RAWVISION97 SPRING 2018
EDITOR John Maizels DIRECTORS Henry Boxer, Robert Greenberg, Audrey Heckler, Rebecca Hoffberger, Phyllis Kind, Frank Maresca, Marilyn Oshman, Richard Rosenthal, Bob Roth ART EDITOR Maggie Jones Maizels SENIOR EDITOR Edward M. Gómez FEATURES EDITOR Nuala Ernest ASSOCIATE EDITOR Natasha Jaeger DESIGN Terrayne Brown ACCOUNTS MANAGER Judith Edwards SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER Suzy Daniels CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Michael Bonesteel, Jenifer P. Borum, Roger Cardinal, Ted Degener, Jo Farb Hernandez, Tom Patterson, Colin Rhodes, Charles Russell, Daniel Wojcik PUBLISHED by Raw Vision Ltd Letchmore Heath WD25 8LN, UK tel +44 (0)1923 853175 email info@rawvision.com website www.rawvision.com USA 119 West 72nd Street, #414, New York, NY 10023 (Standard envelopes only) ISSN 0955-1182
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RAW NEWS Outsider events and exhibitions around the world
OBITUARIES Damian Le Bas and Paul Amar
TIM TER WAL Highly detailed pencil drawings
THE WORK OF SPACES Advocacy organisation and documentary archive for environments
NEW JAPANESE ARTISTS Introduction to four little-known Japanese outsiders
THE OLDEST PHOTOGRAPH? A nineteenth-century capture of outsider art
CHARLES DELLSCHAU Historic Texas-based outsider obsessed with flight
BARTOLOMEO MEREU Sardinian carved wood sculptures
STEPHEN WARDE ANDERSON In conversation with Michael Noland
GENNADIY LUKOMNIKOV Soviet era drawings by self-styled ‘billionaire’
RAW REVIEWS Exhibitions, film and books
GALLERY & MUSEUM GUIDE Notable venues around the world
COVER IMAGE: Tim ter Wal, Flash and Factory, 2017, pencil on paper, 16.5 x 11.75 ins. / 42 x 30 cm
Raw Vision (ISSN 0955-1182) March 2018 is published quarterly (March, June, September, December) by Raw Vision Ltd, PO Box 44, Watford WD25 8LN, UK, and distributed in the USA by UKP Worldwide, 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080. Periodicals postage paid at South Plainfield, NJ. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Raw Vision c/o 3390 Rand Road, South Plainfield, NJ 07080, and additional mailing offices. 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.
AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM VISIONARY AWARD
WORLD’S BEST ART MAGAZINE
UTNE INDEPENDENT PRESS AWARD
MEDAILLE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS
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AUSTRIA, BELGIUM, BRITAIN
EOA CONFERENCE 2018
until May 5
May 4–6
Rithika Merchant
“... chaotisch!” at Galerie Gugging features dynamic works by Arnold Schmidt juxtaposed with the meticulous works of Alfred Neumayr. From May 4, type brut will explore humans, figures and people, with artworks by gugging artists alongside international artists such as Ida Buchmann and Michel Nedjar. GALERIE GUGGING & MUSEUM GUGGING, Am Campus 2, A-3400 Maria Gugging, AUSTRIA. www.gugging.com
Through art and science, Portal presents a gateway which examines how trances, visions and dreams manifest in human consciousness. OCTOBER GALLERY 24 Old Gloucester Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 3AL, UK octobergallery.co.uk
An artist working at Blue Circus
OCTOBER GALLERY
Arnold Schmidt
GALERIE GUGGING until May 4
Outside In will host the European Outsider Art Association Conference at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. This year’s conference focuses on the Artist’s Voice. Presenters will include the Living Museum (Netherlands), Out by Art (Sweden) and Venture Arts (UK) with participation by Garvald Artists (Scotland), Creative Minds (UK), Arts Project Australia (Australia) and Blue Circus (Finland). PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY, 9 N Pallant, Chichester PO19 1TJ, UK. www.outsidein.org.uk
OUTSIDE IN May 2 – Jul 29
François Burland
Greg Bromley
THE CABINETS AT DR. GUISLAIN MUSEUM until Dec 30, 2020
Laila Kassab
The Cabinets, a collaboration between the Collectie De Stadshof Foundation and the Dr. Guislain Museum presents the work of 30 outsider artists. DR. GUISLAIN MUSEUM, Jozef Guislainstraat 43, 9000 Gent, BELGIUM www.museumdrguislain.be
DAPPER BRUCE LAFITTE AT TATJANA PIETERS
Dapper Bruce Lafitte
until Apr 29
Tatjana Pieters presents works by American self-taught artist Dapper Bruce Lafitte. TATJANA PIETERS, Nieuwevaart 124/001, B-9000 Gent, BELGIUM www.tatjanapieters.com 4
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Outside In and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, have co-commissioned two contemporary artists, Greg Bromley and Laila Kassab, to produce work inspired by Scottish outsider Scottie Wilson, to be exhibited alongside the Gallery’s collection of Wilson’s artworks. Bromley’s work will be displayed from May 2 through June 10 and Kassab’s from June 13 through July 29. PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY 9 N Pallant, Chichester, PO19 1TJ, UK www.outsidein.org.uk
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GERMANY, NETHERLANDS, SERBIA, SWITZERLAND
