RAWVISION83 AUTUMN/FALL 2014
EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Phyllis Kind, Frank Maresca, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels SENIOR EDITOR Edward M. Gómez FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels US ASSISTANT Ari Huff FRENCH EDITOR Laurent Danchin CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell ADVERTISING MANAGER Kate Shanley ArtMediaCo, Sales & Marketing 799 Broadway #224 NY NY 10003 917 804 4642 ArtMediaCompany@gmail.com
PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com US OFFICE 119 West 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023 (standard envelopes only) BUREAU FRANÇAIS 37 Rue de Gergovie, 75014 Paris tel +33 (0) 1 40 44 96 46
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RAW INSPIRATION Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons discusses outsider art.
RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world.
RAW COLLECTING A visit to the Memphis collection of John Jerit.
THE GRAND INVENTORY The obsessive documentation of Gregory Blackstock.
DRAUGHTSMANSHIP FROM DOWN UNDER An introduction to the work of Susan King.
LE DERNIER CRI Anarchic 3D imagery from publisher Pakito Bolino.
MORE 3D FROM RV Eye-popping images of famous environments.
PRESERVING PASAQUAN Work has started on the renovation of St. EOM’s environment.
OUTSIDER IN FULL FLIGHT The fluid, graceful drawings of Manuel Lança Bonifacio.
MAN OF MANY FACES Newly discovered sculptures from Pietro Moschini.
REMINISCENCES Jacqueline Porret-Forel, the researcher of Aloïse’s art.
RAW STUDIOS Creativity Explored studios in California.
RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions, events and books.
GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE A round-up of notable venues around the world.
ISSN 0955-1182 Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) September 2014 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25, 8LN, UK and distributed in the USA by Mail Right Inc., 1637 Stelton Road 84, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Periodical Postage Paid at Piscataway, NJ, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster send address corrections to Raw Vision c/o Mail Right International Inc., 1637 Stelton Road 84, Piscataway, NJ 08854. USA subscription office: 119 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023. (Standard envelopes only).
COVER IMAGE: Matti Hagelberg 2011, 3 DC, serigraph, Le Dernier Cri.
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD
WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE
UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD
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.
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MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS
RAWNEWS SEEING THINGS WITH OTHER EYES Rei Kawakubo is the founder and visionary leader of Comme des Garçons, the international fashion and design label. Inspired by outsider art’s creative energy (see “Raw Inspiration” in this issue), she and her team have adorned the façade of the company’s related Dover Street Market store in London with a sculptural hoarding that shares that spirit with passers-by. Be on the lookout for a Comme des Garçons special event to be announced in New York in October.
Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, the first of Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market outlets is located in London’s Mayfair district.
AUSTRALIA, AUSTRIA, BELGIUM
CONFERENCE IN MELBOURNE
ADOLF WÖLFLI AT GUGGING
BELLUCI
Oct 23–26, 2014 Arts Project Australia, in partnership with e University of Melbourne, will present a free international conference focusing on new paradigms and definitions of outsider art. Fifty leading artists, curators, educators and researchers from Australia and around the world will converge at e University of Melbourne to explore the topic of “Contemporary Outsider Art: e Global Context.”
until Mar 1, 2015 adolf wölfli. universum.! marks 150 years since the birth of the Swiss artist (1864–1930). Wölfli’s “Bread Art” will be displayed in the Novomatic Salon of the museum: single sheet drawings which he gave as presents or sold to a growing circle of interested doctors, nurses and visitors, or exchanged for drawing tools.
until Dec 20, 2014 Franco Bellucci has attended the Blu Cammello workshop in Livorno, Italy, since 1999. He attaches objects to one another using electric wire, textile, string and hose.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE Grattan St, Parkville, VIC 3010, AUSTRALIA www.outsiderartmelbourne2014.com
GALERIE GUGGING Am Campus 2, 3400 Maria Gugging, AUSTRIA www.gugging.org
julian martin
franco belluci
adolf wölfli
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MADMUSÉE Parc d’Avroy 4000 Liège, BELGIUM www.madmusee.be
RAWNEWS
FRANCE
DE STADSHOF COLLECTION
COLLECTION ABCD
until Jan 4 In the series Sous le vent de l’art brut, the De Stadshof Collection will be on show at Halle Saint Pierre, with 350 works by 40 artists. Artists include Willem van Genk, Michel Nedjar, A.C.M., Johann Garber, Martha Grunenwaldt, Donald Pass and Christine Sefolosha.
Oct 18 – Jan 18 Bruno Decharme has been a collector of art brut for more than 30 years and the abcd collection holds 3,500 works by 300 artists, spanning from the midnineteenth century to recent works. Featured artists will include Adolf Wölfli, Carlo Zinelli, George Widener, Janko Domsic, Edmund Monsiel, Judith Scott and Henry Darger.
JEAN-PIERRE NADAU Jean-Pierre Nadau shows his new twelvemetre-long drawing on canvas titled “Siphon”.
jean-pierre nadau
janko domsic
GALERIE POLYSÉMIE 12, rue de la Cathédrale 13002 Marseille FRANCE www.polysemie.com
willem van genk
ART PARTAGÉ Oct 18 – Nov 16 Over 600 works by 62 international creators of outsider art. HALLE SAINT PIERRE 2 Rue Ronsard, Paris 75018, FRANCE www.hallesaintpierre.com
LA MAISON ROUGE 10 Bd de la Bastille – 75012 Paris, FRANCE www.lamaisonrouge.org
LILLE MÉTROPOLE
CHRISTIAN BERST
Oct 23 – 26 Paintings, watercolours and artist’s books by Ody Saban will be presented by Gallery Claire Corcia (Paris) and by Gallery Polysemy (Marseille) at the Outsider Art Fair. ody saban
Oct 21 – Nov 22 Art Brut Masterpieces, curated by Bruno Decharme, includes works by Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli, Augustin Lesage, Friedrich SchröderSonnenstern and Luboš Plný.
SEFOLOSHA Oct 9 – Nov 15 Spirit-filled works by the Swiss self-taught artist Christine Sefolosha. christine sefolosha
yves jules
Oct 3 – Jan 11 L’Autre de l’Art offers an opportunity to view works made outside of traditional contexts such as the street, hospitals and prisons, as well as works by self-taught artists and children.
ODY SABAN
SALLE MITTERRAND Parc de l’Orgère, Rives Isère, FRANCE artpartage-oeilart.com
PALAIS IDEAL until Jan 14 A photographic exhibition features Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany.
gaston chaissac
niki de saint phalle’s tarot garden
augustine lesage
LILLE MÉTROPOLE MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE 1 Allée du Musée 59650 Villeneuved'Ascq, FRANCE www.musee-lam.fr 10
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GALLERY CLAIRE CORCIA 323 Rue Saint-Martin 75003 Paris, FRANCE www.galeriecorcia.com
CHRISTIAN BERST 5 Passage des Gravilliers 75003 Paris FRANCE www.christianberst.com
POLAD-HARDOUIN GALLERY 86 rue Quincampoix 75003 Paris, FRANCE polad-hardouin.com
PALAIS IDEAL 8 Rue Du Palais, 26390 Hauterives, FRANCE facteurcheval.com
RAWNEWS NASHVILLE SCULPTURE PARK Permanent installations by self-taught artists ornton Dial and Lonnie Holley have been erected in the revitalised Edmondson Park, which opened on August 20, 2014. e urban park is located on Charlotte Avenue between 16th Avenue North and 17th Avenue North, Nashville, Tennessee.
