Raw Vision 107 by Raw Vision

RAWVISION107 SUMMER 2021

EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Frank Maresca, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels ASSISTANT EDITOR Mariella Landolfi FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger ADVERTISING MANAGER Susan Hirschhaut PRODUCTION EDITOR Aoife Dunphy ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P Borum, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernández, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell, Daniel Wojcik PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd Letchmore Heath WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com

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RAW NEWS The return of exhibitions, and some very fond farewells

BILL ARNETT – OBITUARY The sad loss of a true champion of the creators of the Deep South

WINCEWORLD Charles Wince’s home overflows with his creativity and his past

PIETRO GHIZZARDI From peasant roots, Italian Ghizzardi grew into an artist and writer

MADGE GILL Postcards and calicos: the scale and proliferation of Gill’s work

HUGO ROCHA A bold, graphic creator emerges from an art programme in LA

BRUTAL BEAUTY Extract from the accompanying book to London’s Dubuffet show

KOHLER’S ART PRESERVE A stunning new building to store and exhibit Kohler’s collection

BARBUS MÜLLER The trail to the truth behind the enigmatic stone sculptures

RAW CLASSICS The first in a new strand examines Wölfli’s Samoaaden = Brüke

REVIEWS Exhibitions and publications

GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE Details of notable international venues

ISSN 0955-1182

COVER IMAGE: Charles Wince, detail of interior, photo: Fred Scruton

Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) June 2021 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK, and distributed in the USA by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080. Periodicals postage paid at South Plainfield, NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Raw Vision c/o 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080, and additional mailing offices.

Raw Vision cannot be held responsible for the return of unsolicited material. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Raw Vision.

MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS

BEST DESIGN MEDIA AWARD

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD

WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE

UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD

GUGGING

Aloïse Corbaz

Installation, naive exhibition

August Walla

until Sep 5, and May 2021 – Apr 2024 gugging‘s new special exhibition naive.? naive art from the infeld collection runs until September 5. What is thought to be Austria’s largest collection of naïve art was started in the 1960s by stringed-instrument maker Peter Infeld and his mother, and continued by his widow and family. Works come from a range of European countries, particularly the Balkans and what is now the country of Croatia. Meanwhile, gugging’s new semi-permanent exhibition gugging.! classic & contemporary will run until 2024 and covers five decades of gugging art – from Josef Bachler’s iconic drawings to the current work of younger artists, such as Jürgen Tauscher’s new, boldly colourful compositions. Works by Oswald Tschirtner, August Walla, Franz Kamlander, Franz Kernbeis, Johann Hauser, Karoline Rosskopf and Leopold Strobl all appear, while an entire room is devoted to Arnold Schmidt and presents his most recent works on paper. GALERIE AND MUSEUM GUGGING Am Campur 2, A-3400 Marie Gugging, AUSTRIA galeriegugging.com, museumgugging.at Johann Hauser

Ivan Generalic (naive exhibition)

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GALLERY OF EVERYTHING The Gallery of Everything in London re-opens in May with The Art of Brut: an exhibition of trained and self-taught artists examined, investigated, collected and exhibited by Jean Dubuffet and La Compagnie de l’Art Brut in the 1940s. Featured artists include Gaston Chaissac, Aloïse Corbaz, Fleury-Joseph Crépin, Auguste Forestier, Augustin Lesage, Louis Soutter, Scottie Wilson and Adolf Wölfli, amongst others. GALLERY OF EVERYTHING 4 Chilton Street, London W1 For details: www.gallevery.com.

POCORART Jul 16 – Sep 5 Bringing together 240 artworks by almost 50 artists from 22 countries, POCORART World Exhibition Chance and necessity and ... will be the largest outsider art exhibition to be held in Japan to date. The aim is to liberate the raw expression of artists and people with / without disabilities. 3331 ARTS CHIYODA 1F Main Gallery 6-11-14 Sotokanda Chiyoda-Ku Tokyo, JAPAN Koruda Katsutoshi https://pocorart.3331.jp/world2021/en/

R AW N E W S AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM

Lee Godie

until Jun 6 AFAM has kicked off its sixtieth anniversary with Photo Brut, Collection Bruno Decharme and Compagnie. The exhibition focuses on the extensive art brut photography collection of French filmmaker Bruno Decharme – from the early years of photography through to present day, from traditional photographs to collages that rely on modern digital processes. It explores themes including sexuality and intimacy, image appropriation and social commentary, and identity and gender fluidity. AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM 2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023, USA www.folkartmuseum.org

Sugino

AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM

Woody Long

Sam the Dot Man Macmillan

Adrian Kellard

until Aug 1, 2022 Centred around three fantastical bedrooms created by three visionary artists as their personal refuges, The Science & Mystery of Sleep brings together the latest in sleep-related scientific research. The exhibition, which is located on AVAM’s third floor, explores the impact of sleep on our wellbeing, including links with obesity, diabetes and hormonal change, and the sleep patterns of adolescents. The hypnagogic state – and its power to enable fresh revelations in science, art and creative innovation of all kinds – is also examined. AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM 800 Key Highway, Baltimore, MD 21230, USA www.avam.org

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right: Brenner, far right, top: Mui, far right, below: Maus

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EUWARD EXHIBITION

Martín Ramírez

until Jun 27 Haus der Kunst will present an exhibition of the winners, as well as the nominated artists, of the Euward (European Art Award for Painting and Graphic Arts). The Augustinum Foundation – the Munich-based, non-profit organisation – has given out the international accolade for art in the context of mental disability every three years since 2000. Its aim is to promote artists who are creating outside of the mainstream, to highlight their cultural value, and to make their work accessible to the public. A panel of experts in the fields of mental health and art, including Thomas Röske and Monika Jagfeld, judged the work of 341 entrants from across Europe and selected the three winners: Felix Brenner (Switzerland), Andreas Maus (Germany) and KarHang Mui (Netherlands). The exhibition will be open to visitors from around the end of May until June 27, but a virtual exhibition tour is already available at www.euward.de/en/live HAUS DER KUNST Prinzregentenstraße 1, 80538, München, GERMANY

