Andy Kane is standing in front of City Night, a large horizontal painting done almost entirely in black and white that shows a rat flying over the city of Chicago. Within the giant rat’s body are several animal and human creatures, and beneath it are grids of building windows; the rat clutches a small humanoid figure in its claws.
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One night Kane, who has long been afraid of rats, saw one running along the baseboard of his room at the residential hotel where he lived. He began the painting that night. “I had no choice,” he says. “I had to.” A nightmarish image, it expresses his feelings that “the rats . . . were not just taking over . . . in my room but the rats were running a lot of the world too–people rats.”
When Kane was 21, he was hawking his paintings on the streets of New York, but making almost no sales until Robert Bishop, director of the nearby Museum of American Folk Art, happened by. Bishop was impressed enough to buy a painting for himself, and introduced Kane to a dealer, who soon bought all of his work. But the dealer had typed him as a “folk artist,” Kane says, and when he changed styles the dealer lost interest. Kane was soon broke again.
