#rolfe kessler

Two Things:

Born in Austria in 1882, Rolfe Kessler was a small man who always felt more at home with animals than he did with people. He moved to the United States when he was twenty-one in hopes of riding racehorses. Unfortunately, his reclusive nature and poor social skills undermined any talent he had as a jockey. Out of desperation he began carving furniture out of wood scraps and selling it on street corners. In 1907 Kessler got an apprenticeship at the Philadelphia Toboggan Company, a top producer of carousels which employed many fine woodcarvers. He lasted a day and a half. But amazingly, using what he had learned at PTC, within a month he had carved a carousel horse in his father-in-law's garage. Within a year he had used this horse to convince the mayor of Zamboni, New York that the tiny coastal town should pay him to create a carousel. From 1910 to 1920, Kessler carved horses for four more carousels -- two in New Jersey, one in Pennsylvania, and one in Connecticut. In at least two instances, he agreed to lower his price in return for being given his own, private on-site workshop. His carousels always had two rows which included thirty horses and one chariot. But by 1921, his severe mood swings, and his angry insistence that the horses he carved existed as living creatures in a parallel dimension, had finally driven his wife, Amelia, away for good. When he realized she was never coming back, he put down his carving tools and went looking for her. It took him two years to find her. She died of tuberculosis soon afterwards. No one knows what became of Kessler after that. Homeless, friendless, and now passionless, he simply vanished from history. Kessler is all too often dismissed as a lunatic, a mere poser undeserving of respect because what made his work distinctive was in all probability the result of a chemical imbalance rather than true genius. This is not fair. No one can gaze into the painfully expressive eyes of one of Kessler's horses, or study the peaceful delicacy of his trademark black rose, and come away unmoved. They are works of art. To treat them as anything less says more about us, and our blind allegiance to conventional artists, than it says about them.