HECKLER’S DONATIONS ON SHOW Audrey Heckler

until Jan, 2022 Until recently, only a small proportion of Audrey B Heckler’s 500-piece collection of outsider art had been seen in public. However, the American collector announced last year that she was donating almost all of the works to New York’s American Folk Art Museum. “I love these artworks and have collected them with care,” said Heckler, who has been a trustee of the museum since 2003. “I want them to stay together and to be a part of the American Folk Art Museum – a place I deeply cherish – so that they can be enjoyed by visitors, scholars, and artists for years to come.” One of the US’s most important and comprehensive collections of self-taught art, Heckler’s gift includes work ranging from European art brut to that of AfricanAmerican artists. AFAM’s senior curator, Valérie Rousseau, says, “It translates a wide horizon of expertise, aesthetics, inventiveness, and artistic mindsets, as well as provides an in-depth global landscape of individual creativity.” Heckler has made an immediate donation of three works by Martín Ramírez, Barbus Müller (aka Antoine Rabany) and Achilles B Rizzoli. They are now on view as part of Six Decades Collecting Self-Taught Art: Revealing a Diverse and Rich Narrative, the inaugural exhibition in the new permanent Audrey B Heckler Gallery which opened in November 2020. AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM 2 Lincoln Square, New York, NY 10023, USA www.folkartmuseum.org RAW VISION 107

WILLIAM S ARNETT (1939-2020)

Arnett with Blueprints (2013), by Thornton Dial Sr, in the Souls Grown Deep Foundation warehouse, Atlanta, in 2015, photo: Edward M Gómez

William Sidney Arnett was an American art historian, art collector, curator, and tireless promoter of the thematically rich, technically innovative paintings, sculptures, textiles and other creations of vernacular artists of African descent who have long lived and worked in the Deep South of the United States. He died in Atlanta, Georgia, on August 12, 2020, at the age of 81 after struggling with diabetes and heart ailments. Known to his admirers and critics alike as “Bill”, for many decades Arnett worked with his four sons and other collaborators to identify and document the work of African-American and various self-taught art-makers in Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and other states in the southeastern US. Effectively, his research launched a field of study whose findings played a large part in stimulating popular interest in the work of outsider artists – a term he eschewed – and the growth of a specialised market in the US for their unusual creations. Arnett was unabashedly enthusiastic about the originality, thematic complexity and visionary character of the works he discovered and championed, which were produced by such economically underprivileged but technically ingenious autodidacts as Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Joe Minter and the female quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, an African-American community in southwestern Alabama. Without hesitation, but with what his detractors regarded as hyperbole, Arnett compared the inventiveness and protean talents of these and other self-taught artists to such canonical, modern-art giants as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. By the time of his death, the mainstream art world had caught up with Arnett’s thinking and bold assertions. Such prestigious institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of 16

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Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art had acquired substantial quantities of works by the artists he had promoted from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a non-profit organisation he established in Atlanta in 2010. Arnett was born William Arenowitch in 1939 in Columbus, in westcentral Georgia. His father was a wholesaler of dry goods; his mother was a homemaker. Later, as young men, Bill and his brother would change their Jewish surname to “Arnett”; they had grown up in the racially segregated Deep South at a time when Jews, like Blacks, were the targets of bigotry and discrimination. At the University of Georgia, Arnett studied the art and cultures of ancient civilizations. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in English in 1963, he headed to Europe, where he explored old cathedral towns, visited museums and examined the masterpieces of Western art that he had first seen in college textbooks. Later, he worked briefly in England. A few years ago, Arnett recalled that, after returning to the US, “I went out on my own. I travelled to Europe and Asia, and began collecting art, selling enough so that I could continue collecting. At that time, you could not find art from places like China, the Indian subcontinent or the Indonesian islands in a place like Atlanta.” Based in Atlanta, he assembled a diverse collection – his holdings of fine Chinese jade were renowned – and served museums in the role of what is now known as an art consultant. Arnett also collected art of the kind that the market used to call “tribal” or “ethnographic”. Then he began investigating the overlooked art forms that lay all around him in the South. In 2015, he told me, “It was there in plain sight: junk piles and assemblages of old metal, wood and found

FA R E W E L L S

Lola Pettway, “Housetop” Variation, c. 1970, corduroy fabric, 74 x 89 in. / 188 x 226 cm

Thornton Dial Sr, History Refused to Die, 2004, mixed media, 87 x 102 x 23 in. / 221 x 259 x 58 cm photos: Pitkin Studio, courtesy of Souls Grown Deep Foundation

objects on porches or tucked away in back yards. It’s known as ‘yard art.’ You don’t see it as often today as you did in the past.” In the 1980s and 1990s, his travels through Alabama and other parts of the American South led him to Holley, Dial, Minter, Ronald Lockett, Charlie Lucas, Mose Tolliver, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Emmer Sewell, the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, and many other Black self-taught artists. He created a large collection of their works and, with his sons and other collaborators, organised exhibitions culled from his holdings. As the art establishment and the media became aware of Arnett’s involvement with such artists, his rivals and detractors felt threatened by the implications of the aesthetic-historical claims he made regarding their achievements. For Arnett, their original visual-art creations were as worthy of appreciation as jazz and blues music, those other great contributions of the descendants of African slaves to American culture. In 1993, Morley Safer, a reporter for the CBS television network’s 60 Minutes news-magazine programme, produced a segment about Arnett suggesting that he had exploited the artists he had promoted and whose works he had begun bringing to market. Safer, who died in 2016, never bothered to consider the institutionalised racism by which Arnett’s artists had been brutalised throughout their lives and that often was the very subject of their art. Had Safer done the investigative reporting for which his programme was well known, he would have discovered, for example, that, at the time of his TV report, Arnett held the mortgage on the house in which Dial and his family resided only because, as a Black man in rural Alabama, the artist had no chance of obtaining a bank loan of his own. Safer’s unfair takedown rattled Arnett for the rest of his life.

