Outsider art

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Adolf Wolfli's Irren-Anstalt Band-Hain, 1910 WolfiBandHainLarge.jpg
Adolf Wölfli's Irren-Anstalt Band-Hain, 1910
Anna Zemankova, No title, 1960s 16 Anna Zemankova, Bez nazvu, 60. leta.jpg
Anna Zemánková, No title, 1960s

Outsider art is art made by self-taught individuals who are untrained and untutored in the traditional arts with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds.

Contents

The term outsider art was coined in 1972 as the title of a book by art critic Roger Cardinal. [1] It is an English equivalent for art brut (French: [bʁyt] , "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created in the 1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture. Dubuffet focused particularly on art by those on the outside of the established art scene, using as examples psychiatric hospital patients, hermits, and spiritualists. [2] [3]

Outsider art has emerged as a successful art marketing category; an annual Outsider Art Fair [4] has taken place in New York since 1993, and there are at least two regularly published journals dedicated to the subject. The term is sometimes applied as a marketing label for art created by people who are outside the mainstream "art world" or "art gallery system", regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work. [5] A more specific term, "outsider music", was later adapted for musicians.

Art of the mentally ill

Interest in the art of the mentally ill, along with that of children and the makers of "peasant art", was first demonstrated by "Der Blaue Reiter" group: Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, Franz Marc, Alexej von Jawlensky, and others. What the artists perceived in the work of these groups was an expressive power born of their perceived lack of sophistication. Examples of this were reproduced in 1912 in the first and only issue of their publication, Der Blaue Reiter Almanac. During World War I, Macke was killed at Champagne in 1914 and Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916; the gap left by these deaths was to some extent filled by Paul Klee, who continued to draw inspiration from these 'primitives'.

Interest in the art of insane asylum inmates continued to grow in the 1920s. In 1921, Dr. Walter Morgenthaler published his book Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist) about Adolf Wölfli, a psychotic mental patient in his care. Wölfli had spontaneously taken up drawing, and this activity seemed to calm him. His most outstanding work was an illustrated epic of 45 volumes in which he narrated his own imaginary life story. With 25,000 pages, 1,600 illustrations, and 1,500 collages, it is a monumental work. Wölfli also produced a large number of smaller works, some of which were sold or given as gifts. His work is on display at the Adolf Wölfli Foundation in the Museum of Fine Art, Bern.

A defining moment was the publication of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken ( Artistry of the Mentally Ill ) in 1922, by Hans Prinzhorn. This was the first formal study of psychiatric works, based upon a compilation of thousands of examples from European institutions. The book and the art collection gained much attention from avant-garde artists of the time, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst, and Jean Dubuffet. [6]

People with some formal artistic training as well as well-established artists are not immune from mental illness, and may also be institutionalized. For example, William Kurelek, later awarded the Order of Canada for his artistic life work, as a young man was admitted to the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital where he was treated for schizophrenia. [7] In the hospital he painted, producing The Maze, a dark depiction of his tortured youth. [8] He was transferred from the Maudsley to Netherne Hospital from November 1953 to January 1955, to work with Edward Adamson (1911–1996), a pioneer of art therapy, and creator of the Adamson Collection.

Jean Dubuffet and art brut

View inside the Collection de l'art brut museum, Lausanne Losanna, collection de l'art brut, 05.JPG
View inside the Collection de l'art brut museum, Lausanne

French artist Jean Dubuffet was particularly struck by Bildnerei der Geisteskranken and began his own collection of such art, which he called art brut or raw art. In 1948 he formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut along with other artists, including André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss. [9] The collection he established became known as the Collection de l'art brut and the curator was Slavko Kopač for almost three decades. [10] It contains thousands of works and is now permanently housed in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Dubuffet characterized art brut as:

Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.

— Jean Dubuffet, "Place à l'incivisme" (December 1987 – February 1988). [11]

Dubuffet argued that 'culture', that is mainstream culture, managed to assimilate every new development in art, and by doing so took away whatever power it might have had. The result was to asphyxiate genuine expression. Art brut was his solution to this problem – only art brut was immune to the influences of culture, immune to being absorbed and assimilated, because the artists themselves were not willing or able to be assimilated.