USA
GASPERI COLLECTION Oct 4 – Feb 22 Self-Taught, Outsider and Visionary Art from the Collection of Richard Gasperi will showcase the depth and breadth of the collection.
lonnie holley, photo: ian meyers
howard finster
VISIONARY EXPERIENCE AT AVAM Oct 4 – Aug 30, 2015 e Visionary Experience: Saint Francis to Finster champions the "Aha!" and "Eureka!" moments of a variety of creators. Co-curated by acclaimed filmmaker and book publisher Jodi Wille (e Source Family, 2012), and AVAM founder and director Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, some of the exhibition’s highlights include a spirited centennial celebration of the American self-taught artist, Rev. Howard Finster; the giant otherworldly paintings of Ingo Swann; the cosmic works of polymath Walter Russell; the wildly expansive drawings and bronze wind-bells for future ecology-based cities of Italian architect Paolo Soleri; and illuminating works by visionaries Tom Duncan, Dr. Robert Hieronimus, Paul Koudounaris, John Worrell Keely and Dale Pond, Jason Padgett, Christine Sefolosha, and Judy Tallwing.
JEANINE TAYLOR
INDIGO ARTS
Nov 15 – Dec 31 Jeanine Taylor Folk Art will transform into a shopping wonderland with unique artworks and gifts and Saturday “Trunk Shows” from favourite artists.
Oct 9 – Dec 6 Escenas Fantasticas: Cuban Painter José Garcia Montebravo is a tribute to the selftaught painter who passed away in 2010.
HEIDELBERG PROJECT, DETROIT
tyree guyton’s heidelberg project
e Heidelberg Project has announced the completion of its comprehensive solar-powered security and surveillance system prompted by the string of appalling arson attacks targeting the Project. e plan was possible due to the generosity of nearly 950 Indiegogo donors who raised $54,000 along with the Fred M. & Barbara A. Erb Family Foundation, the Kresge Foundation and others who offered their expertise such as Nomax Technologies, LLC.
THE HEIDELBERG PROJECT 3600 Heidelberg St, Detroit, MI 48207 www.heidelberg.org 16 RAW VISION 83
INDIGO ARTS GALLERY The Crane Arts Bulding 1400 North American Street, #104 Philadelphia, PA 19122 www.indigoarts.com
GIL PERRY
AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM 800 Key Highway, Baltimore, MD 21230. avam.org
AMES GALLERY Nov – Feb 2015 Recollections: Artists of e Ames Gallery, a 45 year review features the works of Jon Serl, Eddie Arning, Dwight Mackintosh, Howard Finster, Inez Nathaniel Walker and Raymond Coins among others.
until Jan, 2015 Gallery in the Wood’s featured visionary show includes spontaneous drawings by Gil Perry.
GALLERY IN THE WOODS 145 Main Street Brattleboro, VT 05301 galleryinthewoods.com
dwight mackintosh
JEANINE TAYLOR FOLK ART 211 E. 1st Street, Sanford, FL. www.jtfolkart.com
ingo swan
OGDEN MUSEUM OF SOUTHERN ART 925 Camp Street New Orleans LA 70130 ogdenmuseum.org
THE AMES GALLERY 2661 Cedar Street, Berkeley, CA 94708 www.amesgallery.com
RAW INSPIRATION
JAPANESE DESIGNER REI KAWAKUBO: “OUTSIDER ART MAY BE THE FUTURE”
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ei Kawakubo is best known for the innovative, category-defying clothes she has created for her signature Comme des Garçons label, which she established in her native Japan in 1969, but to call her a fashion designer is to overlook the broad scope of the influence she also has had on such overlapping fields as graphic design, textile and fragrance development, and retailing. Her company’s name (French for “like some boys”) is synonymous with radical experimentation, whether in the irregular shapes and novel textures of her garments or the treasure-trove atmosphere of her unpredictable pop-up shops and international chain of Dover Street Market stores. This year, Kawakubo has collaborated with Raw Vision, creating a look for Comme des Garçons’ graphic/visual programme inspired by outsider art and the magazine’s colourful pages. With an energetic and subversive, collage-like gesture, Kawakubo has superimposed photos on our past, published covers or page layouts; their subjects have moved her in different ways. She told us, “I feel my own limits after continuing for more than 40 years the act of always looking for something new. [...] I think I want the power one can feel when discovering something that is beyond what is seen or felt normally.... [...] This is why I think the artworks created by outsider artists are so fantastic and I deeply respect them.” An admired visionary herself, Kawakubo added, “For me, I believe outsider art may be the future.” Edward M. Gómez
above, left to right: designer Rei Kawakubo; a creation from Comme des Garçons’ fall–winter 2012 collection; a sculptural ensemble from the innovative label’s fall–winter 2014 collection; an incarnation of the Junya Watanabe boutique at the New York branch of Dover Street Market, which opened late last year portrait © Comme des Garçons Co. Ltd, photo Eiichiro Sakata collection photos courtesy Comme des Garçons shop photo courtesy Dover Street Market
THE GRAND INVENTORY Gregory Blackstock catalogues the qualities he sees in nature and objects By PHILIPPE LESPINASSE
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n the glow of a floor lamp, a man is busy drawing. The shutters are closed and the curtains pulled. Outside is Seattle, the large seaport city on the north-west coast of the United States. Inside, the room is cluttered with framed photos of actors, newspaper cuttings, and trophies won in ten-pin bowling tournaments. In one corner of the room three accordion cases are piled up next to a bicycle, a dozen photo albums and a bed. On the other side there is an organ, a record collection and a television set. The walls are completely covered with pictures and life-sized photocopies of sketch panels: Dentist’s Tools, English
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Second World War Bombers, Crows, Poisonous Plants, All the Tools, County Jails, Masks, Shoes and Hats. Every panel has its own title and subtitle. There is a caption under each drawing and a neatly handwritten signature in the bottom right-hand corner. The grand inventory of Gregory L. Blackstock’s artistic creation takes us back to 1966, when his first work was published by the newspaper of the Washington Athletics Club in which he was employed as a pot-washer for 25 years. It was a sketch of Batman surrounded by speech balloons full of noisy cries and onomatopoeic expletives: Boom! Thonk Thonk! Whoop! Schack! “The drawing has to
photos Philippe Lespinasse translated by Jenny Stenton all images courtesy of Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
previous page: Gregory L. Blackstock, Seattle, 2006 photo Ted Degener left: The Artist Model Petosa Accordions 2011 graphite, felt tip and oil pastel 48.9 x 31.1 ins., 124.2 x 79.1 cm
generate clamour”, he said. His cousin, Dorothy Fritsch, confirms his obsession: “It could be airplanes, animals, high heels, shredders, saws, hammers and anything that moves really, that crawls, runs or even gives him the shivers like poisonous plants – that will catch his eye. Anything that produces noise or music attracts his attention, whether it be a piano or a circular saw. And when he gets going on a new series of sketches, that unerring eye of his will always be able to pick out the difference between one bus of supporters and another bus of supporters, one bell and another bell, or one drum and another drum.”