Joe Minter, Captivity and Freedom, 2009, mixed media, 23.5 x 36 x 16 in. / 60 x 91 x 41 cm

In the early 2000s, Arnett and his collaborators published Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, an encyclopedic survey of the artistic phenomenon that had seized their attention. Packed with photographs and informative texts, it chronicled the artistic achievements of a people that had never before been recognised or critically assessed. Of the museum officials, art dealers and media figures who felt threatened by his discoveries and tried to thwart him, Arnett said, “Their actions were motivated by classism, power, greed, desire for control and, above all, envy. Racism is what allowed these people to get away with the destruction of culture.” Starting in late 2014, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, numerous American museums began acquiring large selections of the works Arnett had amassed over the decades through donation-purchase arrangements made with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Since that time, these institutions’ curators have begun integrating them into their respective museums’ permanent collections. Doing so has obliged them to reconsider the ways in which they present the history of twentieth-century art, now actively folding the stories of African-American self-taught artists into that narrative. Arnett proudly lived to see such respected institutions acquire the art he had spent a lifetime researching and promoting. In retrospect, this development unwittingly anticipated the serious rethinking of many aspects of American social, political and cultural history that more recently have been prompted by the Black Lives Matter and other socialjustice movements. Edward M Gómez RAW VISION 107

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WINCEWORLD Narratives of war, religion and his own near-death experiences appear in Charles Wince’s house, while Surrealism collides with Victoriana FRED SCRUTON

WinceWorld sits on an upmarket street in Columbus, Ohio all photos by Fred Scruton, unless otherwise stated

he sign, with wavy appliqué lettering, that hangs from the front porch of Charles Wince’s 1917 clapboard house in Flytown – a now-upscale residential neighbourhood of Columbus, Ohio – has become something of a historical marker: “WinceWorld Creating Magic in the ‘Hood Since ’88”. There is also a polychromed rocking chair and a taxidermy deer head hung with string lights to greet visitors. The decorative woodwork, the rocker, the sign and a stylised window frame are harmonised by a Victorian pallet of green, red, and yellow. The window frame and the faux-functional fence posts below might be described as cartoonishRococo riffs on the porch’s spindles and columns. Born with ADHD and dyscalculia (dyslexic numerical

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comprehension) in 1955, Wince nearly died twice in fire incidents. Aged ten, he and a friend were playing with matches in the family garage when an assumed-to-be empty gasoline canister erupted into a fireball that severely burned and scarred his back and limbs. With burns over 75 per cent of his body, he was invalided for months. Then, in his early twenties, he passed out while trying to smother a cabin fire, regained consciousness, and crawled out to safety. “Flames, fires, explosions” are recurring motifs in Wince’s work: “Just something that's kind of etched into my psyche at this point.” At school, Wince’s learning disabilities were interpreted as low IQ. Art provided a refuge for him. However, when he was 16, he was led out of school in

The bathroom walls are collaged all over and the cabinet opens to reveal a blade-shaving baby doll

handcuffs, and charged with possession and intent to sell marijuana. Although he was short of academic credits, a diploma arrived in the post not long after (“The administration did not want me to return as much as I did not”). He found work, which would last for 23 years, as a part-time postman. He says: “I was terrible at it. I didn't know the source of my problems with numbers, how other people could so easily use numbers... to find houses, or what side of the street they're on – which comes in handy if you’re a mailman.” During his thirties, Wince supplemented his income with what “might be called criminal enterprises” which sometimes led to life-threatening encounters: “Guns to my head, scenes of my life flashing

through my brain... In hindsight, these near-death experiences gave me a perspective and insight beyond others [who haven’t] endured such nerverattling events. Living outside the norm has fuelled many of the narratives that appear in my artwork.” In 1983, Wince moved from his apartment above a Christian bookstore in Newark, Ohio, to a run-down part of Columbus where he lived over a burlesque theatre. He bought “a real fixer-upper” in 1988 and began transforming it into WinceWorld. In the bathroom, he cut the original tiles into pieces that he used to create a mosaic of a dancing Pan figure and underwater fauna, on the walls above the bathtub. A “stealth bomber fish” painted on the bathroom’s

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“THE VOICE WHICH TELLS HIM HE IS ALIVE”

For most of his life, Pietro Ghizzardi was a landless peasant who, through his art and writing, asserted his unwavering sense of self GIULIA MORELLI

semi-literate farmhand, artist Pietro Ghizzardi (1906–1986) was without doubt self-taught, and today is considered to be one of the most relevant creators on the Italian and international scene. Born in 1906 in Mantua, northern Italy, he came from a

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humble peasant family and grew into a sickly teenager at a time that was marked by the deprivation and poverty that afflicted his community in the lowlands of the River Po after World War I. His move into the world of art was not expected:

above: Modella, c. 1960s, 20.5 x 31 in. / 52 x 79.5 cm opposite: Untitled, 1960, 19 x 31.5 in. / 49 x 80 cm, private collection

