the Titanic, see
George Dunton Widener. For the American businessman and thoroughbred racehorse owner, see
George D. Widener Jr.
George Widener (born February 8, 1962[1][2]) is a self-taught artist who employs his mathematical/calculating capability to create art ranging from complex calendars and numerical
palindromes to
Rembrandt-like antiquarian landscapes to Asian scrolls. He was born in
Cincinnati, Ohio.
Collections
Widener's work can be found in many private and public
Outsider Art collections, including the Bruno Decharme ABCD Collection in Paris, The
American Folk Art Museum, The Art Collection of the
UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute, and The Collection de l’Art Brut. Widener has exhibited at the
Jan Krugier Gallery,
Salon du Dessins Contemporain,
Kunsthaus Kannen (Münster), the Islands of Genius exhibition (for prodigious savants) and others, and shows at the New York Outsider Art Fair, when New York Times art critic
Roberta Smith proclaimed that the artist was “one of the Outsider Art Fair’s most significant recent discoveries”.[3] George is also the subject of a recently published (2009) book The Art of George Widener by Roger Cardinal.[4] Speaking at an October 2008 hallmark event organized under the auspices of the Royal Society and the British Academy on the subjects of autism and creativity, Cardinal illustrated and detailed the 'truly visionary alternative worlds of George Widener".[5]
"And at Henry Boxer, on a par with the work of Dû-Glass, by which I mean high, are the drawings of George Widener, a British mathematical savant in his 40s, who covers surfaces made of tea-stained paper napkins with profusions of numbers and words. The most magnificent of these reviews the sinking of the Titanic in considerable detail."
^It was Cardinal who, in 1972, coined the term "Outsider Art" as an English translation of the French term "Art Brut" (meaning "raw" or "rough" art).
^Das Datum ist dem Genius sein Code (German for "The date is the genius' code"), Exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2013, report at spiegel.de (german)
Roger Cardinal "The Calendars of George Widener",
Raw Vision magazine (issue #51)