Raw Vision 84

RAWVISION OUTSIDER

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BRUT

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FOLK

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NAIVE

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INTUITIVE

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VISIONARY

RV 84 WINTER 2014/15

$14.00 • £8.00 • €15.00

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JULIAN MARTIN • RONALD LOCKETT • LARRY LEWIS • SOLANGE KNOPF

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RAWVISION84 WINTER 2014/15

EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Phyllis Kind, Frank Maresca, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell

RAW COLLECTING A glimpse of Audrey Heckler’s collection in NY

JULIAN MARTIN Unique pastel works by Australian artist

LARRY LEWIS’S PATENT MEDICINE Strong, playful collages

RONALD LOCKETT’S FLOWERS Dark, archaeological works by Southern artist

MARIA PRIMACHENKO ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels

Celebrated Ukrainian naive artist

SENIOR EDITOR Edward M. Gómez

DREAMS OF TAIWANESE PENSIONERS

FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels US ASSISTANT Ari Huff FRENCH EDITOR Laurent Danchin ADVERTISING Kate Shanley, Inez Peralta 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 info@rawvision.com 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

Three very different environments

EMMA HAUCK Unrequited love letters written from an asylum

SOLANGE KNOPF The delicate yet dramatic drawings

RICHARD SHARPE SHAVER Paintings reflecting personal science theories.

RAW STUDIOS A look at Little City studios from Illinois

MOVIE ROUND UP A look at recent films and DVDs on outsider art

RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions, events and books

RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world

GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE A round-up of notable venues around the world

COVER IMAGE: Julian Martin, Starry Night, 2013

ISSN 0955-1182 Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) December 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).

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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AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD

WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE

UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD

MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS

RAWNEWS

BRITAIN, FRANCE

CHARLES BRONSON

GALERIE POLADHARDOUIN

Jan 9–22 The Death of Bronson salutes the demise of prisoner Charles Bronson, dubbed “Britain’s most violent prisoner”. This series of unique artworks depict a no holds barred account of his time in solitary confinement. This year Bronson renounced violence and stated that he is dedicating his time to art and re-naming himself as Charles Salvador.

Jan 21 – Aug 14 Les Cahiers Dessines, the publishing house based in Paris, has been invited to Halle Saint Pierre to exhibit a broad range of drawings. More than 500 works by 67 artists are shown, including James Castle, Victor Hugo, Bruno Schulz, Kiki Smith and Saul Steinberg.

GALERIE POLADHARDOUIN

saul steinberg

until Jan 17 Rarely exhibited paintings by Marcel Pouget, charcoal sketches by Maryan, watercolours and canvasses by Jacques Grinberg and drawings

by Michel Macréau at Galerie Polad-Hardouin.

marcel pouget

charles salvador

DRAWINGS AT HALLE SAINT PIERRE

86 rue Quincampoix 75003 APIARY STUDIOS, 458 Hackney Road, London E2 9EG, UK

Paris, FRANCE

HALLE SAINT PIERRE, 2 Rue Ronsard, 75018 Paris, FRANCE

guerrillazoo.com

www.polad-hardouin.com

www.hallesaintpierre.org

HAITIAN ART

until Feb 1 Two solo exhibitions feature the works of Marie Audin, from France, and Albert Louden, from Britain.

until Feb 15 Haiti: Deux siècles de création artistique explores Haitian art from the nineteenth century to today, with paintings, sculptures and installations.

sébastien jean

marie audin GALERIE ROUTES

GALERIE JEAN GRESET until Jan 31 Artists from L'Art en Marche are currently exhibited at Galerie Jean Greset, including Philippe Azema, Danielle Jacqui, Simone Le Carré Gallimard and François Monchâtre.

simone le carré gallimard

MARIE AUDIN AND ALBERT LOUDEN

until Jan 17 Talismans features over 200 small format works created between 1950 and 2014 by a number of artists including Ody Saban, Jean Deyrolle and Astrid Nanty.

ody saban

GALERIE ROUTES

GRAND PALAIS,

GALERIE JEAN GRESET

GALERIES NATIONALES

7 Rue Rivotte, 25000

53 rue de Seine

MUSÉE DE LA CRÉATION FRANCHE

3, avenue du Général

Besançon, FRANCE

75006 Paris, FRANCE

58, avenue du Maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny

Eisenhower, 75008 Paris,

www.jeangreset.com

www.galerie-routes.com

33130 Bègles FRANCE. www.musee-creationfranche.com

FRANCE. grandpalais.fr

www.art-en-marche.fr

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RAWNEWS

INDIA, JAPAN, NETHERLANDS, SPAIN

KASHINATH CHAWAN AT GALERIE HAMER

until Jan 16 Grafiek Enzo is Galerie Atelier Herenplaats’ annual exhibition of original affordable art.

until Jan 10 Drawings by Indian shoe shiner Kashinath Chawan are shown at Galerie Hamer.

shubhdarshini

GALERIE ATELIER HERENPLAATS Schiedamsche Vest 56-58

kashinath chawan

HERENPLAATS

e gallery at the Outsider Artists Centre & Cafe in New Delhi held an Outsider Art Fair in honour of Francesco Garieri, promoter of outsider art in India. e fair included mosaics by Turkish artist Ayesgul Ozbek, meticulous sketches by Capt Pandeys and paintings by Devika Pandey. e event received considerable media attention and the gallery plans to hold another fair in November 2015.

wouter valentijn

OUTSIDER ART FAIR IN INDIA

3011 BD Rotterdam GALERIE HAMER, Leliegracht 38-HS, 1015 DH Amsterdam

www.herenplaats.nl

NETHERLANDS. www.galeriehamer.nl

GALERIE MIYAWAKI

JOSEP PUJIULA RECEIVES TWO AWARDS

until Feb 7 One hundred and twenty works by selected artists of Galerie Miyawaki are exhibited, including Antje Gummels, Madge Gill, Hans Krüsi, Michel Nedjar and Gérard Sendrey. One room is dedicated to the work of Shisuko Tohmoto.