Hence the panel titled The Bells contains 63 very different drawings characterised by a trick of metonymic allusion in which Blackstock includes a diving bell to preserve the association with “bell” in each and every one. The same happened with his sketches of various baskets of different kinds in which he preserved the “basket” association by adding a basketball net amid an array of wickerwork goods. Within the mental world of his own apartment, the author invents his vast encyclopedia and forges his own classification system. With its 44 objects – or acoustic phenomena – the large panel titled Noisemakers thus RAW VISION 83
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REMARKABLE DRAUGHTSMANSHIP FROM WAY DOWN UNDER A prodigious, prolific maker of drawings, Susan Te Kahurangi King has emerged as a leading representative of New Zealand’s self-taught art world By EDWARD M. GÓMEZ
left: Untitled, c. 1960, crayon on paper, 13.5 x 8.25 ins., 34 x 21 cm above: Untitled, 1958, crayon on paper, 8 x 5 ins., 20 x 13 cm below: already at an early age, Susan was enthusiastically involved in making art; she stopped speaking around the age of four, and it is through her drawings, her family members believe, that she has interpreted her perceptions of the world and given expression to those ideas; photo Doug King
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school, “Susan didn’t join in with normal activities but would spend lesson time drawing; her teacher felt she was a distraction.” In Auckland, the nearest large city, Rachel notes, “she was taken to many doctors and specialists in an attempt to work out what was wrong above: Susan Te Kahurangi King at work today at her home in with her”. Susan “had several Auckland, New Zealand, photo Chris Byrne trying experiences in hospital left: Untitled, 1958, crayon on paper, 8 x 5 ins., 20 x 13 cm psychiatric wards, where all kinds of [treatments] were all photos of artworks by Chris Byrne and Marquand Books tried, such as withholding food or, even more distressing, drawing materials, in order to force her to speak”. usan Te Kahurangi King’s drawings on paper, Eventually, the King family moved to Auckland so which the 63-year-old self-taught artist makes that Susan could attend a special-needs school. Rachel using pencils, coloured pencils, crayons and feltremembers that, in later years, “the school had a tip pens, have rarely been shown publicly. Recently, workshop programme aimed at making the older though, they have begun to appear in exhibitions and students ‘productive’, in which Susan was assigned such receive serious critical attention in the artist’s native repetitive tasks as putting nails in bags and making New Zealand and overseas. woollen mats, instead of being allowed to draw”. Her unusual works share some remarkable affinities Although King was never diagnosed with a with certain kinds of modern art, including, for particular mental disability per se, over the past decade example, perspective-busting cubist painting. or so, her sisters recognised certain autistic Unwittingly, like postmodern appropriationist art, characteristics in her behaviour. Today, the artist lives King’s pictures may take their source material out of its with her mother in Auckland. There, Rachel says, original contexts, place it in new artistic settings and “Susan’s desk is set up with drawers of paper and trays allow it to find new meanings. In King’s case, Donald of pens and pencils, which she sharpens with a blade Duck and other popular cartoon characters, whose to a deadly point.” familiar depictions the artist distorts and brings into A time came when King, for no obvious reason, her own complex compositions, play a role in this stopped making art. It lasted 20 years, until 2008. appropriationist, meaning-shifting process. The results Nowadays she draws every day, all day long, and she can be intriguing and dazzling. does not like to be interrupted. Of her art, Rachel says A selection of King’s works will be shown in “Susan it is “hard to know exactly” what it might mean to Te Kahurangi King: Drawings from Many Worlds”, a Susan, whose “obsession and skill with drawing forthcoming exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery in [intensified] as her speech dwindled”. She adds, “Her New York (November 1 – December 20, 2014.) It is drawings may [express] statements, ideas, questions. In being organised by the American artist, independent them, real people and things are all jumbled up with curator and Dallas Art Fair co-director Chris Byrne fictional characters.” and Ed Marquand, the Seattle-based head of In New Zealand, the artist-curator Stuart Shepherd Marquand Books, a publisher of high-quality art specialises in research about self-taught artists. Of books. Earlier this year, at the Outsider Art Fair in King’s work, he says, “It’s like jazz improvisation with New York, Byrne and Marquand presented King’s distortions of scale, perspectives and shapes. Like a drawings to considerable acclaim. They are now musician sounding out melodies, Susan riffs endlessly assembling a book about her work. on various visual moments.” In a New Zealand King, whose middle name means “treasured one” in the Maori language, was brought up in a farming town newspaper article, Petita, one of King’s other siblings, in the north of her homeland’s North Island. (Her once said of her sister, “Not only is she happy” when father was a student and champion of Maori culture.) she is drawing, but also that she is more “fulfilled with Around the age of four, inexplicably, Susan stopped life in general” when she is at her work table, totally speaking. Her sister Rachel recalls that, in primary engaged in art.
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DIZZY, AUDACIOUS, LOUD: LE DERNIER CRI Pakito Bolino and his cohorts create outrageous images in which nothing is off limits – and now their act has gone 3D By EDWARD M. GÓMEZ
all images are from Le Dernier Cri’s large-format publication, 3DC (2011)
H
ow much punch can any one picture dare to deliver? Think of the atmosphere surrounding Edvard Munch’s tortured figure in his 1893 Expressionist masterpiece, The Scream, and throw in, on steroids, the sexy, spooky, transgressive vibe that oozes from grade-B horror movies, Japanese manga, underground comics, gritty porn, punk rock music and punk record sleeves, and, of course, the unfiltered, unbridled creative energy of the most powerful outsider art. Now throw in some extra doses of sex, death and 32
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left: a drawing by Rémi opposite: a work by Tomahawk
violence, along with freewheeling styles of drawing, in which human figures, often nude, scowl, grimace, writhe and cavort, sometimes merging into plant or animal forms or all but disappearing in sprawling phantasmagorias of visual commotion. Since the early 1990s, from their base in Marseilles, the rough-and-tumble port city on the Mediterranean coast of southern France, Pakito Bolino and his collaborators at Le Dernier Cri, a non-profit organisation that is part publishing outfit, part
exhibition venue and part laboratory for artistic experimentation (and mischief ), have been whipping up just this kind of unstoppable visual overload. Their favourite outlets for their creations – some of the most outrageous, compelling images to be found anywhere in the art world today – have included handmade, limitededition booklets and magazines that have defied easy classification. In French, their rallying cry proclaims, “Vomir des yeux!” (or, as they put it in English on their website, “Puking eyeballs!”).