Dubuffet's championing of Art Brut would not last long. Scholars argue Dubuffet's distaste for the mainstream art world helped ensure that art brut and the Compagnie de l'Art Brut would not survive on a commercial basis. Dubuffet would kill art brut as he defined it in his quest for its authenticity. [9] Three years after the Compagnie de l'Art Brut was formed, Dubuffet dissolved it, caving in to form the more conventional Collection de l'art brut afterward. [9]

Cultural context

The interest in "outsider" practices among twentieth-century artists and critics can be seen as part of a larger emphasis on the rejection of established values within the modernist art milieu. The early part of the 20th century gave rise to Cubism and the Dada, Constructivist, and Futurist movements in art, all of which involved a dramatic movement away from cultural forms of the past. Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, for example, abandoned "painterly" technique to allow chance operations a role in determining the form of his works, or simply to recontextualize existing "ready-made" objects as art. Mid-century artists, including Pablo Picasso, looked outside the traditions of high culture for inspiration, drawing from the artifacts of "primitive" societies, the unschooled art made by children, and vulgar advertising graphics. Dubuffet's championing of the art brut – of the insane and others at the margins of society – is yet another example of avant-garde art challenging established cultural values. As with analysis of these other art movements, current discourse indicates art brut is innately tied to primitivism [9] [12] due to its similarity in its borrowing of personal "de-patriation" and exoticization of familiar yet alien forms.

Terminology

JoeMinter'sAfricanVillageInAmerica1.jpg
AfricanVillageInAmerica2.jpg
Two images of Joe Minter's African Village in America, a half-acre visionary art environment in Birmingham, Alabama. Scenes include African warriors watching their descendants’ struggles in Alabama, tributes to black scientists and military leaders, recreations of the epic civil rights confrontations in Alabama, and biblical scenes.

A number of terms are used to describe art that is loosely understood as "outside" of official culture. Definitions of these terms vary and overlap. [13] The editors of Raw Vision , a leading journal in the field, suggest that "Whatever views we have about the value of controversy itself, it is important to sustain creative discussion by way of an agreed vocabulary". Consequently, they lament the use of "outsider artist" to refer to almost any untrained artist. "It is not enough to be untrained, clumsy or naïve. Outsider Art is virtually synonymous with Art Brut in both spirit and meaning, to that rarity of art produced by those who do not know its name."

Notable outsider artists

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Dubuffet</span> French painter and sculptor

Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor of the Ecole de Paris. His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement art brut, and for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adolf Wölfli</span> Swiss artist (1864–1930)

Adolf Wölfli was a Swiss artist who was one of the first artists to be associated with the Art Brut or outsider art label.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Visionary Art Museum</span> Art museum in Maryland, US

The American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM) is an art museum located in Baltimore, Maryland's Federal Hill neighborhood at 800 Key Highway. The museum specializes in the preservation and display of outsider art. The city agreed to give the museum a piece of land on the south shore of the Inner Harbor under the condition that its organizers would clean up residual pollution from a copper paint factory and a whiskey warehouse that formerly occupied the site. It has been designated by Congress as America's national museum for visionary art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aloïse Corbaz</span> Swiss female artist (1886–1964)

Aloïse Blanche Corbaz was a Swiss outsider artist included in Jean Dubuffet's initial collection of psychiatric art. She is one of very few acclaimed female outsider artists.

Rebecca Alban Hoffberger is the Founder, Primary Curator, and Director Emeritus of the American Visionary Art Museum, located in Baltimore, Maryland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gugging</span> Former psychiatric institution near Vienna, Austria

The Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic was a psychiatric institution located in the suburb of Maria Gugging on the outskirts of Vienna, Austria. During the Nazi era hundreds of mental patients were murdered or abused at Gugging as part of the Nazi Aktion T4 program.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean Tirilly</span> French painter

Jean Tirilly (1946–2009) was a French painter, born in 1946 in Léchiagat, Brittany, France. He painted in the Outsider Art tradition coined by the British art critic Roger Cardinal in 1974, first studied by the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn in the 1920s, and popularized as Art Brut by the French abstract artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s. Tirilly's oeuvre stands among the strongest contemporary examples of Art Brut in Europe. His deft technique and unusual sense of vision and purpose, however, stand in sharp contrast to the commonly prescribed features of Art Brut, notably autodidacticism and dissociativism. As such, Tirilly is also a proponent of Marginal or Singular Art, an art current that eschews many of the habitual artistic qualifiers be they subject, style, method, or purpose. His work is included in the Neuve Invention section of the important Collection de l'art brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pascal-Désir Maisonneuve</span> French artist and mosaicist

Pascal-Désir Maisonneuve was a French artist and mosaicist whose work is considered to be outsider art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collection de l'art brut</span> Outsider art museum in Lausanne, Switzerland

The Collection de l'art brut is a museum dedicated to outsider art located in Lausanne, Switzerland.