Josep Pujiula, creator of labyrinthine installations near Argelaguer (Girona), Spain, has received local and international honours. On October 16, 2014, the Consell Comarcal declared his work a local cultural heritage site. In fall of 2014 it was announced Pujiula was a finalist for the International Award for Public Art.

GALERIE MIYAWAKI, Niji-agaru, Teramachi-dori Nakagyoku, Kyoto, 604-0915 JAPAN. galerie-miyawaki.com 10

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josep pujiula

NETHERLANDS

New Delhi 110021, INDIA. outsidercafe.com

shisuko tohmoto

OUTSIDER ARTISTS CENTRE & CAFE, 1/13, Shanti Niketan

RAWNEWS

USA

AVAM’S VISIONARY EXPERIENCE

GALERIE BONHEUR

until Aug 30 The Visionary Experience: Saint Francis to Finster continues at AVAM, featuring Howard Finster, Ingo Swann, Jimi Hendrix, Walter Russell and more.

Donald Pass: The Hope We Seek is also showing until February 22.

until Aug 8 Works by 27 African American self-taught artists are shown in Our Faith Affirmed – Works from the Gordon W. Bailey Collection and form a permananet donation from the collector to the museum.

ingo swann

craig norton

roy ferdinand (portrait of sulton rogers)

Jan 29 – Feb 1 Galerie Bonheur will be exhibiting at the Outsider Art Fair in New York, featuring artist Craig Norton with his large scale works depicting unusual characters.

DONATION TO MISSISSIPPI MUSEUM

THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI MUSEUM GALERIE BONHEUR

University Avenue and 5th Street, Oxford, MS 38655

800 Key Hwy, Baltimore MD 21230. avam.org

www.galeriebonheur.com

museum.olemiss.edu

THERESA DISNEY AT FUNHOUSE GALLERY

57 WORKS DONATED TO METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Funhouse Gallery serves as a place to showcase the work of Theresa Disney, who is inspired by geometry, narrative and oblique story-telling. Open by appointment, the gallery is currently exhibiting The Art of the Circus.

Fifty-seven artworks by contemporary African American artists from the Southern United States have been gifted to The Metropolitan Museum of Art by the William S. Arnett Collection at Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Key works by Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley are featured along with work from The Gee’s Bend quilters and Joe Minter. An exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is planned for autumn 2016.

purvis young

theresa disney

AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUM

THE FUNHOUSE GALLERY, 6210 Columbia Ave, St Louis

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

MO 63139. thefunhousegallery.com

1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028. www.metmuseum.org

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RAW COLLECTING

IN NEW YORK, BOLD COLOURS AND AN EYE FOR THE UNUSUAL

By EDWARD M GÓMEZ

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he work of self-taught artists and Audrey B. Heckler found each other at a moment of portent. It was 1993, and as she recalls, “I spotted a poster announcing a new event in New York, the Outsider Art Fair. There, I found a kind of art that really spoke to me. It fit me perfectly. I’m not afraid of unusual things. I like something different, something quirky.”

A native New Yorker, Heckler built up her wideranging collection as she continued learning about the art-making themes and techniques of self-taught artists.

Still, its character is more personal than encyclopedic.

“Years ago, I met the New York dealer Phyllis Kind”, she says. “She was the first to present classic European art brut in America. She became my mentor and a close friend. I enjoyed her Adolf Wölfli and Carlo Zinelli shows, and I bought works from her gallery.”

When Kind first showed Martín Ramírez’s drawings, Heckler recalls, “It was: Wow, what a discovery!” Today

she owns several of the Mexican-born artist’s works, including a large, horizontal-format picture featuring rural and urban imagery, and complex collage elements.

(Heckler is assembling a book to document her collection. In it, her Ramírezes will figure prominently).

Another Ramírez in her collection depicts a Spanish galleon in full sail. Still another, a tall, vertical piece, shows one of the artist’s emblematic Madonnas, rich in decorative patterning and allusions to the Mexican Catholicism that was a big part of his native culture.

Framed artworks cover the walls in Heckler’s home, a spacious apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The walls of her main salon, study, sitting room and bedroom are painted in bold colours, not the typical, contemporary-art setting’s sterile white. “I don’t like empty walls,” this veteran collector admits. “I’d rather see art and enjoy the pleasure of living with it. All of these works – they’re my friends.”

left A powerful William Hawkins bullfighter hangs on a green wall; in the background a classic Nek Chand sculpture, a red and yellow Thornton Dial painting and a picture by Purvis Young opposite top left Audrey Heckler, her cat and works by Hiroyuki Doi and Martin Ramirez top far right works by Morris Hirshfield, August Walla and Bill Traylor middlle left Audrey Heckler shows a double sided Bill Traylor drawing middle right figurines by Richard C Smith and William Dawson lower left a Carlo Zinelli gouache lower far right figures by Navaho artist Charlie Wiletto 22

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BOLD ESSAYS IN COLOUR AND FORM In vivid pastel-on-paper drawings, the Australian Julian Martin masters the art of abstraction

By EDWARD M. GĂ“MEZ

all photos courtesy of the artist, Arts Project Australia and Fleischer/ Ollman

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opposite: Untitled (Woman and Two Children) 2011 pastel on paper 15 x 10.8 ins., 38.1 x 27.5 cm left: Untitled (Abstract Composition) 2012 pastel on paper 14.75 x 11 ins., 34.5 x 27.9 cm

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he boldly abstract or semi-abstract, pastel-onpaper drawings the Australian artist Julian Martin has been making for many years are some of the freshest essays in pure colour and form to have emerged on the outsider/self-taught art scene in a long time. Although Martin has developed an appreciative audience and won praise for his work in his homeland, where he has participated in the studio-art programme at Arts Project Australia, in a Melbourne suburb, for more than two decades, only recently has his art begun to attract significant attention overseas.