For these “DIY splatterpunks”, as they have been called, silk-screening on paper is their favorite artmaking method. Anything goes in the rollicking, raucous, ribald worlds Bolino and his artist cohorts from around the world serve up. There is no body part or human foible too dumb, off-putting, ugly or offensive that Bolino and his confrères would not dare to bring into their work. In the not-too-distant past, Le Dernier Cri (the collective’s name literally means “the last cry”, a phrase associated with the cultures of dying RAW VISION 83
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RAW ENVIRONMENTS
MORE RV IN 3D I
nspired by the eye-popping 3D printed works of some of the artists associated with France’s Le Dernier Cri group (see cover story), we wondered: how would photos of actual threedimensional environments made by self-taught artists appear when given the same treatment? Put your 3D glasses back on to savour these images of, right, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles by Sabato (“Simon”) Rodia (1879–1965); below, the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India, by Nek Chand (b. 1924); and, opposite, the Palais Idéal in Hauterives, France, by Ferdinand “Le Facteur” Cheval (1836–1924). original photographs by: right: Seymour Rosen; below: Maggie Jones Maizels; opposite: Deidi Von Schaewen 3D conversions by William K. Chiles and Brian Brock, American Paper Optics, LLC
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PRESERVING PASAQUAN The Kohler Foundation joins long-time local supporters to save St. EOM’s visionary sanctuary
By TOM PATTERSON
E
ddie Owens Martin (1908–1986), a self-taught artist who called himself “St. EOM”, spent the last half of his unconventional life building a spectacular, visionary art environment he named “Pasaquan” on four acres near Buena Vista, a town in Marion County in the southeastern part of the US state
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of Georgia, where he had been born. He bankrolled this ambitious project with his income from his work as a psychic reader, in which he advised clients about the future. The son of sharecroppers, Martin left Georgia in 1922, headed to New York City and hustled his way
painted columnar sculptures at the front entrance to Pasaquan; photo: Roger Manley, 1986
there through the second quarter of the twentieth century, teaching himself to paint and reinventing himself as the streetwise backwoods prophet his clients would later come to know. Returning to Georgia in the 1950s following his mother’s death and responding to visions he had had while once suffering from a high
fever in New York, he set about transforming his family home and the land around it. Not long before depression and various physical ailments led St. EOM to commit suicide in 1986, he predicted that Pasaquan would be destroyed after his own death, a prophecy, which fortunately has not been fulfilled. RAW VISION 83
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AN OUTSIDER IN FULL FLIGHT Based in England, Portuguese artist Manuel Lanรงa Bonifacio makes fantastical drawings marked by exuberant colours and a delicate grace By ROGER CARDINAL and KATE DAVEY
right: Mermaid 2013 crayon and pencil on paper 23.6 x 16.5 ins., 60 x 42 cm, courtesy Galerie Bourbon-Lally opposite: Anoconda, Anaconda, Anaconda 2013 crayon and pencil on paper 23.6 x 16.5 ins., 60 x 42 cm courtesy Henry Boxer Gallery
M
anuel Lanรงa Bonifacio was born in December 1947 in the Portuguese town of Faro, the capital of the Algarve. Now a busy tourist resort boasting an international airport and a marina, and known for its Ria Formosa nature reserve, it was in the post-war years still a town of modest size, with a fine cathedral and several churches, encircled by ancient walls built by the Moors. Here Bonifacio grew up and began to develop his twin interests, in observing the world and in making pictures. At the age of eight, learning difficulties led to his dropping out of the formal educational system. Instead, he turned to artmaking, and 46
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developed a passion for drawing and ceramics, a passion that has persisted to the present day. In due course, he was able to join the fire brigade as a young volunteer, although his ultimate dream was to become a soldier. His other great loves during these formative years included riding motorbikes. Bonifacio was in his early fifties when his mother died; his father died a year later, in 2001. As a result, circumstances led him to immigrate to Britain, accompanied by his sister Maria Odone and her family. They took up residence in Cobham, a small town close to Guildford, the Surrey capital.
Manuel Bonifacio is a soberly dressed and polite man who lives quietly in a flat in Cobham. Places, both past and present, are important to him, and he enjoys regular walks of several miles, for instance along the river to Kingston-upon-Thames, during which he will sometimes pick up discarded materials to incorporate into his work. He takes great pleasure in visiting art galleries and museums, such as the G.F. Watts Gallery or Hampton Court, usually accompanied by his sister, some friends or the ArtVenture studio group. Such trips often provide inspiration for his own pictures. He still cultivates a habit dating back to childhood, when his parents encouraged him to jot down street names and to sketch buildings in a small notebook. He once put his situation plainly: “I like to walk and look around, looking at buildings.” Illustrating this, one of his larger drawings depicts a statue that stands in the High Street of Cobham. It was in 2009 that Bonifacio enrolled at ArtVenture Trust, a multimedia art school in Guildford. It functions as a non-profit-making charity and runs art-making sessions in premises provided by a local school. Its purpose is to open up the field of artmaking to adults
with learning difficulties, and to do so with a minimum of guidance, with the aim of encouraging individuals to rely on their personal imaginings. Twice a week, Bonifacio arrives at ArtVenture, settling down at the same corner table and working with utter concentration for four hours solid, often completing four or five drawings per session. By now, the centre has several drawers crammed with hundreds of his drawings of varied size, as well as shelves overflowing with his unmistakable ceramic heads. He takes his work at ArtVenture seriously, becoming disgruntled at any interruption of his studio time. Once he has decided that a piece is finished, he will animatedly discuss its contents in his native Portuguese, breathing life into the image. Although Bonifacio is somewhat hampered in his flat because of its lack of space and materials, he does occasionally copy objects from television, resulting in images of leading political figures and current affairs. Incredibly ambitious and proud of his work, when asked whether he likes his own creations, he tends to reply – unpretentiously – that he sometimes does, and sometimes doesn’t. “If I don’t like it, I throw it away.” Early on, he liked to sketch churches. When he was RAW VISION 83
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A MAN OF MANY FACES A story of chance, introducing the works of Italian sculptor Pietro Moschini By PAVEL KONECNÝ
W
