Sleeping Beauties

Paul Humphrey (1931–1999) claimed that the source of his first portraits, made in the late-eighties, were photos of students given to him by his daughter, a student and then later a teacher at a local college in Vermont. Humphrey told stories about his past and present that conveyed a very convincing image of his everyday life: he had been married three times and had two sisters in Philadelphia, who were all portrayed on numerous occasions by the artist along with his daughter Sandra—who he affectionately called “Tinker Bell”. This emotional closeness is what purportedly enabled him to tell a different story about each one of the “sleeping beauties” he painted. The women in these portraits, for the most part only the head and shoulders, are resting against a brightly-coloured background or pillow. Their eyes are closed, as also their lips, though sometimes the latter are slightly parted, bordering on the erotic or lewd.

Technically speaking, the artist performed the essential act of closing the eyes of his “sleeping beauties” with white-out correction fluid. His first works were a mixture of drawings that included originals in pencil, charcoal—using burnt matches to create chiaroscuro—and collage. He kept them in archives to which he periodically returned to photocopy them. Xerography allowed Humphrey to use colour pencils, watercolours and markers to shade the different tones of skin, the colour of the hair and clothing. The figures are often deformed to adjust to 30-by-21 cm sheets of typing paper, with parts of the body openly defying anatomical correctness.

From what we do know of Humphrey’s life, he started to paint in earnest following a heart attack that prevented him from continuing his work as a house painter. He managed to survive thanks to a modest pension and collecting returnable bottles and tin cans on the streets of Burlington. In 1992 he suffered another major setback when he became confined to a wheelchair following a stroke. Though many local artists supported him by buying his works and helping to organize exhibitions, his day-to-day life continued to be very precarious. Any money earned from selling his works was soon spent and by the end of the month he inevitably ran short of food and medicines. He ended up living in a homeless shelter where he was able to install a kind of improvised studio.

Humphrey died on June 5, 1999. At his memorial service the true story of his life came to light: he had never been married and he had no daughter. The women he portrayed were no more than fictional characters he had masterfully woven into his solitary life. The images he used to work with were in fact culled from mail-order catalogues or from magazines such as Playboy.

No one knows the artist’s analytical or philosophical reasons for creating these works. We do not know whether his “sleeping beauties” are only resting or if they represent some more lasting, perhaps definitive slumber. In the history of art, representing closed eyes involved an analysis of transgression, the forbidden and the sacred. Bataille asked us to question to what extent our perception and experience are determined by social expectations and how true freedom may call for deliberate blindness. Is the innocence and purity of these “sleeping beauties” preserved because they have not been sullied by the outside world? Did the artist intentionally close the eyes of those women in an endeavour to redress his position with respect to the world caused by his own misfortunes and solitude?

Irrespective of whether these images may underscore a fascination with states of ecstasy, intimacy and taboo, the inventory of materials and processes used in these “sleeping beauties” is equally enigmatic. The fictitious family construction given to these women, taken from real widely-available sources and yet returned to anonymity by means of an array of interventions, layers and duplications, suggests a parallel between the work and the life of the artist himself after discovering his true story. Who were these people often portrayed only with their first name? Who was Paul Humphrey really? Today, twenty-five years after he closed his eyes forever, we invoke his name and reawake his work.