Early in 2014, at two high-profile events in New York, Martin’s work caught the eyes of established collectors in the outsider/self-taught field and of art aficionados more rooted in the aesthetics of classic modernism and more contemporary modes of artmaking. They were shown in New York at the Armory Show, an annual fair featuring top-quality works of modern and contemporary art, and at the Outsider Art Fair. Recently, at its own gallery, Arts Project Australia presented “Transformer”, a retrospective exhibition that examined the past 25 years of Martin’s career.

Martin, who has lived with his parents in Melbourne since his birth there in 1969, was diagnosed with autism when he was two-and-a-half years old. From the age of five, he began taking part in a programme for specialneeds children, but as his mother, Pat Martin, recalls, her son did not start making art until he was around ten

years old. Later he attended an autism-specific school in Melbourne, where he stayed for several years. It was during that period, his mother remembers, that he “won a minor art prize”. In retrospect, that achievement might be seen as an early indicator of Julian’s later, more fully recognised artistic talent.

Julian Martin began taking part in the programme for autistic persons offered by EDAR, a provider of services for the disabled in Melbourne’s Eastern Region, when he was eighteen years old. While still at EDAR, he began going to APA a few hours each week on the recommendation of a teacher who had spotted his talent.

Eventually his routine visits to APA grew longer, until he found himself spending three days each week at that specialised studio.

A few years ago, Philadelphia-based Alex Baker served as senior curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. During his four-year sojourn in Australia, he became familiar with APA’s studio-art programme and Martin’s work. In 2011, he organised “Detours Through Abstraction”, an exhibition at APA’s gallery, which featured works made by both its own self-taught artists and artists from Melbourne’s contemporary-art community. Baker included some of Martin’s drawings in that show.

In an essay in the “Transformer” catalogue, Baker draws affinities between Martin’s boldly-coloured pictures and those of such American artists as Adolph RAW VISION 84

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LARRY LEWIS’S PATENT MEDICINE Dazzling collages of Hollywood divas and Victoriana, made in private by an oil company secretary

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remember vividly the day in 2008 when I was invited to see the work of the artist Larry Lewis, who had died in complete obscurity four years earlier. I had been intrigued by some pictures Lina Morielli, a friend and close collaborator of Lewis’s heir, Sharyn Prentiss Laughton, had sent me, but I wanted to see the work in the flesh. Morielli had told me the little that was known about Lewis’s biography. Born in 1919, he took art classes in his youth and exhibited his

paintings in the 1950s with some limited success, but for reasons unknown he withdrew from the art world.

Married to a nurse, he lived in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he made his living as a secretary at United Oil Products. But he did not stop making art. From the 1960s, almost until his death in 2004, Lewis worked on a series of extraordinary hand-painted scrapbooks made out of collages of photocopied pictures of Hollywood divas, Victoriana, newspaper advertisements, product

By JONATHAN WEINBERG

Untitled (Hearts of the World) c. 1970 mixed media on paper (two-page spread from collage book) 21 x 36 ins.

58.4 x 91.4 cm RAW VISION 84

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RONALD LOCKETT’S ROSES The memorialising imagery that blossomed from sheet metal

By CARA ZIMMERMAN

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onald Lockett’s Drought (1994) is an examination of mortality through rusted and flaking horizontal strips of sheet metal. A deer, head dipped gracefully between its front legs, seeks out water. Formed from punctures and striations that disrupt the picture’s ground surface in disconcerting ways, the animal’s head, neck and shoulders are delineated through aggressive strips, while its legs and haunches recede as a constellation of small perforations. An attached, undulating metal scrap at the lower left of the picture hints at a riverbank, but its rich brown colour pairs with the title to imply aridity and barrenness. As the deer seeks water, the metal surface frustrates its search.

Through the harshness of the environment and the passage of time, the deer is receding into the terrain, the landscape, and history.

Artist Ronald Lockett was interested in ephemerality, destruction and memory throughout his artistic career. In his early pieces, from the late 1980s, he experimented with many techniques and materials in service to these concerns. Rebirth (1987) is a delicately limned animal skeleton on a painted, colour-blocked surface. Civil Rights Marchers (1988), a found-objectlayered surface augmented with bright splattered paint, is in conversation with works by Lockett’s mentor and cousin Thornton Dial. Hiroshima (1988), a textured surface of black, red, and white paint is, in its subtleties, a quiet conversation about the horrors of nuclear warfare. Each looks remarkably different and speaks of a right: Drought, 1994 found tin, pencil and nails on wood 48.5 x 51.5 ins., 123.2 x 130.8 cm

overleaf: Rebirth, 1987 wire, nails and paint on Masonite 12 x 18.5 ins., 30.5 x 47 cm

photos courtesy the Souls Grown Deep Foundation 34

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MARIA PRIMACHENKO The language of colour, and the story of a celebrated Ukrainian naive artist

By JAMES YOUNG

Bull, 1940, watercolour on paper, 10.9 x 7.8 ins., 27.4 x 20 cm

I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian. – Pablo Picasso, 1936 World Exhibition, Paris

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his miracle of colour and invention had her bast shoes planted firmly on the soil of her native land.