hile looking on Flickr.com, I came across Pietro Moschini, and that he had unfortunately died photographs of a self-taught Tuscanian two months earlier, towards the end of 2011. sculptor who signed his works “PM”. There In early June 2012, several months after my online in the photographs was a genial-looking older man in a discovery of the work of Pietro Moschini, I visited straw hat, showing visitors his woodcarvings and stone Tuscania to find out more about this sculptor. sculptures which possessed a marvellous emotional force Pietro Moschini was born to illiterate parents in and originality, as well as a compelling and raw Tuscania on 14 May, 1923. He was the second of five expressiveness. Particularly impressive children. His father, Septimus, and was the view of the high wall of his mother, Rosa, just barely scraped by small courtyard, comprising stone as peasant farmers. Moschini lived faces and heads, joined and all his life in his native Tuscania or decoratively framed by a mosaic of its immediate surroundings, the only tiles, pottery shards and seashells. exception being a trip to Florence There were also numerous figures and Bergamo during his military and diverse materials – different service. After finishing the first level kinds of wood, marble, concrete, of primary school, Moschini had to volcanic stone, plaster, cork, go and help his father in the fields, masonite and more. Unfortunately, and he continued to do farm work the brief text accompanying the until retirement. He had difficulty photographs on Flickr contained learning but was proud that, unlike neither the name nor the address of his father (who signed with an “X”), the artist. Luckily, one of the Italian he could write his name. As a child, tourists, a certain Vladimiro Testo, he learned to carve wooden spoons had left his email address, and I sent for the household, decorated with him a message at once. small designs. He carved his first three figures, porous concrete, height 41 cm From his reply I learned that he larger work (a 50-centimetre tall had taken the photographs, but he could not remember figure of a kneeling woman) from hornbeam with a the name or address of the artist who had so willingly knife in 1952. Moschini’s works reflect a harmonious invited him to view his works. He did add that Tuscania relationship with nature, an enchantment with the is a small town and that it should not be a problem to human figure, with history and, especially, with the find the creator of these works. It soon became apparent, genius loci of Etruscan and medieval Tuscania. As a however, that he was mistaken. The monogram “PM” fundamentally fragile and sensitive person, Moschini was unknown to the employees of the local tourist absorbed the impressive atmosphere of Tuscania’s streets information centre and to several young guides whom I and hidden corners, rich in sculptures and architecture, contacted via the internet. Then it occurred to me that I fountains, springs and gargoyles, the anthropomorphous might ask a contemporary professional artist living and decoration of portals and window frames. The lightness working in Tuscania. Of several possible websites, my and naturalness with which he became a poet of the choice fell on that of Mario Ciccioli, which I studied human face and figure is truly amazing. He quickly with growing interest. I anxiously awaited a reply. This found his personal sculptural style, free and unfettered by conventions. It is as if he had been born a sculptor time, my intuition did not fail me; in his prompt reply, who – intuitively, spontaneously, and in many different Ciccioli informed me that the autodidact I was searching variations and forms – combined and layered mysterious for had been his longtime friend, that his name was 52
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all works are untitled, undated, carved stone unless otherwise stated
cork relief, 8.3 x 6.7 x 0.8 ins., 21 x 17 x 2 cm
translated by Stephen von Pohl
photos Pavel KoneÄ?nĂ˝
confusions of human figures and multiplying faces above, behind and next to each other. In his unceasing creative ecstasy and with the frequent use of unconventional sculptural tools, he engaged in an almost
frenzied activity of cutting and sculpting. He felt preordained for this work. The dark side of life is found in his work as well, but it is overlaid by playfulness and insightful yet subtle RAW VISION 83
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R EMINISCE NCE S
JACQUELINE MARIE PORRET-FOREL JULY 4,1916 – MARCH 28, 2014 By JACQUELINE FOREL and JOHN M. MACGREGOR
Jacqueline PorretForel and Aloïse Corbaz, in a corridor at La Rosière asylum in Gimel, Switzerland, 1963, photo Henriette Grindat © Fondation Aloïse
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he discovery and celebration of the life and work of new outsider artists of importance is Raw Vision’s passionate and ongoing purpose. Nevertheless, the magazine returns, again and again, to the investigation of the work of early artistes bruts who, at the beginning of the history of this unique artistic category, achieved international recognition. Among these giants of 56
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outsider art, one thinks immediately of Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930), Heinrich Anton Müller (1865–1930), Gaston Duf (1920–1966) and certainly the female artist Aloïse Corbaz (1886–1964). Less commonly celebrated in Raw Vision are the contributions of the outstanding professional artists, physicians and scholars who singlehandedly preserved this work from destruction, grasped its
outstanding artistic importance and frequently devoted their lives to the investigation of the unique biographical situations, societal pressures and mental states that inspired the birth of pictorial images of astonishing originality and beauty. Among these pioneering figures no one would fail to include Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) and Leo Navratil (1921–2006), without whom the outsider art field would never have come to exist. The earliest female pioneer among the serious students of art brut was Jacqueline Marie Porret-Forel, whose recent death at the age of 97 represents a major loss to the scholarly investigation of outsider creativity. Her life’s work, which extended over 60 years, was devoted exclusively to understanding the life and work of Aloïse Corbaz. This appreciation of Dr Forel’s life and contribution, inspired by 25 years of friendship, is based on conversations with her, which took place over five days in late November 2013, four months prior to her death. What follows are her memories and reminiscences. Aloïse called Dr Forel, her physician and friend, by many names – “Doctoress”, “Carola” or “The Madonna”. We will call her Jacqueline, the name she preferred. Family background, childhood and education Jacqueline was born on July 4, 1916, in the small city of Morges, in French-speaking Switzerland, into a family of social prominence, wealth, and outstanding intellectual accomplishment. Her grandfather’s brother, Auguste Forel (1848–1931), was a neuroanatomist and psychiatrist of world fame, an expert on hypnosis and a colleague and friend of Sigmund Freud. It was Auguste who first acquired the huge farm house in Chigny which was to become the main residence of successive generations of the Forel family, the “château” in which Jacqueline lived most of her life. It was here that Auguste’s passion for the study of ants reached its height. He was the leading authority of his day in the field of myrmecology and possessed the largest collection of ants in the world. It was in this house that the famous portrait of him was painted (1910) by the young artist, Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), one of the finest portraits of the twentieth century. Jacqueline first encountered her famous great-uncle only toward the end of his life when she was four or five years old. She was sixteen when he died. No less famous in Switzerland was her grandfather, François Alphonse Forel VIII (1841–1912). (1) He is considered the originator of the scientific investigation of lakes and in 1892 coined the term “limnology”. He based his life-long research on an intensive study of Lac Léman. Clearly, scholarship and publication at the highest level were a tradition in the family, although, until Jacqueline, they had been the activities of the Forel men. For the first four years of her life, Jacqueline lived with
