Last weekend in New York for the 31st time took place the world's largest fair of art brut and art of outsiders, marginal artists and self-taught Outsider Art Fair. This year the exhibition had more than 60 pavilion participants from 8 countries and 28 cities, dozens of outsider art legends. As well as the entire art community in New York, which traditionally admires non-institutionalized artists.
During the 4 days of the exhibition, one could get close to the pillars of art brut - look at the little brave girls of Henry Darger, who never knew that he was a great artist, Bill Traylor's ugly animals and Martin Ramirez's tunnel fantasies. Or just immerse yourself in the fantastic, sometimes uncomfortable and uncomfortable world of real artists. It's about people who create because they can't help but do it. And also about those for whom creativity is the only window into the world, which turned out to be unbearable for perception and existence in its narrow framework: we are talking about people with mental disorders.
Recently, the commercialization of Art Brut has been on the rise. And that's why outsider paintings can only be afforded by wealthy collectors. Why is this art becoming marketable, because the artists it popularizes have never sought to monetize? Moreover, many of them did not consider their creativity to be art. Therefore, they gained recognition only after death. Perhaps that is why almost every story of such an artist is tragic.
Obsessive motifs of detailed UFOs abducting people and cows, strange wooden dolls from the American South, diagram paintings, pictogram paintings, half-animals, half-mechanisms, Elvis Presley's biography in the form of giant paintings - how can one perceive this? Like a marvelous cabinet of curiosities or like a trip to the museum of modern art? We will try to explain how to relate to the art of outsiders and how to look at it from the right angle.
What is outsider art and why is it important
The term "outsider art" was first used in 1972 by art critic Roger Cardinal. But in general, this is the English equivalent of the word "art brut", which was used to describe the work of artists such as Jean Dubuffet. He himself, although he was friends with the surrealists and studied painting, was inspired precisely by art brut: the work of the mentally ill, children's drawings, spontaneous creativity. It was he who began assembling perhaps the world's first art brut collection in 1948. Then this word was called art that exists outside the official culture. And these are not only people in psychiatric clinics, but also hermits, visionary artists. Those who consciously despised the mainstream and the commercialization of creativity and continued to create for the higher realms.
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Previously, interest in such art also existed. For example, it was explored by the Munich expressionist art group Der Blaue Reiter, founded by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Artists thought about how to get rid of the cliches of academic painting. And they began to explore the creativity of children, the mentally ill, peasants. In 1912 The Blue Rider published an almanac of similar works.
Outsider art was inspired by the leading masters of the world - not only Dubuffet, but also Picasso, Dali, Duchamp, Dadaists, Cubists and Surrealists. It was not easy to systematize it - it is both art brut and folk art, visionary art, naive art.
However, since the 90s, largely due to the Outsider Art Fair and the emergence of the first art magazines dedicated to this phenomenon, art brut began to be commercialized. Critics became interested in him, other fairs appeared, specialized galleries and museums began to appear. Films began to be made about these artists - In the Realms Of The Unreal about Henry Darger, The Electrical Life Of Louis Wain about Louis Wain, who painted cats while his schizophrenia progressed. MoMA in New York is hosting a major exhibition by self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum titled What I Saw. Joseph spent his whole life painting landscapes of the places he visited, but they are not like any place that ordinary people have seen. In New York, since 1961, there has been a museum dedicated to "folk art" - the Folk Art Museum. Even though it sometimes exhibits touching folk quilts, in general this is one of the best outsider art museums in the world. It was in it that the huge exhibitions of Morris Hirshfield and Henry Darger were held.
In the last 20-30 years, the work of marginal artists has been a huge segment of the art market. Not a single major event in the art world takes place without representatives of art brut - from the Venice Biennale to annual exhibitions in contemporary art museums in leading cities around the world. And not everyone can afford this art. For example, in 2020 at Christie's auction, paintings by self-taught artist Bill Traylor broke records again. The canvas, codenamed “Man and Black Dog,” was bought for $507. This is another world auction record for an artist who died 000 years before his belated triumph.
Whose names are important to know
Henry Darger (1892-1973)
The great American writer and artist who never learned this about himself. He lived a tragic life. He spent his childhood in an orphanage, his youth in a boarding school for the mentally retarded (from where he tried to escape several times - he repeatedly reflected this experience in his work). Then he worked as an orderly in a hospital for 50 years. He had no friends or family. He heard voices, led a reclusive life, lived on welfare, died in a nursing home where his neighbors handed him over. After his death, it turned out that Henry had been writing a collage book all his life. This is something like a giant multi-volume art comics - The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion - "The story of the Vivian girls in the land known as the realm of the Unreal, or the Glandeco-Angelinian War, caused by the revolt of child slaves." The book has 15 pages. Each is a huge landscape, often with battle scenes. The book tells about little girls on a distant planet who rebelled against the evil tormentors who enslaved them. The girls are caught and tortured by soldiers. Warrior girls are often naked, but they have genitals like boys. This is because Darger had never seen naked girls and did not know how they differed from boys. There is nothing erotic in these works, however. Darger just wanted to emphasize how innocent and pure they are.