Maria Aksentievna Primachenko (1908–1997) was a Ukrainian peasant. Her astonishingly fertile picture plane was located in the flat limitless horizon of the Ukrainian steppe.

Primachenko’s mother and grandmother were highly skilled embroiderers and she absorbed the intergenerational Slavic tradition of needlework, of which Ukrainian embroidery is a superlative example. It encodes an ancient symbolism, fusing both pagan and Christian, where flower heads morph into eternal sun wheels, birds become messengers of peace, horses protect

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Maria Primachenko after returning from Kiev, 1935–36

from the evil eye. This inherited world of signs would saturate Maria’s later work. When we encounter these forms and symbols on the decorated pottery of the adult artist, the initial impression is one of timelessness. Are they Bronze Age? Contemporary?

Primachenko lived her life in the village of Bolotnya in the Kiev region. She contracted polio as a child. Her already empathetic character became heightened into a profound sense of universality that in earlier times might have been seen as almost pantheistic. In the Ukraine of the immediate post-Revolutionary period this would, of necessity, find more nuanced modes of expression.

Rather than withdrawal from the world her disability enabled her to engage more creatively with it.

She observed her home, her village and its customs, as well as the animal life that was husbanded there.

The Threat Of War, 1986, gouache, 14.4 x 33.5 ins., 63.5 x 85 cm

All images courtesy of National Museum of Decorative Folk Art (Senior Researcher Elena Shestakova), Kiev, Ukraine.

Undiminished by limits of body and mind, she also ventured into the wilder places beyond:

and cell phones are to contemporary people. When we see echoes in Primachenko’s work of Petrykivka, the village tradition of decorating objects with floral plant motifs, it is not a quaint form of historicism. Such images, and patterns were intrinsic to rural life. They are not “craft” or hobbyism, they are a fundamental language of colour. Maria absorbed these stylised forms as much as she observed and poeticised the actual flowers, buds, leaves and berries of her immediate environment.

Ancient and primordial powers persisted in the Ukraine of Maria Primachenko’s life and imagination.

Like other twentieth-century naive artists her work was positioned at the crossroads between the urban and the ancient, the scientific and the numinous. Her genius reveals an imagination that rejoices in a profound sense of reality. Her work is derived from an experienced, loved world. Her fantasy has roots.

Once as a young girl, I was tending some geese. I followed them across a wild flower meadow to a sandy beach by the river. I began to draw real and imaginary flowers with a stick in the sand. Later I decided to paint the walls of my home using natural pigments. From that point I never stopped painting and drawing.

And from that point Primachenko lived in a totally created world. She decorated her home, embroidered her own clothes, made pottery, sculptures and most significantly created an enormous body of paintings whose subjects range from fantastical creatures, to work on the collective farm; from visionary anthropomorphic forms to, latterly, the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred only twenty miles from her village.

Ukrainian folk tradition permeated Maria’s work. It must be remembered that at the time of her birth 85 per cent of the population lived off the land. Thus what we term as “folk art” was a commonplace feature of daily life, as much as the design elements of computers

James Young is a writer and musician who has spent the last twenty years researching the outsider art of Eastern Europe.

State Museum of Ukrainian Folk Art: http://www.mundm.kiev.ua/COLLECTN/PRIMA.HTM http://www.wikiart.org/uk/maria-primachenko/mode/all-paintings.

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DREAMS OF THREE TAIWANESE PENSIONERS On an East Asian island, three older men create very different environments

by REMY RICORDEAU

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he work of self-taught artists from Taiwan became known to European audiences in 1997–98 when the exhibition “17 Naives from Taiwan” was presented at Halle Saint Pierre in Paris and later at the Musée de Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium.

Through this exhibition, the public discovered, to their astonishment, some curious contemporary creations from this small island. In truth, the art that was shown was more art brut than naive art. The artists whose works were displayed were self-taught. Some of them, including Hung Tung and Lin Yuan, were illiterate.

Discovering these Taiwanese creators through that exhibition piqued my interest and set me off on a journey of exploration in search of other artists from that East Asian country. I hoped to find unusual and unique built environments in Taiwan, those which the French writer Jacques Lacarrière described as being “inspired by the edge of the roads”. After carrying out some research and contacting some Taiwanese friends, I found some striking results, which far exceeded my expectations. On my subsequent trip to Taiwan, I began to compile a “census” of sites built by self-taught artists on the island – an important index, which had not existed up until that point.

Of the three artists whose works appear here, one of them painted his neighbourhood with frescoes; another carved a cliff near his home; and the third built himself a personal temple to honour his late wife and his dragon protectors. What these three art-makers have in common is that they all waited until the twilight of their lives to begin to engage in a creative activity, as though they were unconsciously propelled to do so by an urgent desire to leave some final traces of their and their loved ones’ presence on Earth.

The nocturnal visions of an old soldier, Huang Yongfu I had learned that in Taichung, central Taiwan, I would find a set of frescoes that were the work of a Republic of China Air Force veteran. When I arrived, I found these very original images covering a hastily-constructed 42

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building from the early 1950s, which had been intended to serve as a temporary military headquarters when Chiang Kai-Shek had become the RoC’s president, after his Chinese Nationalist Party had been defeated by the mainland Communists. ese military buildings were to be razed to the ground for an urban redevelopment scheme had Huang Yongfu, driven by an uncontrollable desire to decorate his world, not been on the threshold of his 80th birthday (today he is 93) and ready to take up a paintbrush.