Grisolina, c. 1960s, 19.5 x 31.5 in. / 50 x 80 cm

all images courtesy of Casa Museo Pietro Ghizzardi; all artworks shown are mixed technique on cardboard, unless otherwise stated

it was a world that was incomprehensible to the people of his social class, judged as useless, dangerous even, when for so many it was difficult to acquire even the essentials to survive. As recorded in his autobiography, Mi Richordo Anchora (“I remember still”), Ghizzardi began to paint in 1929 soon after moving with his family to the southern bank of the Po, in the rural province of Reggio Emilia. Previously, he had been dazzled when he watched his cousin – a painter or, rather, a decorator – drawing a realistic watermelon on a courtyard wall; and, later, seeing an embroiderer sewing elaborate initials on to bed sheets, he was struck by the power of the symbol, a notion that would stay with him forever. At the age of 23, he undertook his own artistic experimentation – in secret, at night. The scarcity of artistic supplies led him to use old cardboard from a nearby nail factory, which he painted on both sides with colour pigments that he produced himself from substances such as herbs, animal blood, grated bricks and soot. With no formal knowledge of art history or drawing, Ghizzardi discovered realism, perspective and

chiaroscuro for himself. His experimentation was instinct led, following no conventional rules; it was empirical in its own way, and somehow achieved “classical” results that the artist chose to discard in order to achieve his own outcome. He invented a new language through which he gave shape and substance to his imagery. It was the start of Ghizzardi’s creative output, which would span 60 years and include his unprecedented portraits, his shocking women, figures far removed from any traditional canon, as well as his studies of the motion of the female body, so sharp and sensual, the result of a creativity without schooling and norms. He hid these first artistic attempts, but he was already convinced of the beauty he was creating. Years went by, his father and brother died, the farmland the family worked was lost. He was living with his elderly mother in the village of Santa Croce di Boretto, doing odd jobs that were hardly enough to ensure the pair’s survival. Throughout, Ghizzardi painted. He was at the very bottom of society, rejected by women, pitied and viewed with suspicion by the community but – unlike many outsider artists – he did

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TRANSFIGURATION Reams of calico murals and thousands of mesmerising inked postcards – more of the transcendental creativity of Madge Gill SOPHIE DUTTON

he mysterious and enigmatic artist Madge Gill (1882–1961) defied all expectations of being a working-class woman in the early twentieth century. Hidden away at home, she produced a seemingly endless wealth of unique artwork. While connecting to spiritualism, perhaps in response to her own psychological turmoil, she worked on her own terms, heedless of the male-dominated mainstream art world. Life outside her terraced house in Newham, East London, during World War II, was conservative, rationed and restrained. Her creative outpouring challenged all preconceptions of her supposed role in a gendered and restrictive society. Until Gill began creating at the age of 38, her life had been unsettled and beset with trauma and tragedy. Perhaps it was these early experiences that paved the way for her incredible artistic journey, inspiring her to make art and produce thousands of intricate ink drawings and embroideries, many of which reflected her obsession with spiritualism. Born an illegitimate child in 1882 in Walthamstow, East London, Gill was christened Maud Ethel Eades. When she was a young child, her family – unable to support her – placed her in an orphanage. At 14, she was sent to Canada to work on a farm as part of the British Home Children scheme which shipped poor and orphaned children to British colonies as labourers. Gill remained in Canada until she was 18, but in 1900 moved back to London and became a nurse at East London’s Whipps Cross Hospital. A few years later, she married her cousin Tom Gill and went on to have three sons. However, the couple had a difficult marriage and suffered a number of tragedies, including the death of their second child in 1918 to the influenza pandemic. Gill’s health deteriorated in the years that followed and a lengthy illness resulted in the loss of her left eye. It was around this time – on March 3, 1920 – that Gill spontaneously began to create art, often engaging in extended flurries of drawing. This activity, she said, was encouraged by “Myrninerest”, her spirit guide. In 1921, shortly after the start of her prolific artistic

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output, she gave birth to a stillborn girl. Her grief manifested itself in a deep depression and she underwent treatment for an undiagnosed psychiatric condition in an institution in Hove on England’s south coast. Here, she was encouraged to keep making art as a means of processing her traumatic experience. Gill went on to use the creative process as an emotional outlet for the rest of her life. Always channelling – or embodying – her spirit guide, she very rarely signed her own name on her creations, preferring to attribute her work to Myrninerest. Gill instinctively created inspirational, beautiful work. She produced intricate embroideries (see “Uncovered Treasures”, Raw Vision 103) and hand-woven clothing, and made detailed illustrations in pencil and ink. Her artistic intuition and her eagerness to create are reflected in the very foundations of her creations. She drew, painted and stitched on whatever materials she could get hold of and, as a result, worked at a variety of scales, from small postcards to old, ripped bed sheets and such enormous lengths of calico – 50 feet, in some instances – that one wonders how far she would have gone if there were no boundary at all. Undoubtedly, Gill's embroidery technique is intertwined with her illustrative style: meticulous and repetitive with a feeling of horror vacui. Her drawings are a mesmeric sea of free-flowing, often recurring pattern. They present a self-taught, unrestrained markmaking methodology. Drawing lines, dashes, stairways, windows and checkerboards, she layered the lines over and over, causing the canvas to seemingly undulate hypnotically and her patterning to come to life. Her artwork often features a young woman in flowing robes, but Gill never gave any indication as to who this figure might be; perhaps her guide Myrninerest, perhaps the artist herself. Known to frequently sit and draw at night by candlelight, Gill worked at speed, sometimes producing as many as a hundred postcard drawings – each one totally unique – in a single sitting. She was a master of harnessing the power of the most humble of tools:

The artist at work on a calico mural, 1947, photo: Edward Russell Westwood, courtesy: Getty Images

pencil, biro, pen and ink. Using these same materials and her own personal drawing technique throughout her artistic career, Gill created a remarkably distinctive style. One of the oldest known postcard artworks to survive is from her time at the psychiatric facility in Hove. Filled with characterful faces and figures, its inked lines appear to be much looser and more fluid than her later more architectural works – nevertheless,

it is clear to see that her creative explorations always remained close to her original inspiration. Although Gill is widely celebrated within the outsider art community, and represented in major collections – including Jean Dubuffet’s Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and the l’Aracine Collection at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Lille – the largest collection of her work resides in the place where

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¡VIVA EL COLOR!