The book was discovered in the basement by the owner of the house where the artist lived before the nursing home. He could not throw it away, his hand did not rise. He tried to talk about it with the artist, but he ordered everything to be thrown away. However, the homeowner, himself a photographer and a creative person, published some of the work. And after that, world fame came to Darger. Darger had already died by this point. Researchers of his work believe that the artist suffered from PTSD after living in an orphanage. And so he came up with girls-defenders. In terms of the number of characters and the complexity of the plot, his book is compared with the "Game of Thrones" and "The Chronicles of Narnia".
Bill Traylor (c. 1853-1949)
Born in the era of slavery in the United States, a self-taught black artist is considered a titan of American folk art. Now his strange, faded paintings of people and animals are valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars. The artist worked hard in the fields and factories. And during the Great Depression, he was homeless, sleeping on cardboard boxes and living on welfare. Fortunately, Traylor lived to be 95 years old and managed to catch the dawn of his fame despite the fact that he began to draw a few years before his death. There was an immediate interest in his work. But the real success came to him after his death. It is curious that one of Spielberg's early films, The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker's book about a poor black girl from Georgia and nominated for a whole scattering of Oscars, is indirectly connected with Traylor and with the scandalous sale of the picture for half a million dollars. Steven Spielberg once presented this picture with a dog to the author of the book, on which he decided to make a film.
The most important thing about Traylor's work is how it reflects his real experience and memory. These are projections of his most difficult life path and an important part of the global pan-American discourse about the destructive role of slavery in the formation of African American identity. Traylor died in a nursing home, frustrated, ill, having lost his leg to gangrene and lost his will to live and work. One of his white patrons-friends kept all of his thousand-odd paintings.
Morris Hirschfield (1872-1946)
Polish-born Jewish American emigrated at a young age. He worked as a tailor, and then founded a garment factory with his brother and sewed slippers and coats all his life. I started drawing at the age of 65 out of boredom. Now his funny tigers and seals, both decoratively austere and terribly cute, adorn the world's leading museums. Hirshfield wasn't particularly keen on drawing the weird. On the contrary, he wanted to depict the real world, it just so happened that a phantasmagoria was obtained. This, however, attracted attention to him during his lifetime. Literally a couple of years after Morris took up the brush, two of his paintings were exhibited by the New York MoMA. And two years later, his first solo exhibition took place there. The artist left behind 77 paintings - they are stored in MoMA and in the National Museum of Art Nouveau in Paris, as well as in private collections. In general, we can say that Hirschfeld was lucky. He was adored by the Surrealists and André Breton, and the Getty Museum considers him one of the greatest self-taught artists of the 20th century.
Aloisa Korbaz (1886-1964)
Swiss artist, one of the founders of art brut. She dreamed of becoming a singer, but worked as a governess. She suffered from schizophrenia and spent the last 40 years of her life in psychiatric clinics. It seemed to her that she was having an affair with Kaiser Wilhelm II. When she was about 50, she began to draw with pencils on cardboard and wrapping paper. She painted mainly historical characters and heroes of films and books, such as Napoleon, Manon Lescaut and Queen Elizabeth. Fortunately, her work caught the eye of Jean Dubuffet, so they managed to save them. According to Dubuffet, by the end of her life, the artist was able to overcome her illness with the power of art - by accepting it and fully working it out through creativity.
Martin Ramirez (1895-1963)
American outsider artist of Mexican origin who moved to the US at the age of thirty and worked on the railroad. Ramirez developed paranoid schizophrenia and stopped talking. And then he even began to pose a danger, he was imprisoned in a psychiatric clinic. There, at the age of 50, he began to draw. When he was transferred to a clinic in California, his drawings caught the eye of Dr. Tarmo Pasto, who himself was an amateur artist. It was he who began to bring the patient materials for drawing and show his paintings to gallery owners. With more than 300 works left of Ramirez, the Folk Art Museum in New York in 2007 did a major retrospective of his paintings: sketchy, painfully detailed, depicting endless rails, Mexican patterns and claustrophobic tunnels.