Huang began by quietly decorating the outside of his hut with small touches. Every morning at 3:00 a.m., he still paints and repaints his visions by street light.

According to witnesses who have seen him at work, he appears to be in a trance – utterly deaf and blind to his external environment, like the drawers of psychic art.

When asked who the people in his paintings are, Huang explains that most of them are unknown to him and they come from another world. Over time, as he updated his frescoes, local officials invited him to continue, and encouraged him to let his imagination flow freely.

He then devoted the beginning of each morning to making two drawings on paper. These pictures portray fantastic characters or animals that are similar to those in his frescoes. Later each morning, he starts to lose contact with the visionary headspace from which his art springs.

It is at this point that he may be invaded by tens or even hundreds of young people who come to take photographs of the frescoes in an alley, which has been transformed into a temple dedicated to the god of happiness, in which painted inscriptions celebrate peace and joy. The pilgrims who come here express their hopes and wishes by writing them on small, rainbow-adorned pieces of paper, which they hang under the building’s eaves.

The number of visitors Huang’s painted site attracts has prompted the local municipality to preserve it, and all photos by Remy Ricordeau right: Huang Yongfu's frescoes, Taichung city, central Taiwan

UNREQUITED LOVE LETTERS Institutionalised for the last eleven of her 42 years, deemed incurable and left untreated, Emma Hauck wrote letter after letter to her husband to rescue her

By MIRANDA ARGYLE

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he extraordinary letters that Emma Hauck we can glean that she longed to see her family and to (1878–1920) wrote to her husband from the visit the countryside. She expresses the wish to go to the University Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg just theatre, to have a good slice of cake and a glass of red over a century ago have lost none of their despair over wine – in short, to lead a healthy life again. However the years. She was suffering from a severe mental according to the medical notes, Hauck’s behaviour did disturbance and, at the time of her incarceration in not reflect this. She became catatonic and refused to 1909, believed that she had been contaminated and communicate with anyone. Although she longed to live poisoned by her husband’s kiss. the traditional life of a housewife and to have a social Originally from a modest family in Ellwangen, identity, she was undermined by a deep and pathological Hauck had apparently been a boisterous child who grew aversion to her family. At the time of her incarceration up to enjoy theatre and dancing. There is nothing in the she had two young daughters aged two and three, yet we case history to indicate that she would deteriorate so are told that she would have liked to dwell in the forest quickly and dramatically. Having had no vocational on her own. (1) training, she became an Most of the existing assistant in her mother’s letters date from 1909, You would have been here by now dress shop and had the year that she was if you had received my letters. apparently been a interned at the hospital, diligent worker. and the medical records However, throughout the course of her four-year state that she wrote continuously, sometimes hourly. marriage she became increasingly unstable and suffered There are three categories of letters, each with varying from feelings of emptiness, stubbornly withdrawing degrees of legibility. In the more legible letters she from society and neglecting her personal hygiene. She expresses her desire to visit her mother’s house and asks began to fear that the food she ate was poisoned and that about her daughters, but underlying it all is her intense her children were infecting her. On one occasion she desire to leave the asylum. At some point she wonders if the letters are being delivered and underlines the sentence thought that something was stuck in her throat and “You would have been here by now if you had received blamed her husband. Eventually, after becoming my letters.” Later she expresses the desire to “see Bertele increasingly distressed, she was detained at the clinic in romp in the garden” and to “decorate the pram with Heidelberg for a few weeks. At first she appeared to branches of pine from the meadow”. However, as her recover and was allowed to stay in her mother’s house. anxiety increases and her situation remains unchanged However, a month later she was returned to the clinic, the message is simplified to one word: Komm (Come). diagnosed with incurable dementia praecox and sent to Her distress is reflected dramatically in these the asylum in Wiesloch where she died eleven years later condensed letters where the text is overwritten with at the age of 42.

Throughout her incarceration she wrote photo of Emma Hauck, 1909 impassioned and intense letters to her husband Michael, University Psychiatric Clinic, Heidelberg a schoolteacher in Mannheim, begging him to collect her. Some of the existing letters, of which there are all images courtesy of the Prinzhorn Collection Centre of the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Heidelberg twelve, are written in a fairly legible script. From these

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AN ART OF HALLUCINATION AND HEALING For the Belgian artist Solange Knopf, the making of complex, mysterious drawings has presented an unexpected pathway from darkness into light

By EDWARD M. GÓMEZ

Behind the Darkness No. 1, 2013, mixed media on paper 28.74 x 31.1 ins., 73 x 79 cm

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t is no secret that many works of art can be characterised by a powerful therapeutic aspect, which functions as much for the people who create them as it does for those who view them. Even photographic reproductions of pre-historic, cave-wall paintings can pack a potent, psychic-emotional punch.

For the Belgian self-taught artist Solange Knopf, making art has been a soul-soothing, inexplicably rewarding activity. As she plainly states, producing her art has given her a fulfilling sense of personal identity, something she sorely lacked until well into adulthood.

Humble in the face of the mysterious nature of artistic, creative energy – her own or that of any other

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art-maker – Knopf says she is awed by the thought of where it comes from and how, through her own efforts, it is released. A little bit world-weary and admittedly somewhat timid or cautious by nature, Knopf is a contemporary woman who has experienced some of modern life’s typical but still daunting tribulations – and emerged stronger and more self-aware as a result of those unsettling episodes.

Sitting down for an interview at a café in Paris on the occasion of the second annual Outsider Art Fair in that city in late October, Knopf spoke about her life and the evolution of her art, which was on view at the fair.

