Most likely you have never heard of artist Peggie Hansen Bach (1921–2007). Nor had I until I discovered some of her remarkable book illustrations, which spurred me to start looking further into her life and work. Bach represents an artist typology I had never previously considered: one with a formal art education who decided not to pursue a professional career and mostly just painted for herself.

Bach frequently painted family members in or around sites such as the interior or exterior of her home, yet beyond this, even after further research, much of what she depicts is difficult to specifically identify. Many of the paintings seem to represent her own cosmos, an individual mythology.

This, combined with her lack of direct connection with the mainstream art movements of her era, would fulfill the basic definition of an outsider artist, save for one: Bach was not self-taught. She studied painting at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, then chose not to follow the conventional path of gallery representation and making a living with her artwork.

Markings and labels on the backs of some paintings suggest that Bach did very occasionally show her work and sell something, but she did not exhibit much at all during her lifetime, and the vast majority of the work is now in the possession of her family members. Her family, particularly her granddaughter Madeline Bach, herself an artist based in New York, is the primary source of information on the artist.

Bach was born in Copenhagen and came to the United States with her parents in 1925. She grew up in San Francisco and spent time in Hawaii, where she met her husband. She lived most of her life in Gladwyne, a small town just outside Philadelphia and notably also the hometown of M. Night Shyamalan, whose films, coincidentally or not, share characteristics with Bach’s work. (Shyamalan not only grew up close to the Bach family but also attended the Episcopal Academy, where Bach’s son Peter went to school.) A theme for both is the perception of things that others, even those close at hand, might not—an attunement to the potential for the surreal, the fantastical, the eerie, and the bizarre to be embedded in the everyday. Even the possibility of extrasensory perception, or the ability to receive information directly via the mind rather than the conventional five senses.

If pressed to name a contemporary with a similar voice, the first artist who comes to my mind is Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012), who also developed her own individual style full of fantastic imagery. Tanning’s works likewise give the impression that we are witnessing someone’s inner world, things that usually only dwell in dreams and the unconscious. Yet Tanning was intensely active in the art world and fully identified as a member of an art movement, namely Surrealism. She moved to New York in the early 1930s, where she met Max Ernst (to whom she was married for thirty years), Lee Miller, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and many others, all of whom enormously influenced her development as an artist and her art career.

Around the same time that Tanning was immersing herself in Surrealism, Bach was raising her family in Gladwyne and painting in her spare time; the development of her idiosyncratic vision took place worlds away from the avant-garde epicenters of New York and Paris.

Bach maintained a fairly consistent drawing practice throughout her life. She was an accomplished book illustrator who worked on the first edition of Edward Ormondroyd’s time-travel classic Time at the Top (1963) and on Elizabeth Howard Atkins’s Treasures of the Medranos (1957). But even here, the limits of our knowledge are frustrating. Did she need the income, or did she undertake her illustration projects for pure pleasure, like her paintings?

The five works in this presentation were executed between 1959 and 1971, and Bach’s granddaughter does not know of many other paintings she made during this period (these few others are more abstract and/or use unusual media such as stones). The featured works depict quiet scenarios—the outside of a house, a chair in an empty room, a staircase—yet possess an intensity and mysteriousness that gives them an outsize attraction. They all work together conceptually, but while one is detailed and more technically well executed, the next seems to have been made in haste. Apparently, when Bach had time, she would work more carefully, and when she did not, she would rush. She seems to have been unconcerned about whether or not something was finished in the conventional sense. So many questions are provoked.

The earliest work in the group is Peter’s Drawings on the Wall (1959). Despite the title, Peter’s drawings are not, in fact, the focus—rather, the primary subject is an old, shabby-looking Victorian chair in a corner. The tones are muted: brown floorboards, dark wood, even darker upholstery, beige walls. Despite the sophisticated play with light and shadow, the brushstrokes seem as if they were applied quickly and with vigor. The walls have cracks, and the seat cushion is ripped. The empty chair gives the scene an eerie feeling, as if Bach had been planning to paint a portrait of someone who never showed up, or is seeing someone who is not visible to us.

Peter’s drawings are hanging to the chair’s right, taped to the wall. Rather than clean, intact sheets, they have been ripped out of a notebook, or parts are missing. The top drawing depicts what most likely are two horses or a horse and a cow, yet these creatures could also be insects or dinosaurs. The subject of the second drawing is nearly impossible to discern, but if we allow our imagination to run free, we perhaps see a boy, a snake, maybe a fish, or just scribbles. The bottommost drawing depicts a yellow creature with legs or some sort of tentacles, red eyes, and a smiling red mouth, and seems to have been cut with scissors along the creature’s outline.

Bach’s son Peter was seven in 1959, yet the sketches look as if they were made by a three-year-old. Had Bach really kept them taped to the wall for that many years? It seems unlikely that a seven-year-old—the son of an artist, no less—would draw that naively.