Alexander Lobanov (1924-2003)
It is important to mention the post-Soviet outsider artists, who in many ways were victims of the harsh Soviet system of inhuman treatment of people with mental disabilities. Alexander Lobanov became deaf from meningitis at the age of seven, lived in a boarding school for the deaf and dumb, and later in a psychiatric hospital, where he died. All this time he painted insanely detailed and militarized self-portraits. As well as portraits of Stalin, Lenin, abstract beauties and Russian sailors. He loved weapons and constantly drew double-barreled shotguns. However, there is no violence in his paintings - on the contrary, they are cute and defenseless, and the weapon in them serves as a kind of ornament and decoration. Lobanov also managed to grab a piece of glory. In 1997, his art found its way into galleries, and in 1999 he personally attended a solo exhibition dedicated to his 75th birthday at the Yaroslavl Art Museum. Lobanov's works are kept in museums in Lausanne, Paris and Cologne, in 2001 a film was made about him in France.
Maria Primachenko (1908-1997)
It is even more important to mention Ukrainian artists of this genre. Maria is a Ukrainian folk artist, a bright representative of the naive art genre. Having been ill with polio as a child, she began to draw - displaying the fragile touching beauty of Ukrainian nature and not being afraid to give free rein to her imagination. So, outlandish animals, birds and plants came out from under her brush. She became famous during her lifetime. Primachenko's work has been exhibited all over the world, she was admired by Chagall and Picasso. She disposed of fame as best she could. She taught children to draw, created her own school-studio of decorative arts. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, 12 Primachenko's paintings miraculously managed to be saved from the local history museum destroyed by shelling in the village of Ivankov near Kiev, where they were kept.
Polina Rayko (1928-2004)
This Ukrainian grandmother from the town of Tsyurupinsk (now Oleshki) near Kherson lived a tragic life. As a child, she was taken to Germany to work and returned to war-ravaged Ukraine. Her adult daughter died in a car accident, her husband soon died, and his alcoholic son beat his mother and drank all the things in the house, after which he died of cirrhosis. At the age of 70, my grandmother, in order to cope with her sadness, began to draw angels, creatures of paradise - half-cats, half-cats - and sad birds on the walls of her empty house. Her entire pension was spent on the cheapest paints, so the neighbors considered her crazy. Grandma painted every piece of the house. She painted both herself in her youth and her late husband. She put him in a boat, gave him a bandura and drew him a whole battery of bottles so that he would have something to drink. The last work she painted before her death was her portrait on the back of the mirror, because there was no free space left in all seven rooms of the house. Only after her death did the curators pay attention to her art, the Pinchuk Art Center used elements of her paintings in exhibitions, they filmed her documentary "Paradise".
At the time of the beginning of the Russian war in Ukraine, the house-museum of Polina Raiko was still intact (volunteers looked after it). What happened to him now is unknown. “We have chosen a symbol of our cultural resistance,” Ukrainian journalists from occupied Kherson told the Guardian. “This is the dove of Polina Rayko, our artist.”
What happened at the New York Fair
The fair was incredibly eclectic. In places it looked like the setting for the films of Peter Greenway or Jan Svankmajer, in other places it looked like the trendy and meta-modern Whitney Biennial. And sometimes it turned into a clear and transparent tribute to art minorities, whose voices are lost in institutionalized art flows. Three main directions could be traced on it: the work of people with mental disabilities, American folk art itself (self-taught artists “from the people”) and the work of visionary artists, whose goal is to tell the world some important message or share a complex concept.
At the fair, there were many works created on the basis of workshops and ateliers that help artists with mental and psychophysical development to express themselves and their world. This includes the Arts of Life/Circle Contemporary gallery in Chicago, the Bronx-based ArTech Collective, which helps children and adults with disabilities express themselves creatively, and the New York-based Pure Vision Arts workshop, which works with autistic people and sells things like puzzles from drawings. "shopping cats" by artist Simone Johnson, grocery bags with visionary urban fantasies by Armando Nunez and pillows with New York stories by Susan Brown.
The German studio KUNSTRAUM (Nuremberg), created on the basis of an art therapy center for people with mental disabilities, also participated in the fair. Every day the works at the stand were updated. They were bought and had to hang new ones. First of all, they bought paintings with imaginary cities by a talented young man Daniel Moser. He has serious vision problems, as well as some social difficulties. Nevertheless, he was happy to be present at the exhibition.
“I drew all these cities from memory, but this is the memory of my imagination,” says the artist, leading a “tour” of his imaginary London, similar to a fairy tale, comic book and book illustration in the spirit of “find David Bowie”. “I have never been there, but I dream. Maybe someday I will. I also dreamed of New York - and here I am! But I've never traveled so far from home. This is the first time such a big exhibition. I am anxious, a lot of people, a lot of sounds, everyone says that I had a migraine in the morning. And I realized that I have to talk to people all the time, I calm down so much. When I don’t speak, it all around me twists like a whirlpool, and I want to hide in a corner. And when I speak, I return to reality. And I love that I'm an artist. That everyone sees my paintings, that everyone is interested in my work,” he said.
