Ted Diamond American, 1938-1986

Diamond made gouache paintings on paper – intense portraits, dense crowd scenes, patients in the psych ward. Exceptionally raw, emitting crackling energy and deeply affecting, through keen draughtsmanship and superb color sensibility, the work evokes James Ensor and Francis Bacon with reverberating power beyond their intimate scale.

In 1966, art dealer Stuart Denenberg was sitting in his Boston gallery on Newbury Street at the age of 22 – Ted Diamond was 27, elusive, a bit “pixelated”, walked in with his drawings. Denenberg knew what his eyes told him – the gouache paintings were special – he immediately purchased two self-portraits that to this day he lives with and admires.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipola, Diamond spent most of his adult life under care, obsessed with death, eventually taking his own life on May 8, 1986 at forty-eight years of age. All works were made in a fecund twenty-year period between 1966 and 1986 when Diamond was living in the psychiatric ward of the Charles River Hospital in Boston. Although he studied off and on at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Diamond did not graduate and never developed a professional career. After his suicide a few hundred works that had been mounted in notebooks and kept in his room at the hospital were taken by his only heir, a dear friend of Denenberg's who kept them safe for over 30 years. 

The paintings’ energy, deft handling and powerful scale beyond their humble size recalls James Ensor’s visions and Francis Bacon's forms. Their emotional content is achieved through idiosyncratic draughtsmanship and coloristic mastery. Eben a few pure abstractions display the fever of schizophrenia. Robert Flynn Johnson, Curator Emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation, sees in them a "Jazz" spirit, a mid-60s bohemianism, and an “Outsider’s’” vision in the deepest sense. These arresting works have until been seen only once out of the notebooks in which they had been carefully preserved for over 50 years.

Stuart Denenebrg