<i>Courre Merlan (Whiting Chase)</i> Painting by Jean Dubuffet

Courre Merlan (Whiting Chase) is an oil painting by French artist Jean Dubuffet. It has been part of the permanent collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art since 1992.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Augustin Lesage</span> French painter

Augustin Lesage was a French coal miner who became a painter and artist through the help of what he considered to be spirit voices. His style utilizes patterns and symmetry on a large scale, often accompanied by bright, vibrant colors. He was untrained and is considered an outsider artist, part of Art Brut.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vojislav Jakić</span>

Vojislav Jakić was a Serbian painter, renowned as an outsider artist. His paintings and drawings display phantasmagoric visions of death, insects and human insides. His most significant works are exhibited in the Collection de l'art brut in Lausanne and Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina.

Laure Pigeon (1882–1965) was a French medium who produced an oeuvre of 500 drawings related to her Spiritualist practice. She is considered one of the foremost Art Brut creators.

Jeanne Tripier (1869–1944) was a French medium who produced works of text, drawing and embroidery under Spiritualist influence. She is considered part of the Art Brut canon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucienne Peiry</span>

Lucienne Peiry, born in Lausanne on 4 September 1961, holds a doctorate (PhD) in the history of art; she is a specialist in Outsider Art, an exhibition curator, a lecturer and the author of several publications. She gives lectures in both Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe, and has been teaching Outsider Art at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne since 2010. Since 2016, she has also been teaching at the University of Lausanne

Magali Herrera (1914–1992) was a Uruguayan self taught artist who wrote, danced, acted and made films in addition to producing the oeuvre of paintings of Utopias, for which she is known.

Maria Wnęk was one of the most eminent representatives of Outsider art in Poland.

Juliette Élisa Bataille was a French textile and outsider artist. She created small embroideries with the character of paintings, by sewing silk, cotton, and wool onto rectangular pieces of cardboard. She is known for the works she composed during a three-year period at Ville-Évrard Psychiatric Hospital. She met the artist Jean Dubuffet at the hospital, who was collecting art brut.

Madeleine Lommel (1923-2009) was a French outsider artist and founder of the first outsider artist museum in Paris, l'Aracine which became the Musée d'Art Brut. She was a prominent supporter of outsider art in France.

References

  1. Conley, Katharine (2006). "Surrealism and Outsider Art: From the ‘Automatic Message’ to André Breton’s Collection". Yale French Studies, no. 109 (2006): 129–43.
  2. 1 2 Cardinal, Roger (1972). Outsider Art. New York: Praeger. pp. 24–30.
  3. 1 2 Bibliography The 20th Century Art Book. New York, NY: Phaidon Press, 1996.
  4. "Outsider Art Fair". Outsider Art Fair. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
  5. "What the Dickens is Outsider Art?" The Pantograph Punch, December 2016, retrieved 2024-04-13
  6. ""Outsider Art Sourcebook" (Raw Vision, Watford, 2009, p.4)". Archived from the original on 2014-06-27. Retrieved 2013-01-22.
  7. Cornell case study: Early Onset Schizophrenia – William Kurelek
  8. "Psychiatry in Pictures", British Journal of Psychiatry (2001)
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 Sherman, Daniel J. (2011). French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, 1945-1975. University of Chicago Press. pp. 12, 14, 111, 114. ISBN   9780226752693.
  10. Fabrice Flahutez, Pauline Goutain et Roberta Trapani, Slavko Kopač. Ombres et matières, Shadows and Materials, Paris : Gallimard, Hors série Connaissance, 2022 352 p. (ISBN 978-2-07-295610-2)
  11. Jean Dubuffet (December 1987 – February 1988). "Place à l'incivisme" ["Make Way for Incivism"]. Art and Text no. 27. p. 36.
  12. Koenig, Raphael (2018), "Art Beyond the Norms: Art of the Insane, Art Brut, and the Avant-Garde from Prinzhorn to Dubuffet" (PDF), Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences., p. 99, retrieved 2022-12-08
  13. Brut Force. "The Many Terms in Our Continuum". Brut Force. Retrieved 8 February 2017.[ permanent dead link ]

Further reading