Self-taught artists are represented by the Carl Hammer Galleries in Chicago and Marion Harris (New York). As well as well-established art dealers like Cavin-Morris Gallery and Nexus Singularity (New York). In general, almost every more or less respected gallery has in its collection a couple of works by one of the honored masters of the genre. Some galleries - for example, Carl Hammer Gallery (Chicago), presented almost outsider bingo: from Darger and Wölfli to Traylor and Frank Jones. There are often no price tags in such paintings.
Gallery owner Andrew Edlin (Andrew Edlin Gallery) on the question of how much you can buy Darger, confidentially said: from $ 750 thousand. This is the average price of a good apartment in New York. Edlin is doing well without Darger's sales. He just bought a huge interactive panel of 84-year-old Tom Duncan, a Scotsman from New York who works in the Mixed Media genre and creates complex paintings-sculptures like "Portrait of Tom with a Migraine", which took the artist 20 years to complete.
Nevertheless, there are also enough newcomers - debutants only at this fair, but not in the world of art. For example, the Feheley Fine Arts Gallery from Toronto exhibits Inuit art for the first time. Among them are the paintings of the unearthly Shuvinai Ashun. For 30 years she has been drawing mythical, funny and tender stories from the life of the indigenous peoples of the Canadian North: Inuit women cradle small green walruses, octopuses and half-ducks-half-mermaids on their knees. But a deer man in a coat bought an iPod in the Apple Store and holds it in black hooves, funny monsters dance, breastfeed each other and pull out roots from the frozen ground.
At the exhibition you can also admire the new classics
For example, a graphic series of portraits of all ages of Elvis Presley with a detailed biography from the visionary astrologer and architect from Boston Paul LaFolley (1935-2015). LaFolley had Asperger's and a soulful passion for detailed science art in the spirit of crazy invention. When he had to lose a leg due to diabetes, LaFolley demanded a prosthetic leg in the shape of a lion's paw - because he was a Leo according to the horoscope. The life of Elvis in the form of eight giant canvases is the central object of the exhibition. Around Elvis all the time some multi-colored old women crowd.
One of the potential classics is Timothy Wyllie (1940-2017), a telepathic artist and visionary, as well as a musician and one of the most active participants in the 60s religious cult The Process Church. He painted a hundred psychedelic stories about the Apocalypse. Wiley claimed that it was he who once treated the Beatles to LSD, and also talked with dolphins, angels and aliens. Genesis P-Orridge introduced the New Discretions Gallery to his work, bringing gallery owner Benjamin Tischer a folder with semi-abstract paintings, in the center of each of which hung a UFO.
Many galleries specialize in specific artists
Someone is showing a selection of paintings by Texan Valton Tyler, who paints strange mechanistic surreal canvases related to the 1947 Texas City man-made disaster. Then, due to a fire on a cargo ship carrying saltpeter, 500 people died. Someone demonstrates a whole parade of Terry Turrell's good-natured dogs and cats. So far, you can buy them for only 2-4 thousand dollars. Turrell is in a sense an American Chagall - he draws big-eyed sad people, animals and birds, everyone is flying somewhere, cats turn into fish, smiling dogs soar in the clouds, horses hang in the fog, men timidly hug women, and donkeys and hares walk through the gardens of Eden with girls in bloom.
One of the galleries decides to join forces with musicians and artists to help the National Bird Society of America. And he creates a curated space “We are birds” with pictures and sculptures of birds, within which you can purchase a musical box set with bird-themed music from Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Beck, Elvis Costello and other superstars. It is part of the global project of The Birdsong Project. This part of the exhibition is very impressive - how different, it turns out, you can depict birds!
The audience that wanders through the exhibition itself looks like a work of art. Bright people as if in carnival costumes, similar to movie characters. Some ask the price of paintings: what if you can get a cheap future classic?
At first glance, cheerful feminism with traumatic overtones was also popular among buyers. For example, metal dishes with vaginas and mammary glands depicted on them from the Bill Arning Gallery in Houston. These anatomical sketches by the artist Tedra Caller Ledford were not very expensive and were happily snapped up by visitors. And, mostly, not the youngest age. “I bought this work in memory of my father,” shared one of the older ladies who purchased the dish with the vagina, “He worked as a gynecologist.”
Everyone managed to take out either a picture or a memory from the fair. Or at least the knowledge that you can not be a superstar, not get an education in expensive institutions and not strive for world domination. It is enough just to serve art all your life in order to sooner or later become known to the whole world.