her family in Morges in a house across the street from her grandmother, “who I was not fond of ”. In 1920, her father, François IX, rebuilt the château, and from then on the family established itself in the tiny community of Chigny. Jacqueline began her studies in the local nursery school. She attended primary school in Morges. “At sixteen, I went to the gymnasium in Lausanne. Earlier it had been impossible for girls to go to the gymnasium, but then one was opened for girls. It provided a good education. There were only ten students in my class.” Jacqueline already had decided on a career in medicine, and education at a gymnasium was the essential preparation. “We studied classics, but only Latin, no Greek. To study medicine, you needed Latin.” Her unusually candid memories of her early life at home were surprisingly ambivalent but very typical of Jacqueline. “My mother was lovely, and very intelligent, but I didn’t love her. I felt abandoned by my parents. I was very isolated.” Jacqueline was the second of five children – two brothers and two sisters. She said, “I was very close to my brother, François X, but in character I was most like Claude.” Jacqueline loved her father passionately. In speaking of him, she spoke very openly, perhaps providing insight into her decision to follow him into medicine. “In those days, I was in love with my father. I wanted to be a man. I felt like a man who had no penis.” Significantly, her sister also became a doctor. “My father loved us. He was charming. A physician, a generalist; his practice and his office were in Morges. He loved his work, especially surgery. He kept a horse and rode back and forth, coming home for meals. During the day we never saw him, except at lunch. He had fun with us while he drank his coffee, sometimes telling us stories from the Fables of [Jean de] La Fontaine (1621–1695). We went hiking occasionally, but we didn’t travel. My father was an amateur sculptor. His work was figurative, slightly medieval in style.” Aware of Jacqueline’s extraordinary knowledge of European art, I enquired about the source of her arthistorical awareness. Did it originate with her parents? “My parents didn’t involve themselves with my education; it was as if I educated myself. We seldom spoke of art. In school we did no formal study of art history. I did read some books on art history on my own – Raphael, da Vinci. Caravaggio was an early interest. I had no knowledge of modern art, and it meant nothing to me.” From early on, Jacqueline was determined to follow her father in studying medicine. Switzerland was rather advanced in making this possible for women. I asked about this. “There were five or six other girls studying medicine at the University of Lausanne. I was 25 when I graduated.” This was followed by a period of rotating internships, including a brief exposure to psychiatry, and it was in this context that she first encountered the work of Aloïse. “I RAW VISION 83
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EXHIBITIONS
TEZUKURI HONJIKOMI GEIJUTSU [Handmade Basic-training Art] Hajimari Museum, Inawashiro, Japan June 1 – October 13, 2014 Opened at the beginning of June, the small Hajimari Museum, located in the town of Inawashiro, just over 200 kilometres north of Tokyo, in Fukushima Prefecture, is one of a few new regional institutions in Japan dedicated in large part to the presentation of works produced by Japanese self-taught artists. With financial aid from the Nippon Foundation, a government-funded agency, and collaborators like the contemporary artist Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd, the Hajimari Museum will present exhibitions and serve as a venue for cultural and educational events. Housed in a renovated, 120-yearold, former warehouse, the museum’s building is a showpiece of both traditional and state-of-the-art carpentry, containing gallery, reading room and office spaces. The museum’s inaugural exhibition places an emphasis on skilled craftsmanship. The show presents works by the self-taught artists Shinichi Sawada, Takashi Shuji, Hitomi Kato and Mineo Ito, and by the schooled artists Takahiro Iwasaki, Kaori Sato, Hiraku Takeda and Yuken Teruya. In recent years, Sawada’s ceramic sculptures and Shuji’s richly coloured, semi-abstract, pastel-on-paper drawings have been included in several exhibitions outside Japan. Sawada’s spiky animal forms were prominently shown in last year’s main exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Here, he is showing a totem-like figure, an object about the size of a teapot with faces on each side, a many-legged alligator and a round piece in whose surface of nubby spikes a face is buried. It resembles an artifact from an ancient civilisation. Hitomi Kato uses regular and coloured pencils to make drawings on paper filled with faces and human forms. Similarly dense but also full of rhythm are the ink-on-paper drawings of Mineo Ito, who repeatedly writes his name, in black ink, either in hiragana, a Japanese syllabary (phonetic alphabet), or in kanji (Sino-Japanese characters). From Takahiro Iwasaki’s delicate cell-phone towers shaped from the plastic bristles of scrub brushes to Yuken Teruya’s little plants that pop up
takashi shuji
from the surfaces of photos printed on newspaper pages and Hiraku Takeda’s sculptural forms fashioned out of throw-away wooden chopsticks, all of the artists’ handling of their materials is impressive. So, too, is that of Kaori Sato, whose nature-inspired mural has been “painted” with little more than dirt of different colours. The Hajimari Museum instantly has become one of Inawashiro’s notable cultural attractions. With a mountain for winter skiing and a popular lake for summertime recreation, the town’s economy depends on tourism. With its first exhibition, the new institution has shown that it plans to offer programming of the highest quality. Edward M. Gómez
KAZUMI KAMAE Masato, My Love Yukiko Koide Presents, Tokyo June 3 – 20, 2014 The Japanese self-taught artist Kazumi Kamae was born in 1966. Today she lives and produces her unglazed, firedclay sculptures in Shiga Prefecture, near Kyoto, at Atelier Yamanami, an arttherapy workshop in the city of Kouga. In terms of their subject matter and the art-making techniques Kamae has developed, her creations are among the most unusual to have appeared anywhere in the self-taught art field. Although her sculptures have been shown in group exhibitions before, this was her first solo, commercial-gallery presentation. The abiding main theme of her work is her affection for – call it a crush on – Masato, a male staff member at Atelier Yamanami. Kamae
kazumi kamae
lives in a country whose popular culture is loaded with expressions of cuteness and sometimes mawkish sentimentality – smiling bunnies, puppies or fish in company logos, and sweet Hello Kitty’s ubiquitous, mouthless mug. By contrast, despite the fact that her subject matter is so personal, in her art she abstracts it in a manner that yields objects of mystery and intriguing ambiguity – and considerable charm. Masato and I, Driving in His Car (2012), a centerpiece of this exhibition, RAW VISION 83
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BOOKS
L’ART BRUT DANS LE MONDE [Art Brut Around the World] Collection de l’art brut, Lausanne June 6 – November 2, 2014 Collection de l’Art Brut/Infolio, Lausanne/Gollion, 2014 ISBN 978-2-88474-730-1, 35 SFr. The work of seven “auteurs” are on view in “L’Art Brut dans le monde”, an exhibition Lucienne Peiry, the director of research and international relations at the Collection de l’Art Brut, has organised for this well-known museum in Switzerland. They hail from Bali, Benin, Brazil, Greenland, India and Europe. Their creations represent the latest discoveries from beyond the outsider art world’s most familiar territories by a museum that in recent years has shown works by Nek Chand (India), Ataa Oko (Ghana) and artists from Japan.