In Los Angeles, the Mexican-American self-taught artist Hugo Rocha’s drawings have become known for their bold palette and strong sense of design EDWARD M GÓMEZ

above: Untitled (6), 2018 opposite: Untitled (4), 2018, 12 x 19 in. / 30.5 x 48 cm

all images: illustration marker and colour pencil on paper, 24 x 18 in. / 61 x 45.5 cm, unless otherwise stated; courtesy: Tierra del Sol Gallery, Los Angeles

hroughout the history of the visual arts, artists who have developed their own special ways of handling their materials and creating their works often have managed, through such original methods, to evolve their own signature styles. This tendency is as evident among art brut, outsider and other self-taught art-makers as it is among academically trained artists who produce their work in conscious dialogue with established art history and the well-known styles, techniques, and critical theories to which, as students, they are exposed. In Los Angeles, Hugo Rocha is a 44-year-old, MexicanAmerican self-taught artist who has developed a manner of drawing that is marked by a bright palette and what graphic designers might refer to as a clean, hard edge. Despite – or perhaps because of – his particular visual language’s regular use of composition-ordering grids and simple geometric shapes to depict everything from faces and their details to lamps, tables, trees, buildings and school buses, Rocha’s colourful drawings are remarkably vibrant and expressive. Since 2007, Rocha has taken part in an art-making programme for people with developmental disabilities

sponsored by the Tierra del Sol Foundation. The art studio he frequents is situated in the Sunland area of greater Los Angeles, north of Burbank, while the Tierra del Sol Gallery, which shows his drawings and the works of other participants in the art-studio programme, is located in another part of the city. Paige Wery, the gallery’s director, says, “It's unusual for a progressive studio to have a gallery in a separate location. We treat this space just like any other Los Angeles contemporary-art gallery.” Well integrated into the city’s art scene, the Tierra del Sol Gallery showcases self-taught artists’ creations in the broader context of the contemporary-art market. Summarising her own observations and those of some of her colleagues at the foundation and the gallery that she manages, Wery notes: “Hugo enjoys listening to music while he works and often breaks into song, singing in Spanish. His beautiful tenor often stops people in their tracks. He has featured the names of popular singers in some of his drawings, using precise, large-scale hand lettering, which he draws without using rulers or guides.” Wery and her co-workers recall that, when Rocha

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BRUTAL BEAUTY

Jean Dubuffet, Dhôtel, 1947, oil and sand on canvas, 35 x 45.5 in. / 89 x 116 cm, courtesy: Private Collection © Fondation Dubuffet, Paris / DACS, London 2020

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Barbican Art Gallery is holding London’s first Jean Dubuffet retrospective in over 50 years. “Brutal Beauty” celebrates the artist’s singular and provocative approach and the inspiration he gained from his art brut discoveries. The accompanying exhibition book includes an essay by Sarah Lombardi, director of the Collection de l’Art Brut, which tells of the erratic early days of his art brut journey from 1945 until 1962. Here Raw Vision publishes an extract which opens with Dubuffet, frustrated and conflicted, deciding to dissolve the Compagnie de l’Art Brut

“I

am putting “l’Art Brut” on the back burner; I no longer wish to become immersed in this enterprise to the extent I was in the past year; I desire to occupy myself with nothing but my painting.” When his artist friend Alfonso Ossorio offered to install the art brut collection in his mansion in East Hampton, Long Island, Dubuffet gratefully accepted. With his precious collection left behind, Dubuffet finally had the chance to really put his art brut project “on the back burner”. Yet even then it was not long forgotten. In January 1955, Dubuffet moved to Vence in the south of France, where the climate seemed more suitable for the pulmonary problems with which his wife Lili had been suffering. They lived in a villa and Dubuffet rented a small studio, which was replaced in April by a larger space that he had bought and where he could work on new artistic projects at leisure. In this new environment he became friendly with the dealer Alphonse Chave, who was to present his work at his gallery Les Mages later that year. Pained by the physical separation from his collection, Dubuffet aroused in his new friend an interest in exploring art brut: “Alphonse Chave became very interested in these things. We decided to undertake new research together and establish a collection in Vence.” From August to September 1959, an exhibition with the simple title of ”Art Brut” was organised and staged. It brought together works by major artists discovered

between 1945 and 1950, including Aloïse Corbaz, as well as discoveries made since 1951, such as the paintings of Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, and new treasures found in Vence itself, such as the work of Francis Palanc, who was born there in 1928. Dubuffet’s Provence retreat was therefore beneficial to both his own work and his relationship with art brut as he found a new élan for work made on the peripheries of mainstream culture. This prompted a degree of ambivalence about his collection in New York: in 1959, he told Ossorio of his wish to have the works brought back to France, but added “I know that you love them as you always have and it is probably better that they remain in your hands.” Though he did not envisage their immediate repatriation, the seeds of the idea had been planted. By 1961, just two years later, Dubuffet had become more resolved, buying a mansion on the rue de Sèvres in Paris where he planned to “install the collection of Art Brut [across] a ground floor and three upper storeys, with extremely spacious rooms”. With the help of an architect, he intended to renovate the spaces into beautiful galleries worthy of the collection, which he hoped would be returned the following year. Meanwhile, he desperately wanted to retrieve the metal filing cabinets of research and correspondence that he had also shipped to New York ten years earlier, with the aim of resuming contact with the various creators, collectors, interlocutors,

