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Outsider Art Breaks Into the Mainstream
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10077 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
1,952 Words |
| Author
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Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
Paul Klee's 1912 proclamation opens the director's introduction to the catalog for Los Angeles County Museum of Art's wonderfully original traveling exhibition Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art, currently on view in Madrid. Through the works of some seventy artists, the show persuasively demonstrates how "insider," or professional, artists have been influenced by the form and the sprit of "outsider" artists--those untrained artists whose creative act was necessary to them as breath, yet who rarely sought remuneration or public recognition for their efforts.
The insider artists in this shows include such luminaries of modern art as Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, and Max Ernst and contemporary artists such as Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jim Nutt. The outsiders, of course, are not so well known. They include a number of European artists such as Aloise, Karl Brendel, Joseph Crepin, Madge Gill, Friedrich Schroeder-Sonnenstern, and Helen Smith, as well as Americans Martin Ramirez and Howard Finster, the latter perhaps our best-known outsider artist.
Klee had called for greater attention to the art of children and the insane early in the century, but interest was to build gradually. In 1918 in Heidelberg, Germany, psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn began collecting artwork from clinical patients in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Holland .The result was his influential 1992 book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), which was widely circulated at the Bauhaus.
Many professional artists, like Alfred Kubin, felt drawn to the art of the insane because they believed it to be, in the words of Reinhold Heller for the LACMA catalog, "spontaneous expression of a liberated ego producing autonomously from a universal creative drive." Also, it is clear that insider artists have been attracted by the powerful imagery as well as the purity of such expressions, which are un-fettered by demands of profit and public recognition.
It should be pointed out that the outsider category also includes artists who are not clinically insane. This wide-ranging and well-researched exhibition therefore includes mural photographs of the phantasmagoric outdoor construction of Ferdinand Cheval's Palais Ideal (Ideal palace) in Hauterives, France, and the inspirational spires of Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles--both men may have been eccentric, but they were not certifiably mad.
Cheval was a postman at the
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