In the beautifully illustrated catalogue that accompanies “L’Art Brut dans le monde”, various scholars comment on the moving life stories and works of each artist featured in the exhibition and on how they express their obsessive dreams in the face of many hardships. For example, there is Gustav Mesmer (1903–1994, Raw Vision #3), a mystical figure who was institutionalised by his family and was a kind of naïve Otto Lilienthal (a nineteenth-century, German aviation pioneer). Mesmer tried to escape his tragic condition by flying in the air with devices he made himself, by hand, but which could never lift him off the ground. His writings, more than his attempts to fly, seem to be the most
RAWREVIEWS interesting part of his creative output. The same may be said of Anarqâq, a young, Inuit shaman whom the Danish polar explorer and anthropologist Knud Rasmussen (1879–1933) discovered during the fifth of his Thule Expeditions (1921–1924). Anarqâq’s drawings of spirits and frightening guides, which his mentor commissioned and purchased, may be seen as rare documents of more scientific than artistic interest. ey are stored in the anthropological collections of the Danish National Museum. Of the works of the various artists that are on view in the exhibition, those of the “machiniste” (“engineer”), Ezekiel James Messou (b. 1971), from Benin, may seem to be of relatively poor aesthetic value but of great sociological interest. As for that of the Balinese artist Ni Tanjung, two phases of her creative life are documented in the catalogue by Georges Bréguet and by the film-maker Erika Manoni in an 18-minute short that appears on a DVD that comes with this book. Born around 1930, Ni Tanjung is a sensitive woman, who, deeply hurt by life, first built a roadside altar of painted stones but now fills her tiny bedroom with hundreds of brightly drawn paper puppets made in the tradition of Balinese wayang kulit (shadow-puppet theatre). The show also looks at the ballpoint-pen drawings of Kashinath Chawan (born c. 1950), a shoeshine boy from Pune, India, whose pictures portray deities, or characters from great Indian epics. For Chawan, making his drawings is like a therapeutic kind of prayer. They attracted much attention at the last INSITA triennial of outsider art a few years ago in Bratislava. Also in the exhibition are works by Giovanni Bosco (1948–2009), a street artist from Castellammare del Golfo, in Sicily, whose daring need to cover his environment with his vocabulary of elementary forms, colours and letters – often he painted his bright designs on buildings’ exterior walls – remains strongly impressive and survives the ephemeral recognition he has received. For me, though, the work of Antonio Roseno de Lima (1926–1998, also known as “ARL”), the “pop artist of the favela” from Campinas, Brazil, is something completely new. For this reason, this naïve-brut artist, who made paintings from photographs, is perhaps my favourite discovery among the gifted group of artists whose works are featured in this show. Laurent Danchin
MICHEL NEDJAR, MOMENTUM (une retrospective) Galerie Christian Berst, Paris, 2014 ISBN 979-1090463-22-6, €30 This bilingual catalogue of a recently presented exhibition at a Paris gallery (now known as Christian Berst Art Brut) showcases more than 170 works – sculptures, works on paper, stitched collages, two-dimensional figures – by Michel Nedjar. It begins with reproductions of seven letters, which Jean Dubuffet wrote to Nedjar expressing his passionate responses concerning the self-taught artist’s work and his acquisition in 1981 of several of his creations for the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne. Thirty-four years later, the show for which this book was published was designed, in part, to confront certain paradoxes related to Nedjar’s status as an artist. Since he was anointed by Dubuffet, Nedjar has been regarded as an art brut artist by various partisans of the movement and represented by Christian Berst’s gallery, one of the leading venues of its kind. However, in this book Berst challenges the art brut field (and perhaps, in effect, his own interests) by observing that Nedjar’s early identification as an art brut artmaker allowed him to dedicate himself to the life of an artist, and that today his work’s appeal or affinities extend “beyond the artificial barrier” (erected by the “sycophants of art brut”) to “the art of our time”. Parenthetically, Berst could have also noted that many other art brut defenders deny that Nedjar is brut enough to be considered anything but a “contemporary artist”. Stéphane Corréard, this book’s main author, explores these paradoxes by asserting that Nedjar is a maker of art brut because his work keeps faith with what he sees as its basic “moments”, including its historical moment (that of art brut’s emergence in 1945 thanks to Dubuffet, who RAW VISION 83
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JOSEF WITTLICH: Bilder Nach Bildern/Pictures After Pictures by Hans Körner and Manja Wilkens Wasserwerk.Galerie Lange, Siegburg and Verlag Walther König, Cologne, 2014 ISBN 978-3-86335-413-8, €78 Josef Wittlich (1903–1982) worked in a tile factory in the Rhineland, where he pinned up in his workspace the drawings he made in his spare time. Discovered by a discerning ceramicist, Fred Stelzig, who encouraged him, Wittlich developed a reputation as a self-taught painter. His work became widely known and was typically marketed as “naïve art.” In 2005, his estate was taken over by Dieter Lange, whose Wasserwerk.Galerie Lange in Germany is widely respected as a centre for outsider art. Through his editing of this remarkable book, Lange seeks to confirm Wittlich’s eminence as an artist and hopes to establish his place in the wider contemporary-art market, too. This bilingual, German-andEnglish tome weighs in at two kilos and is packed with delightful images. Its first half is devoted to an essay by two attentive art historians, Manja Wilkens and Hans Körner. They examine Wittlich’s practice as a copyist who refreshed the insipid print images that inspired him and support their analysis with numerous reproductions of his gouache-on-paper pictures. The book’s second half is a catalogue raisonné containing 1234 entries, each boasting an illustration the size of half a matchbox. Wittlich’s art-making approach was comparable to that of the outsider Johann Hauser or the pop artist Andy Warhol in that he relied on source
material instead of coming up with original imagery himself. His “pictures after pictures” borrowed images from postcards, popular magazines, mailorder brochures for women’s clothes or military histories. This book reproduces many such sources and notes the changes Wittlich made in copying them. He used unmixed colours and thin black outlines, which made his versions resemble wordless posters. His subjects included fashion models, royal figures, animals, churches and landscapes. His most startling works are his battle scenes, in which faded engravings or photos were transmuted into eye-catching jumbles of intersecting elements. In them, bayonet-wielding infantrymen dart, clash and grapple almost joyously. Sometimes Wittlich’s preposterous distortions seem to reveal a grain of truth. For example, one 1981 cover of the magazine Bunte Illustrierte showed Britain’s Prince Charles standing behind his bride-to-be, Diana, his hands resting on her shoulders. By contrast, Wittlich’s brazen reworking of this photo suggests that the prince was actually throttling his fiancée. Roger Cardinal