“ ...being as passionately attached to the collection as I am, seeing some pieces separated is a sacrifice like losing an eye... ” RAW VISION 107

He experienced an “aspiration to produce works that were absolutely unsuitable for being introduced into cultural circuits.” doctors and psychiatrists who had helped him form the original nucleus of the collection. In a letter to Ossorio in November, Dubuffet expressed his plan to install the earlier collection alongside the works he had collected in Vence, which were currently in the basement of his Villa Vortex, so that the two periods could be combined. In February 1962, with the collection’s departure for Europe imminent, Ossorio selected works from it for a public exhibition of art brut in New York. Although the works had been in Ossorio’s hands since 1951, they had been visible only to the select group of artists, writers and collectors invited to his soirées; now, a wider audience would have the opportunity to discover art brut at the Cordier-Warren Gallery on Madison Avenue. In parallel, Dubuffet was honoured with a major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, curated by Peter Selz. The following month, a frustrated Dubuffet wrote to Ossorio again, urging him to act: “I have undertaken new research, some of which has turned out to be fruitful and will increase our collection with numerous interesting pieces... [but] I am bothered by being deprived of my old archives, which hold so much information that I am missing on those correspondents whose addresses, and sometimes even

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names, I have forgotten. I am waiting with impatience for the shipping from East Hampton to get under way.” In the same letter, he agreed to Ossorio’s request to keep some pieces of art brut in the United States, albeit reluctantly: “As you can understand, being as passionately attached to the collection as I am, seeing some pieces separated is a sacrifice like losing an eye, and I affectionately ask you to limit yourself to four or five pieces as agreed on, and not the important ones.” Finally, in July, the longed-for works and archives made their return to Paris. Following their arrival, Dubuffet devoted his time to installing them in their new home, regrouping them by artist in a very dense hang that in places reached from floor to ceiling. Every nook and cranny, even the walls of the staircase ascending between the four floors, was used to present work. Dubuffet was assisted by Slavko Kopač, who had resumed his curatorial position. Several frames were made to order for paintings, and some sculptures, such as those by Émile Ratier and Auguste Forestier, were arranged in vacant spaces or on shelves, while plan chests housed the numerous works on paper. Some of the more fragile pieces were placed in glass showcases; these included sculptures made of bread and clay by the

opposite: Jean Dubuffet, Paris-Montparnasse, 1961, oil on canvas, 86.5 x 65 in. / 220 x 165 cm, courtesy: Private Collection © Fondation Dubuffet, Paris / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020 below: Jean Dubuffet, L’Extravagante (The Extravagant One), 1954, oil on canvas, 28.5 x 36 in. / 73 x 92 cm, courtesy: Private Collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020, photo: Joseph Coscia Jr, courtesy: Pace Gallery

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SEEING IS BELIEVING In Wisconsin, the John Michael Kohler Art Center’s new Art Preserve building is both a repository and a showcase for in-depth holdings of notable self-taught artists’ works EDWARD M GÓMEZ

The new Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, photo: Durston Taylor, courtesy: JMKAC

Seeing is believing – and to be able to peek behind the scenes and catch a glimpse not just of artworks from the John Michael Kohler Art Center’s (JMKAC) permanent collection that might be on view in temporary exhibitions but, instead, of the full range of its holdings in an array of different media and genres is to grasp just how ambitiously and discerningly this museum has amassed a trove of sculptures, paintings, and other objects over the last half-century since its founding in the late 1960s. With the imminent inauguration of the JMKAC’s new Art Preserve building, which will open on June 26, 2021, following a long delay caused by restrictions related to the coronavirus crisis, visitors will be able to do just that – examine up close the breadth of this unique American museum’s extensive holdings. The John Michael Kohler Art Center is located in the 50

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small city of Sheboygan, in the state of Wisconsin, about an hour’s drive north of Milwaukee, on the west coast of Lake Michigan. When it was first established and before it erected a large, modern building to house its expanding range of exhibitions and other programmes, the JMKAC originally occupied the former, nineteenth-century residence of its namesake, an Austrian-born industrialist who founded the Kohler Company, a manufacturer of bathroom and kitchen fixtures. That company and the related Kohler Foundation – both headquartered in the city of Kohler, near Sheboygan – have long enjoyed a close relationship with the museum. Over the years and often in collaboration with the Kohler Foundation, which funds and oversees preservation projects aimed at rescuing art environments produced by autodidacts in Wisconsin and other parts of the United States, the JMKAC has exhibited and acquired

top and below: Items from Ray Yoshida’s collection installed in the Art Preserve evoke the way they were displayed in his own home, photo: JMKAC

various fragile, artistically noteworthy elements of such site-specific creations. In this way, the museum has brought into its collection parts of art environments that, even if professionally repaired or conserved, would certainly be irreparably damaged by continued exposure

to harmful weather conditions. In addition to housing pieces of environments or individual works by such selftaught artists as Fred Smith (1886–1976), the creator, in the northern part of the state, of the Wisconsin Concrete Park; Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910–1983), the RAW VISION 107

Untitled, c. 1907–1919, granite, 9 x 16 x 8 in. / 23 x 40.5 x 20 cm, American Folk Art Museum, New York, gift of Audrey B Heckler

THE LONG-LOST FATHER OF THE BARBUS MÜLLER FIGURES Research by a French artist and writer has revealed the true origins of the mysterious sculptures BRUNO MONTPIED