“Things were always rather heavy at my home when I

Spirit Codex No. 22, 2014, acrylic, coloured pencil and graphite on paper, 29.45 x 23.23 ins., 74.8 x 59 cm

was growing up,” Knopf recalled. “As a child, I was withdrawn. I was never really allowed to express myself.

I drew pictures to entertain myself. Perhaps it was a way to escape the unpleasant atmosphere.”

Knopf ’s father was a glove-maker in Brussels. Later he took his skills to the prêt-à-porter sector of the fashion industry. Still, the family faced mounting financial challenges. When Solange was an infant, she and her older brother were sent for about a year to a children’s home run by the Catholic Church, even though they came from a Jewish family. Later, during her adolescence, Knopf recalled, “I was a rebel. I took drugs. I wanted to escape myself. Meanwhile, my father

was very hot-tempered. He would throw away my things. The situation at home was very tense.”

When she was in her twenties, Knopf gave birth to a son. In 1998, as she entered her forties, a long-brewing crisis erupted. The Knopf family’s business collapsed.

Solange lost her home, and her family effectively rejected her. Her relationship with a man with whom she had been involved painfully dissolved. She fell into a deep depression and was hospitalised. It was during this period that Knopf began making the drawings that would evolve into her mature body of work. “Making drawings at that time of anger, pain and crisis soothed me,” the artist said. “I felt the need to express myself, to RAW VISION 84

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GODS OF THE CAVERN WORLD Richard Sharpe Shaver influenced science fiction with his personal science theories, uncovering ancient civilisations’ stories and drawings in rocks

By MICHAEL BONESTEEL

T

here is a structure in Belgium known as the Tower of the Apocalypse, built by the late Robert Garcet and completed in 1963. A curmudgeonly and cantankerous pacifist, Garcet was convinced that a peace-loving species of man ruled the earth during the age of the dinosaur. Beneath his tower runs a prehistoric labyrinth of tunnels that Garcet contended was part of a 70 million-year-old subterranean village. The inhabitants of that village, he said, sculpted stones into images of men and animals. To the ordinary eye, they look like the kind of anthropomorphic shapes one sees in other stones, but Garcet discerned faces and profiles that were deliberately put there. “These stones were sculpted and colored intentionally”, he insisted.

In the mid 1940s, around the same time that Garcet began planning his tower, Richard Sharpe Shaver (1907–1975) was way ahead of him. Shaver had not yet begun his exploration of what he would term his “rock books” at this time, but he most certainly claimed to have had first-hand experience of the ancient advanced civilisations dwelling in underground Cavern Worlds.

A native of Pennsylvania, Shaver worked mostly at bluecollar factory jobs or hoboed his way across North America during the Depression years. He seems never to have mastered the elements of basic grammar, yet he was highly intelligent and well-read, tried his hand at writing poetry and fantasy stories, and exhibited a strong interest in visual art.

Shaver first gained the notice of Ray Palmer, the Chicago editor of a notable science fiction pulp, Amazing Stories, in 1943. Palmer was struck by a letter from Shaver who purported to have discovered an archaic alphabet of root words that comprised the source of all languages worldwide. Shaver called the language “Mantong”. When

Untitled, c. 1968-74 mixed media on cardboard, 23 x 17 ins., 58.4 x 43.2 cm Richard Sharpe Shaver original scans from collection of Brian Emrich

Palmer asked him how he had discovered Mantong, Shaver replied by inundating him with epic-length letters and manuscripts describing his abduction by an underworld Elder race of alien humanoids that ostensibly had resided on earth, which they called “Lemuria”, long before the dawn of man. When the Elders discovered that certain poisonous effects of our sunlight were inhibiting their nearimmortal age lengths and giant physical sizes, they created vast underground cities in which to live, but most of the Elders finally migrated to other planets. ey left a small population behind and these subterraneans devolved into two species: the Tero, who remain good people and consider surface dwellers their brothers; and the Dero, a deranged and sadistic horde of monsters who telepathically cloud the mind as to their existence and control every move we make, kidnapping thousands of surface people every year to serve their pleasure as sexual slaves or human food.

It all sounded unbelievable, but Palmer smelled a story and began collaborating with Shaver on a series of sci-fi yarns under the collective rubric “e Shaver Mystery”, which quickly boosted circulation but ultimately earned the ire of serious sci-fi fandom because of Shaver’s and Palmer’s claim that the stories were all true. In 1947, Shaver incorporated growing UFO reports into his cosmology and, with Palmer’s encouragement, was largely responsible for the popular craze for flying saucers.

Toward the end of Shaver’s life, it was revealed that the eight years he had supposedly dwelled in the Cavern World was actually spent in a mental institution, the Ypsilanti Hospital of Washtenaw County, Michigan. While there is speculation about the extent of Shaver’s mental illness, the untimely deaths of both his brother in 1934 and his first wife in 1936 probably added significantly to his feelings of persecution and paranoia. Naturally, he blamed the Dero for their demises.

After e Shaver Mystery had for the most part run its course by the mid 1950s, Shaver turned to providing “proof ” for his claims: visual records frozen in rocks. He RAW VISION 84

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RAW STUDIOS

LITTLE CITY, USA

I

n 1950s Illinois, and worldwide, children with autism were invariably thought by professionals – and their families – to be unable to live productive lives. This lack of understanding often led to them being consigned to institutions for life, where there were few opportunities for personal development or expression, creative or otherwise.

A group of parents in Palatine, just north of Chicago, wanted more for their children, so they founded the Little City Foundation. Opening in 1959 with three buildings and 16 residents, today it continues to aim to provide autistic children “with the best options and opportunities to live safely, work productively, explore creatively and learn continuously throughout their lifetime[s]”. At the time, such thinking was truly progressive.

