Outsider Art: Moving in from the Margins

▪ 2008

Colin Rhodes One of the most talked-about exhibitions of 2007 showcased the work of Mexican-born Martín Ramírez (1895–1963), who worked entirely within the confines of the California psychiatric hospital where he was a patient for the greater part of his adult life. His work was long known and highly prized among those interested in outsider art, and in 2007 nearly 100 of his amazing large and sophisticated works were introduced to a much wider audience, first at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City and subsequently at the Milwaukee (Wis.) Art Museum. The New York Times described the exhibit as “one of the best shows of the season” and went so far as to declare Ramírez “one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.” In late October the near-miraculous survival of another 144 drawings from the last years of Ramírez's life was reported.

      Outsider art comes from the hands of artists who do not play the art game—not by choice but by circumstance. The “classic” figures of outsider art were socially or culturally marginal figures. They were usually undereducated; they almost invariably embraced unconventional views of the world, sometimes alien to the prevailing dominant culture; and they often had been diagnosed as mentally ill. These people nevertheless produced—out of adversity and with no eye on fame or fortune—substantial high-quality artistic oeuvres.

      The showing of Ramírez's work in Milwaukee confirmed a general move since the mid-1990s toward the wider acceptance of outsider art into mainstream galleries and museums and a recognition of its worthiness for serious art-world attention on its own terms. Other notable examples include exhibitions in 2005 at Kiasma, Helsinki's museum of contemporary art, and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. On the whole, however, outsider art continued to circulate among specialist dealers, collectors, and galleries. In New York City, for example, dealers could be found in the Chelsea, Midtown, and SoHo districts; the annual New York Outsider Art Fair celebrated its 15th year in 2007, attracting 33 dealers from the U.S., Europe, and Asia. A landmark exhibition of outsider, or “vernacular,” environments, “Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds,” was held June 2007–January 2008 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis.; one of the featured environments, Nek Chand's Rock Garden of Chandigarh, celebrated its first 30 years in November with an international symposium and festival in Chandigarh, India.

  Well-established major private and public collections continued to showcase outsider art, most famously the Collection de l'art brut in Lausanne, Switz., amassed by French artist Jean Dubuffet, who is commonly regarded as outsider art's foundational figure. In the 1940s he began collecting works of art made in unusual contexts; he considered these more authentic than the works of trained artists. In particular, he was intrigued by the art of psychiatric patients such as Heinrich Anton Müller, Aloïse Corbaz, and Carlo Zinelli; spiritualist mediums such as Augustin Lesage and Madge Gill; and other self-taught social isolates such as Gaston Chaissac and Scottie Wilson. Dubuffet coined the term art brut (“raw” or “unrefined” art) as the descriptor for such work. He defined the term in 1949 as follows: “We understand by this term works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part… These artists derive everything…from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art. We are witness here to the completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists' own impulses.”

      Outsider art had its origins in the psychiatric collections of 19th-century European mental hospitals. The works in these collections were solicited from patients and organized for the purpose of medical teaching and analysis. In about 1900 some of these artists and psychiatrists came to see such works not as medical evidence but as art. Two of the doctors produced early, influential books on the subject: Swiss psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler's A Mental Patient as Artist (1921), which provided the first monograph of an outsider artist, Adolf Wölfli, a long-term patient whose oeuvre the Surrealist writer André Breton considered one of the three or four best of the 20th century; and the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn's Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922), which became something of a touchstone for the Surrealists, especially Max Ernst, as well as for Dubuffet and subsequently many others.

 The term outsider art itself was introduced into the lexicon in 1972 by British writer Roger Cardinal as an English-language equivalent of the French l'art brut. By the 1980s, however, the term had expanded to encompass a much greater range of vernacular and “marginal” arts. This broadening was particularly important in the U.S., where a rich vein of art that reflected racial, religious, and localized histories rather than psychiatric or spiritualist ones had grown independently from art brut. Known successively—and at times concurrently—as “popular painting,” “modern primitive art,” “self-taught art,” and “contemporary folk art,” works from the American scene were first made visible and analyzed in the 1930s by curator Holger Cahill, collector Sidney Janis, and others. Some of the first such American artists to be identified were Horace Pippin, William Edmondson, and Morris Hirshfield. Although none of these artists conformed to the European idea of pathological artists, they were viewed in much the same way—as naïfs whose creative strength lay in some presumed innocence and authenticity. Later these artists would be joined by others, including Joseph Yoakum, Minnie Evans, Bill Traylor, James Castle, and, perhaps most famous of all, Henry Darger, a janitor from Chicago whose 15,000-page saga In the Realms of the Unreal came to public notice only after his death. Outsider art further benefited from the addition at the end of the 20th century of figures such as the impressive fibre artist Judith Scott, who had Down syndrome and was deaf; Dwight Mackintosh, who was cognitively disabled and began drawing after his release from years of confinement in psychiatric hospitals; and Roy Wenzel, an autistic Dutch artist who developed a distinctive approach to colour and visual narrative.

      The artists Dubuffet chose to put in his category of art brut were socially marginalized—often denied not only their liberty but also their status as adults. Nevertheless, even the most distant of them—who were autistic or resided in other realities—did not create art out of nothing. For example, Wölfli and Ramírez, who had been held up as paragons of uninfluenced creativity, in fact had deep connections with culture outside the psychiatric hospital, both before and after confinement, that were formative in their artwork and important aspects of its content. For other outsider artists, such as Howard Finster or Traylor, content and context were uppermost in their work.

      One of the threads connecting the groups within the outsider art category is the tendency of the artists to be “straight talking” (even if that talk is straight from a radically different worldview). Outsider art used to be seen as a kind of evolutionary prototype for much of modernist practice, but considered by itself, it was valued for its essential difference from that practice. By 2007 the work of outsiders could often look like an awkward version of what Dubuffet scathingly called the “usual art”—that is, the accepted and acceptable production of the contemporary mainstream. The confusion was more likely to result from “outsiderish” trends among trained artists than from any wish of outsiders to fit in. Because outsider art tends to concern itself primarily with its message, the works often seemed more readily accessible and visually coherent to audiences in 2007 than those of the mainstream artists whose spaces it had begun to invade.

Colin Rhodes is the Dean of the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, and the author of Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives.

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