“W

e will probably never know anything about the author (or authors) of ‘Barbus Müller'." This peremptory statement by Michel Thévoz in his book L’Art Brut, in 1975, has always intrigued me. For Thévoz, the anonymity of the maker of these sculptures went hand in hand with an attitude that he considered characteristic of certain art brut creators, namely a hypothetical denial of their signature and

of the personalisation of their works. What was grouped together under the name of art brut was thus often presented as orphaned, without roots, a cultural fireball – or rather, an anti-cultural fireball – created by those who would have knowingly fled the lights of stardom. Thévoz, the first curator of the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, categorised the Barbus figures as “anti-art” – a label that their creator probably never even considered. This label was more

Untitled, c. 1920, granite, 10.5 x 15.5 x 5.5 in. / 26.5 x 39 x 14 cm, The Museum of Everything /@musevery

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Photos taken around 1912 by Albert Lejay and published in the Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique de France in 1929 as examples of fakes of ancient carvings; some of the sculptures are now in the collections of the Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art (LaM) in Villeneuve-d'Ascq, the Museum of Everything (Fig 1, centre) and the American Folk Art Museum (Fig 1, left). One of the figures (Fig 2, centre) featured on the cover of Dubuffet’s first Fascicule de L’Art Brut in 1947

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Fascicule 1 de l'Art Brut, 1947, republished by the Barbier-Mueller Museum in 2020

the notion of the inventor of the concept of art brut himself, namely Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet acquired some lava sculptures when he first began collecting art brut. And it was he who gave them the nickname "Barbus Müller" in 1945–46 because the sculptures – which he had seen at various dealers and collectors – sometimes had beards, and because the collector who possessed the greatest number of them was called Joseph Müller. Although I found the hypothesis of the provenance of the Barbus Müller from Auvergne to be plausible, I waited almost 40 years to find the real truth – in the end, stumbling across it through an astonishing coincidence. While researching online in 2017, I came across two pairs of glass photographic prints for use in a stereoscopic viewer. They were images of a scene from the archives of a photographer named Goldner. The dates were uncertain but one pair was taken in high summer and the other in off-season, and all four images showed rows of statues standing near a small cottage or hut. They appeared to me, from the moment I saw them, to be very similar to the famous Barbus Müller figures which had been acquired by the writer Henri-Pierre Roché before WWII, possibly in the 1920s, then, in 1939, by the merchants Charles Ratton and Joseph Müller (1). None of the collectors were in possession of any information about the history of the sculptures. The seller of the glass prints easily identified the place where the sculptures stood. A tenth-century

The catalogue of the 2020 exhibition at the Barbier-Mueller Museum, including the full account of Montpied's investigation

Romanesque chapel, visible behind a cemetery, indicated that they were in Chambon-sur-Lac, in Puy-de-Dôme (Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region). I published the photos in my book Le Gazouillis des Éléphants (2), in November 2017, but was determined to find out more. Further research revealed that at least three of the statues in the photos could be identified as pieces included in Dubuffet’s publication Fascicule 1 de l’Art Brut of 1947. I also realised that the glass photographs themselves provided me with a rough idea of dates, since this type of photo reproduction was only used from the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1930s. Currently, around 40 Barbus Müller sculptures can be found in various public and private collections. With those shown in the photos, we now know that there are many more in existence – almost 80 in all – half of which are still waiting to be found. The statues share a characteristic style which is what made it possible to unite them into a corpus: broad, thick lips, almost fat; large, strong noses; marked eyebrow arches; eyeballs standing out in hollow sockets, pierced with holes to represent the pupils. The stone used is composed of volcanic rock, ranging from dark grey to light grey (trachyte, according to the Barbier-Mueller Museum for the sculptures they hold). At the beginning of 2018, I was able to verify that the hut on the plot of land in Chambon-sur-Lac, as shown in Goldner’s photos, was still there. Perhaps

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R AW R E V I E W S

accounts, cartoon pages and religious parables – comment on the political and social aspects of African-American life as the artist experienced it.“Elijah Pierce’s America” – with over 100 carvings and ephemera created between 1923 and 1979 – highlighted his unique method of storytelling. Not only a master woodcarver,

but also a lay minister and a barber by trade, Pierce used images to educate, preach and sometimes poke fun at the human condition. The subtlety with which he transmitted ideas about racial dynamics and social issues makes his work all the more engaging. Yet, there is also great joy to be derived from its visual aesthetic on its own merits. The roots of Pierce’s mastery can be traced back to his childhood. The youngest son to a father who was a former slave, he was born on a farm in Baldwyn, Mississippi, with a veil over his face, which was thought to be an omen. He began carving at an early age when he was given his first pocket knife. His father was a church deacon, and Pierce’s mother always felt that her son’s calling to religion was prophesied. Pierce had his own blueprint as to how to translate that calling. His painted bas-reliefs and free-standing carvings often get lost in the outsider art world and the traditional practices of regional folk art. As I reflect on my many years of knowing Elijah Pierce, the man and his work, I am gratified by the approach taken by curators, Dr Nancy Ireson and Dr Zoé Whitley, to this exhibition. Not only did it address the question of why Pierce’s works have been left out of the discussion of the history of art in the twentieth century, it also considered how we can reimagine or recontextualise the way we see and talk about the influence self-taught artists have had in the art world at large. JEFFREY WOLF