Now, over 60 years later, Little City is still providing innovative programmes on its 56-acre grounds in Palatine (and offices in Chicago), with 450 staff supporting over 350 people who have intellectual and developmental 62

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above left: Harold Jeffries, Untitled 123, 2012, watercolour, marker and paint marker on paper, 30 x 22 ins., 76.2 x 55.9 cm above right: John King, Untitled 44, 2011, 25 x 13 ins., 63.5 x 33 cm, acrylic on masonite

disabilities. Little City caters to different levels of need, offering residential and day care, home-based support and a fostering and adoption program. Many Little City attendees take part in activities at the Palatine campus or at community-based group homes, where education, training, skills and encouragement help enable them to live full and actualised lives.

Little City’s Palatine-based Center for the Arts runs an award-winning programme that has had artworks shown at Intuit in Chicago and MADmusée in Belgium, among other venues. It evolved out of a project in which people with developmental disabilities produced and starred in their own television programmes. Awards were won, other foundations adopted the template and, in

clockwise from above: Wayne Mazurak, Bellwood, 2008, marker on paper, 11 x 17 ins., 28 x 43.2 cm; Joe Flasch, Untitled 21, 2009, screen print, 25 x 15 ins., 63.5 x 38.1 cm; a view of the studio (with John King at work, top left), 2014

1992, other visual arts were added to the programme after three artists and instructors from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago were given a grant to work with artists with disabilities. at temporary project was such a success that the visual arts programme became permanent, and now around 70 people take part in painting, drawing, sculpting, printmaking, ceramics, CGI and time-based media each week across the five studios. Three full-time staff members and seven professional artists take turns facilitating the work in the studio, but that activity is artist-led and the focus on fine art rather than art therapy.

A 2013 documentary, Share My Kingdom, offered a fascinating look at the relationship between the lives and work of three Little City artists. Wayne Mazarak draws

cars and urban scenes, inventing new features for the cars. One design, for a car’s tail lights, was actually produced by Cadillac in one of their models in the 1980s. Harold Jeffries draws endless blueprint plans for heaven, while Luke Tauber depicts classical composers (and their graves and mausoleums), his own deceased family members and Western funeral practices. These artists create in an environment where there is portfoliosubmission requirement or jury process for admission, which leads to a sense of freedom in the atmosphere of Little City – and to the art that emerges from this celebrated centre. Nuala Ernest See www.littlecity.org/arts/home and www.littlecityarts.blogspot.co.uk/ See trailer for Share My Kingdom at http://www.littlecity.org/kingdom RAW VISION 84

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RAW VISION GOES TO THE MOVIES

FROM THE WORLD OF SELF-TAUGHT AR T, A ROUND-UP OF NOTABLE FILMS

Images from Kelly Rush’s 2014 film Emery Blagdon & His Healing Machine, which examines the work of the Nebraskan loner

I

n addition to the bounty of publications and vivid photographs that exist in the outsider art field, which document the lives and creations of self-taught artists around the world, each year an international library of motion pictures that tell their fascinating stories keeps growing. Nowadays, relatively inexpensive highdefinition video equipment has made it possible to more easily preserve for posterity interviews with significant self-taught artists, their family members and friends, thereby providing valuable records.

Of the numerous films in this field that have been released in recent years, many of which have been made available on DVD, Raw Vision recently screened a handful of noteworthy titles. Some of these productions may feel or look a bit homemade or amateurish; others are well-produced visual essays that evocatively capture the spirit of the art and artists they explore. e makers of all of these films have been motivated by an abiding

roughly 100-foot-long (30.5 metre), three-storey-high mound covered in decorative patterns and Christian sayings, and topped with a cross. “God loves everybody, and I love everybody, too,” Knight says effusively as he speaks to the camera, pointing out the ribbons of paint on the surface of his “mountain” that represent a river, as well as a big “God is love” emblem.

Kelly Rush’s Emery Blagdon & His Healing Machine (2014) is a 30-minute film that looks at the life and mixed-media work of its subject, a reclusive former sawmill worker and gold prospector who lived alone on a farm in Nebraska and died in 1986. During Emery Blagdon’s lifetime, only a few people knew that, in a shed on his property, he had used wire, metallic foil, scraps of wood, coloured lights and assorted found objects to create unusual talisman-like sculptural objects and abstract paintings. Densely packed together in that small structure, these “pretties”, as Blagdon called them,

Hidden Gifts: The Mystery of Angus McPhee is a short film that examines the life and woven-grass works of a mute, Scottish self-taught artist who died in 1997

interest in the uniqueness and the intriguing nature of the subjects at which they have aimed their cameras.

At the lower-budget end of the production-values scale, Leonard Knight’s undated 12-minute video, Salvation Mountain Tour, shows the American artist, who died earlier this year at the age of 82, walking on the colourfully painted hill he had created in southern California’s Imperial Valley. Originally from Vermont, Knight arrived in that desert region in the early 1980s and over time used adobe, straw and paint to create a 66

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constituted his “healing machine”. He believed his creations possessed a curative power that could affect people in their presence.

Soon after Blagdon’s death, two New York-based friends who had grown up in North Platte, the city closest to the artist’s farm, returned to Nebraska on a visit and learned that all of Blagdon’s property, including his mysterious handiwork, was going to be auctioned off. ey bought it all and effectively rescued and preserved it for many years.