Peter on the Stairs, also from 1959, shows her son looking his correct age, leaning against the wall, almost at the bottom of a staircase. The color palette recalls Peter’s Drawings on the Wall, but this work is much more refined; a conventional sense of finished-ness seems to have been more of a concern. Given the architectural scenario, the painting must have been made with Bach working in the next room. We see the doorframe of that room, which functions like a frame within the image, creating a painting within the painting. The staircase, steps, and doorframe fit awkwardly together; everything feels a bit crooked or twisted.

Even Peter’s casual lean seems slightly off-balance. I wonder if Peter, or his younger self that exists now only in the minds of those who knew him as a child, is the missing person on the chair in the other work. Even here, his presence feels precarious, given the otherwise empty staircase and lack of other objects—no pictures on the wall, no rugs or carpets, no windows, no furniture.

The spooky atmosphere piques my imagination. Peter flickers before my eyes, suddenly sitting on the chair, and the staircase now entirely empty. My mind is playing tricks.

Two remarkable works are Gladwyne Elementary School Halloween Parade (1960) and Gladwyne Elementary School Halloween Parade II (1961). Both feature a group of kids dressed in Halloween costumes marching down a hill. Between them we see clowns and harlequins, a scuba diver with the head of a frog, a cowboy, Jack Pumpkinhead, several ghosts, and, up front, Peter, in a skeleton outfit. The earlier painting feels like a study or trial run for the second, where details are finer and the characters are more recognizable; indeed, the kids higher on the hill in the first work have no faces. While the first painting situates the action on a small hill covered in autumn leaves with several trees in the background, the second features an exquisitely rendered dry lawn on which a few leaves flutter, a single, rather ghostly tree, and an equally convincing ghost costume.

The most significant difference is that in the later painting Peter holds a koinobori, or wind sock in the shape of a carp, traditionally used to celebrate Children’s Day in Japan. The flying carp dominates the middle section of the painting, giving the entire scene an even more surreal atmosphere. Jack Pumpkinhead is part of the Wizard of Oz universe, and indeed, these fantastical characters might well have jumped off the pages of one of L. Frank Baum’s many Oz books. Also called to mind are the works of Belgian painter James Ensor, with his specific interest in the grotesque, carnival, masks, costumes, skeletons, and puppets. Skeletons Fighting over a Hanged Man (1891) is probably the best known of his skeleton paintings.

Peter is the central protagonist in Episcopal Academy (1965), named after the school he attended. It was founded in 1785 in Merion, Pennsylvania, and is noted for its illustrious history and alumni. Bach here plays heavily with skewed perspectives. The background, we assume, is a building on campus. We see four windows, two of which are open, with a few students looking out. Farther to the right, at a bit of a distance, we notice what could be a teacher or the headmaster. Peter and his schoolmates are dressed in the academy uniform: white pants, purple jacket with the insignia of the school, a white shirt, and a skinny black tie. Peter, however, is looming like a giant in the foreground, and in front of him are two enormous potted plants that seem totally out of both context and scale.

While the children observe Peter, he is looking straight at us—but why? And why is he wandering outside while the other kids are presumably in class? This work epitomizes the ghostly intensity of Bach’s work, her mysterious and magical environments, and her play with dimension and perspective.

The final work in this presentation is House (1971), which again manifests many of Bach’s recurring themes—emptiness, pensiveness, play with perspective and architecture. The brushstrokes are bolder and more rudimentary, as in the flowers in the foreground, which are merely suggested by green vertical lines and colored dots. We presume this is Bach’s family home in Gladwyne, but something about it seems slightly unsettling. While it suggests a typical colonial house as are found all over Pennsylvania, it is narrower and taller than would be traditional. It almost resembles a tower, and the fire escape on the side seems incongruous. The place looks abandoned—the windows are only black rectangles, no lights seems to be on inside—but well kept. The dark sky suggests that it is early evening, perhaps during a storm, given how the limbs of the trees blow strongly to the left.

Peggie Hansen Bach’s works are haunting, fantastical, and highly imaginative, yet given the lack of information about her or a larger body of work that would lend itself to a more robust interpretation of her subjects and their context, we must rely on our imagination to draw what conclusions we might—including about Bach’s mindset as an artist. It is challenging, and yet to me fascinating, that we know so little about her and her intentions. Indeed, this not-knowing enhances the attraction, despite my frustration when I wonder what other works Bach might have made, what career she might have enjoyed, had she thrown herself enthusiastically into the art world. Does her upturning of the domestic indicate longings in this regard?

By rendering the familiar so peculiarly, was she expressing a yearning to actually reject a rational view of the world and fully immerse herself in the creative power of the unconscious—a world of dreams, nightmares, altered states, and unexpected encounters born from fragments of real life?

Some essential part of me wants to believe it’s impossible to be a part-time Surrealist. But I’m probably projecting, as with my flickering view of Peter first here, then there.

Jens Hoffmann