aspect of the art that has long captured his imagination, has been issued by one of France’s most distinguished publishers of books in various subject areas that are known for their high literary quality. Thévoz was a friend and close collaborator of Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), the influential French modern artist. In the 1940s, based on his research and collecting activities in Europe, Dubuffet first articulated the aesthetic characteristics that typify art brut (literally, “raw art”) and gave the phenomenon its name. After Dubuffet donated his personal holdings of self-taught artists whom he had discovered to the new Collection de l’Art Brut, a museum that opened in Lausanne in 1976, Thévoz served as its first director, until 2001. Meanwhile, starting in the mid-1980s, for many years he also taught art history and museology at the University of Lausanne. Thévoz’s interests are diverse – from what used to be called “the art of the insane” and art brut to spiritualism, Switzerland’s history, graffiti, jazz, and what he has called “the aesthetics of suicide”. In a recent book, examining the work of various Swiss artists over the centuries, he even argued that his homeland is more of a concept than an actual country. Pathologie du cadre: Quand l’art brut s’éclate is a tour de force of eye-opening,

generously shared – but never pedantic – insight and erudition. In it, Thévoz focuses on how the frame – as a compositional tool for organising pictorial space and as a conceptual device for delineating intellectual, social, psychic, and other kinds of boundaries – has been employed by art brut creators. He looks, too, at how it may be discerned in their widely varied creations. He also examines more literal examples of frames as objects that demarcate and contain the perceptible borders of works of art and that sometimes become integral elements of their compositions. In an interview with Raw Vision, Thévoz recalled that, among his earliest encounters with works of art was his discovery, as a teenager, of the Swiss artist Louis Soutter (1871–1942), who made paintings after dipping his fingers in ink or paint. About his first viewings of Soutter’s works, Thévoz noted, “The frame – that is, the common rectangular format – felt like a form of incarceration.” Soutter’s human figures, he pointed out, “had to fold themselves into confined, rectangular-shaped pictorial space, and, paradoxically, this constraint led the artist to devise some figurative solutions – deformations [of his subjects’ forms] and extraordinarily inventive anamorphoses.” The title of Thévoz’s new book offers a play on words, for, in French, the reflexive

Three Ways to Send a Message: Telephone, Telegraph, Tell-a-Woman, High Museum of Art, Atlanta

ELIJAH PIERCE’S AMERICA Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia September 27, 2020 – January 18, 2021 The long-awaited retrospective of Elijah Pierce (1892–1984) made the case that the artist’s often-narrative carvings – grabbed from newspaper headlines, personal

L’ART BRUT S’ENCADRE Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne December 11, 2020 – May 24, 2021

PATHOLOGIE DU CADRE: QUAND L’ART BRUT S’ÉCLATE by Michel Thévoz, Les Éditions de Minuit French text, 4 x 6.5 in. / 10 x 17 cm ISBN: 979-10-304-1214-7 In a new book and a related exhibition, the Swiss art historian Michel Thévoz examines the physical, conceptual and aesthetic notions of containment and borders in art brut. To read any essay or book by Thévoz is to savour his provocative, illuminating ways of thinking and presenting arguments. They have made this Swiss art historian, curator and educator one of the most original – and respected – thinkers and commentators about culture in Europe today. Thévoz, who was born in 1936 in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he lives today, is now in his early eighties and still as active as ever. In October, he added Pathologie du cadre: Quand l’art brut s’éclate (Pathology of the Frame: When Art Brut Explodes) to the long list of books he has written and published over the years, including L’Art Brut (Skira, 1975), a now-classic work in its field. His new book, a compact volume that presents an engaging collection of observations and analyses of a particular 64

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EXHIBITIONS/BOOK

GALLERIES AND MUSEUMS AUSTRALIA

AUSTRIA

B R I TA I N

FRANCE

ARTS PROJECT AUSTRALIA 24 High Street, Northcote, Melbourne +61 3 9482 4484 www.artsproject.org.au

GALERIE GUGGING Am Campus 2 - A3400 Maria Gugging t: +43 676 841181 200 office@gallerygugging.com www.gugging.com

PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY 9 North Pallant, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1TJ t: +44 (0)1243 774557 info@pallant.org.uk, www.pallant.org.uk

HALLE SAINT PIERRE 2 Rue Ronsard, 75018 Paris t: +33 1 42 58 72 89 www.hallesaintpierre.org

PORTUGAL

SERBIA

SWITZERLAND

TREGER/SAINT SILVESTRE COLLECTION Centro de Arte Oliva, Rua da Fundição, 3700-119 São João da Madeira, Portugal tsscollection.org "Sereno Variável" on view until 2 May 2021

MUSEUM OF NAIVE AND MARGINAL ART Jagodina, Serbia www.mnmu.rs International and Balkan outsider and naive art at leading museum

COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT 11, av. des Bergières, CH - 1004 Lausanne t: +41 21 315 25 70 art.brut@lausanne.ch www.artbrut.ch

MUSEUM IM LAGERHAUS Davidstrasse 44, 9000, St. Gallen www.museumimlagerhaus.ch “Linda Naeff– Matricule II” and “ÜberMütter” (Maria Rolly) Maria Rolly, Mar 23 – Jul 5

ALABAMA

CALIFORNIA

MARYLAND

P E N N S Y LVA N I A

MARCIA WEBER ART OBJECTS 118 E. Bridge St., Wetumpka, AL 36092 Self-taught • Outsider • Contemporary Folk Art www.marciaweberartobjects.com weberart@mindspring.com

JUST FOLK www.justfolk.com t: 310 435 3639 American folk and outsider art

AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM 800 Key Highway, Inner Harbour Baltimore, MD 21230 www.avam.org

INDIGO ARTS GALLERY, Anthony Fisher, 1400 N. American St, #408, Philadelphia PA 19122 t: 215 765 1041 www.indigoarts.com Self-taught and visionary artists from Africa, Latin America, Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti, India

WEBB GALLERY - Waxahachie TX webbartgallery.com WE SELL SOUL GREY CARTER OBJECTS OF ART - McLean VA www.greyart.com

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