RAWREVIEWS

EXHIBITIONS

In Paris, the abcd Collection offers a definitive, high-quality survey of the best of art brut Art Brut: collection abcd/Bruno Decharme La Maison Rouge, 10 boulevard de la Bastille, 75012 Paris, France until 15 January, 2015

O

pened in 2004, La Maison Rouge in Paris was created by the French collector (of contemporary art and art brut) Antoine de Galbert as a venue for exhibitions and programmes presented by its parent foundation of the same name, which he also founded. To date, La Maison Rouge has presented numerous exhibitions, as well as conferences and special events. Among its past exhibitions devoted to the work of classic créateurs in the art brut field were those that focused on Henry Darger, Augustin Lesage and Elmar Trenkwalder, and Louis Soutter.

In October, La Maison Rouge opened “Art Brut: collection abcd/Bruno Decharme”, its latest, illuminating presentation in this field of aesthetic appreciation and research.

It offers a substantive sampling from Decharme’s vast holdings of some 3,500 works of art made by 300 artists, all of which this film-maker and collector, who began amassing art brut more than 30 years ago, has chosen according to criteria that have

Hans-Jörg Georgi, Aeroplanes, photos by Marc Domage

reflected a deep, well-informed understanding of this genre’s history and aesthetics.

In 1999, Decharme established abcd, a non-profit organisation, whose stated purpose is to “rais(e) awareness of art brut” through exhibitions, special events, books and films, and other related projects. Its name stands for the French phrase “art brut connaissance & diffusion” (“knowledge and distribution of art brut”). abcd maintains its own gallery space in Montreuil, immediately south of Paris.

It also serves as a think tank in the art brut field for researchers from a range of disciplines, including psychiatry, art history and philosophy, among others.

Anonymous ex-votos, Brazil; Auguste Forestier, carved constructions

68

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The art historian Barbara Safarova serves as abcd’s president.

La Maison Rouge’s published notes about the current exhibition point out that, through his collecting, Decharme has branched off from and expanded upon the earlier findings and theorising regarding the artistic creations of isolated, untrained artmakers that were made or put forth in Europe in the early twentieth century by such pioneering art brut researchers as the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn or the French artist-writers, André Breton and Jean Dubuffet.

Two fine books have been published in conjunction with “Art Brut: collection abcd/Bruno

RAWREVIEWS

BOOKS

WILHELM WERNER (Sterelationszeichnungen) eds. Thomas Röske & Maike Rotzoll, Sammlung Prinzhorn/ Wunderhorn, 2014 ISBN 9783884234709, €24.80

OutSIdER ARt (Vol. 1) ed. Zhang Tianzhi Shanghai University Press, 2014 ISBN 9787567114081 €17, available from shupcopyright@sina.cn This first edition of China’s new outsider art magazine is striking for its innovative design: bound inside out, with board in the middle, glue glistening on the spine, and the dustjacket panels opening outwards to reveal vivid images.

Inside are fourteen dual-

tHE ARt OF tHE MANdALA

by Henry Sultan Last Gasp, CA, 2014 ISBN 9780867198157, $40 Hypnotic and timeless, stationary yet dynamic,

language chapters by mainly Chinese authors including Guo Haiping, as well as Laurent Danchin and Edward M. Gómez. There are essays on Adolf Wölfli, Martin Ramirez, Li Changsheng and Bazi, and thoughts on art and disability.

Some of the Chinese–English translations could have been improved, but this slim volume offers a fresh perspective on self-taught and outsider art through its essays on art and mental disorder while introducing some stunning Chinese self-taught artists.

spiritual and vortex-like: there is something about mandalas that endows it with magnetic properties. Henry Sultan has a profound connection with them and has been drawing mandalas, sometimes every day, since the 1960s. This largeformat hardback book presents the different phases of his work. Categorised into sections such as geometric, figurative, landscape (of earth or mind) and so on, Sultan elucidates on his methods and techniques, as well as his influences (including Islamic geometry and Aboriginal painting), while discussing individual mandalas in this full-colour edition that provides modern and personal interpretations of the mystical and symbolic shrine.

These drawings by an asylum inmate, who was sterilised and later murdered by the Nazis, are unique examples of such an experience. This facsimile of his notebook has an excellent German/English introduction and overview by Röske, followed by precise reproductions of the drawings. Looking at where pencil pressure was exerted until marks appeared on the back of the paper makes for a visceral viewing.

IVAN GENERALIć

by Svetlana Sumpor The Croatian Museum of Naive Art, Zagreb, 2014 ISBN 9789536660575, Generalić’s work from 1946 to 1961 is covered in this second volume to mark the centenary of his birth. Wonderfully illustrated record of one of Europe’s geat naive artists and founder of the Hlebine school of peasant painters.

tHE OutSIdER (Patricide 6) ed. Neil Coombs, Dark Windows Press, Rhos-on-Sea, 2013 ISBN 9781909769007, £12 This Welsh small-press volume, part of a series, examines the outsider from all sides and “the point at which the inside and outside might be unified”. It recognises that art-related institutions will draw boundaries around the “outsider”, and sensibly suggests that they be ignored. George Widener talks about his experiences and how he has learned to ignore external noise and follow his interests, to tap into his own “psychic purity”. e vibrant authenticity of outsider art, an honesty that is highlighted by Henry Boxer in his interview, comes through in these texts.

An apparently-conflicting line is trod between the personal and intellectual, and the inside and the outside: but the conflict is resolved while questions are raised. A dissonance of voices becomes a dialogue that both informs about and represents the “outsider”. Texts by artists, academics, art dealers and poets are presented in essays, interviews, stories and poems, so that an idea of the “outsider” begins to coalesce. Roger Cardinal’s essay examines the similarities and differences found in a range of significant artistes brut and outsider artists.

He quotes Míro, whose words are also worth repeating: “[T]he more individual something is, the more it becomes universal”.

Book reviews by Nuala Ernest RAW VISION 84

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