WILLEM VAN GENK: CHRONICLE by Nico van der Endt Lecturis, Eindhoven, 2014 ISBN 978-9-46226-046-7, £32.50 A dealer who develops personal friendships with the outsider artists he or she represents is probably the exception rather than the rule. In such circumstances, the lines between a dealer’s recognition, encouragement, support and exploitation of an artist and his or her work may become blurred. Such observations provide a backdrop for this well-illustrated, chronological account by the Dutch, Amsterdam-based dealer Nico van der Endt of his close relationship with the extremely obstinate and paranoid outsider artist Willem van Genk. It lasted from 1975 until the artist’s death in 2005. Van der Endt’s tone in these pages is tactful and self-effacing, which adds to his story’s convincing sincerity. As a gallery owner, his relationship with Van Genk was complex. There was an unwritten agreement between them that his work would not be sold to individual collectors, and Van der Endt went to great lengths to support and promote it in ways that would be
acceptable to the artist. But alongside their business activity in the art market, the two men gradually developed a genuine friendship. (Between the lines, this book also shines a fascinating light on the wheelings and dealings of the art world.) Not only did Van der Endt offer Van Genk practical advice and emotional support, but in 1980 he accompanied the artist to see a presentation of his work at the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York. Subsequently Van der Endt made several more trips with the artist, during which Van Genk had opportunities to apply his encyclopedic knowledge of different cities and their transport systems in the real world outside his studio. This book includes many touching scenes in which the artist’s very real psychological problems and their everyday, domestic consequences – several times, for example, the police broke into his apartment, and he was sent to a psychiatric hospital – are described with a sense of compassion that is all the more telling because it is understated. Van der Endt certainly offers a vivid picture of Van Genk’s world, evoking a sense of the often justified resentment that fuelled his obsessive creative drive, as well as of his preoccupation with power, both literal and metaphorical, and its modes of transmission, attitudes that were relieved by occasional flashes of humour. Still, despite its modest tone, this informative memoir is also a tribute to the loyalty to his artist, which was sorely tested at times, and to the exceptional kindness of Van der Endt himself. David Maclagan RAW VISION 83
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BACK ISSUES FOR SALE Some issues only available as pdf downloads: #4 #5 #6 #9 #12 #13 #23 #24 #26 #54 #55
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RAW VISION 123 Facsimile reprint of the historic first three issues
Art Brut Dubuffet, Art Cars, Definitions, Lonnie Holley, Abbé Fouré, Ray Morris
Billy Lemming, Huichol, Australian Outsiders, Art of the Homeless
von Bruenchenhein, Imagists, Monsiel, McKesson, Mabussa, Vahan Poladian
Joe Coleman, Minnie Evans, Seillé, Peploe, Papa, Canadian Environments
La Cathedral, Hauser, Norbert Kox, Zemankova, Anita Roddick, Laffoley
Gugging, Art & Psychiatry, Traylor, M-J Gil, De Stadshof, Margaret’s Grocery
Salvation Mountain, Yoakum, Dos Santos, Scottish Outsiders, Bartlett
Ossorio, Irish Naïves, Nick Blinko, Ray Materson, Le Carré Galimard
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Adolf Wölfli, Art Cars Zeldis, Albert Louden, Cellblock Visions
Sudduth Burgess Dulaney, St EOM, Mouly, Dulaney, Mr Eccles, SPACES
Rio Museum, Voodoo,Carvers of Poland, Naïves of Taiwan, E. James
Ben Wilson, Inner Architecture, Fasanella, Phase 2, Fryar, Gordon’s Patio
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Y5/P5, Chomo, Arning, Leonov, Kaiser, The Tarot Garden, Gene Merritt
Mary Proctor, Carlo Zinelli, Dernier Cri, Art Brut, Jersey Shell Garden
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Mary T Smith, de Villiers, Matt Lamb, Old Curiosity Shop, Mithila Painters
Robert Tatin, N-M Rowe, McQuirk, Denise Allen, Freddie Brice
William Thomas Thompson, Alfred Wallis, Johnny Meah, Michael Rapanakis
Dr. Leo Navratil, Ilija Bosilj, Simon Sparrow, Melvin Way, Pradeep Kumar
Nek Chand, Finster, Valton Tyler, LaraGomez, P.Humphrey, War Rugs, Lonné
Van Genk, Purvis Young, Marcel Storr, RA Miller, Madge Gill, Makiki
Watts Towers, Bessy Harvey, Marginalia, F. Monchâtre, Tree Circus
Palais Idéal, J. Scott, Charles Russell Donald Pass, Outsider portraits
41 G. Aiken, Junkerhaus, Kurt Haas, P Lancaster, Minnie Evans
51 August Natterer, New Gugging, George Widener, Paul Hefti
63 Howard Finster, Michel Nedjar, James H Jennings, Rosemarie Koczy
73 Dalton Ghetti, Art & Disability, Danielle Jacqui, Andrei Palmer, Mingering Mike
42 Boix-Vives, Fred Smith, Rosa Zharkikh, Donald Mitchell
52 Ivan Rabuzin, Czech Art Brut, Sunnyslope, Prophet Blackmon
64 Joe Coleman, Harald Stoffers, Elis F. Stenman
43 Thornton Dial, Richard Greaves, Martha Grunenwaldt
53 Toraja Death Figures, Chauvin Sculptures Josef Wittlich, Nigerian Sculpture
44 Theo, Jane-in-Vain, Janet Sobel, Lanning Garden
56 Maura Holden, Clarence Schmidt R.A. Miller, Hans Krüsi, Silvio Barile
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Speller, Norbert Kox, Haiti street art BF Perkins Damian Michaels
Philly/K8, Sefolosha, Palmer, Belardinelli, Ludwiczac, Oscar’s sketchbook
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Henry Darger, Peter Kapeller, Nadia Thornton Dial, Belykh
August Walla, Adolf Wölfli, Antoni Gaudi, Tim Wehrle, Frank Walter, Art & Therapy
76 CJ Pyle, Aloïse Corbaz, Mr Imagination, John Danczyszak
45 William Hawkins, Expressionism and Insanity, Giovanni Battista Podesta
57 Burning Man, Matsumoto, Nicholas Herrera, William Fields
67 Renaldo Kuhler, Sonabai, Outsider Films, Giov Bosco, Finster/Ginsberg
46 Finnish Outsiders, Sylvain Fusco, Roy Ferdinand
58 Lobonov, Zindato, JB Murray, Anthony Jadunath, Seymour Rosen
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47 Scottie Wilson, Gavin Bennett, Bispo Do Rosario, Art Behind Bars
59 Emery Blagdon, ZB Armstrong, Bali, Imppu (Finland), Mari Newman
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48 Hung Tung, Photography, Bernard Schatz, Jessie Montes
6 Tom Duncan, Movie Posters, Spanish Sites, Rosa Zharkikh
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Paul Amar, Phyllis Kind, D M Diaz, W Dawson, Joe Minter, Survivors, Martindale
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Martin Ramirez, Bruce New, Stephanie Lucas, Ellen Greene, Art in Houston
Mark Beyer, Howard Finster, Veijo Ronkkonen, Alexis Lippstreu
Alex Grey, Hiroyuki Doi, Josef Karl Radler, Ferdinand Cooper, Patrick Joyce
Prophet Isaiah Robertson, SchröderSonnenstern, Madge Gill, John Gilmoour
Electric Pencil, Gugging, JJ Cromer River Plate Voodoo
Darger, R/stone Cowboy, Thévoz: Chiaroscuro, Pearl Blauvelt, Bressse
49 Mammi Wata, Fred Ressler, Mary Whitfield, Isaiah Zagar
61 Sam Doyle, Myrtice West, Lost In Time, Romanenkov
3 Picassiette, Benefiel, Vodou, Dellscahu, Mediumistic, Van Genk
4 Eli Jah, Singleton, Marie-Rose Lortet, Ross Brodar, Catalan site
5 Hamtramck Disney, Roger Cardinal, Ken Grimes, Criminal Tattoos
62 S.L. Jones, Kevin Duffy, Frank Jones, Charles Steffen
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Mario Mesa, Tim Lewis, Joel Lorand, Chelo Amezcua, Clayton Bailey
Masao Obata, Takeshi Shuji, Henriette Zéphir, John Toney, Edward Adamson
81 Andre Robillard, Johnny Culver, Lubos Plny, Arte Bruta, Donald Pass
82 Bill Traylor, Art Brut Today, Meta Doodles, Billy Tripp, Gugging, Zoran Tanasic