GALERIE HAMER
ERNST KOLB AT LAUSANNE
May 17 – Aug 26
until May 12
until Jun 17
Contrasts is a group show of outsider art that celebrates its great diversity. Participants include Bertho Virant (Belgium), Seth Prime (Australia), Helmut Hladisch (Austria), Davood Koochaki and El Sirio (Cuba). GALERIE HAMER Leliegracht 38, 1015 DH Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS www.galeriehamer.nl
Unrest and Architecture will feature more than 200 drawings with architectural motifs created by artists marginalised in institutions. PRINZHORN COLLECTION Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg Voßstraße 2 69115 Heidelberg, GERMANY www.sammlung-prinzhorn.de
Collection de l’Art Brut presents artworks by Ernst Kolb, drawn with ballpoint pen on small-format paper and representing characters or scenes from the artist’s everyday life. Showing through April 29, CORPS features 300 drawings, paintings, photos and sculptures illustrating the multiple ways in which art brut can represent the human body. COLLECTION DE L’ART BRUT Av. des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne, SWITZERLAND www.artbrut.ch
VISIONARIES IN SERBIA
CARL JUNG COLLECTION
Apr 12 – May 31
March 13 – April 10
until Jul 8
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The Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina and Belgrade's House of King Peter I present a selection from the museum's permanent collection. Masterworks by the leading Serbian figures include those by Sava Sekulic, Vojislav Jakic, Miloslav Jovanovic and IIija Bosilj. HOUSE OF KING PETER I, Vase Pelagica 40, Belgrade www.mnmu.rs www.kucakraljapetra.rs
Anonymous
Norman Seibold
Miloslav Jovanovic
GALERIE ART CRU
Galerie Art Cru Berlin presents heavy oil paintings by Norman Seibold from Stuttgart. From June 15 through July 14, see works by Haci Sami Yaman who is almost completely blind and has been working in Open Studio St. Hedwig. GALERIE ART CRU BERLIN Oranienburger Str. 27, 10117 Berlin, GERMANY. www.art-cru.de 8
Ernst Kolb
Paul Goesch
Davood Koochaki
PRINZHORN
The C.G. Jung Collection is being presented to the public for the first time. In the Land of Imagination shows artworks by Jung’s patients from 1916 to 1955. A parallel exhibition, collection meets artist: inspired by Saï Kijima, compares the collection with the artist’s own work. MUSEUM IM LAGERHAUS, Davidstrasse 44, 9000 St. Gallen, SWITZERLAND www.museumimlagerhaus.ch
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USA
SOULS GROWN DEEP AT THE MET May 22 – Sep 23
Cutting-edge artwork created at Burning Man, the annual Black Rock City gathering that is one of the most influential events in contemporary art and culture, is exhibited in Washington for the first time this spring. No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man takes over the Renwick Gallery building, exploring the maker culture, ethos, principles and creative spirit of Burning Man. Artworks on the first floor will be on view through September 16 and artworks on the second floor through January 21. THE RENWICK GALLERY OF THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W., Washington, DC 20006. americanart.si.edu
JOSH COTE AT JEANINE TAYLOR until Apr 22
Thornton Dial
FoldHaus, Shrumen Lumen, 2016, photo: Rene Smith
BURNING MAN AT THE SMITHSONIAN until Sep 16 and Jan 21
History Refused To Die: Highlights from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation Gift will present 30 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and quilts by self-taught contemporary African American artists to celebrate the 2014 gift to The Metropolitan Museum of Art of works of art from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. The artists represented all hail from the American South and include Thornton Dial, Nellie Mae Rowe, Lonnie Holley and Ronald Lockett. THE MET FIFTH AVENUE, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028 www.metmuseum.org
JAMES CASTLE HOUSE INAUGURAL SYMPOSIUM
Josh Cote
James Castle Shed Studio
Apr 25–27
Down the Rabbit Hole features Josh Cote's wire sculptures depicting seven feet tall bike riding rabbits, the inner workings of Houdini’s book of tricks, and upside down bats hanging from rafters. JEANINE TAYLOR FOLK ART 211 East First Street, Sanford, FL 32771 www.jtfolkart.com 12
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Hosted by the City of Boise’s Department of Arts and History, this symposium will celebrate James Castle’s work in the context of the distinctive places that were his home. Learn about the preservation and reopening of the James Castle House, as well as efforts to preserve Castle’s Shed Studio and Cozy Cottage Trailer. A private pre-opening tour of the James Castle House is included, along with five separate Castle exhibitions of artist books, drawings and assemblages. www.jamescastlehouse.org
MASTER OF REFINEMENT A celebration of the craftsmanship of upcoming Dutch talent, Tim ter Wal YVONNE BEELEN
Hotel Costa Meloneras, 2012, pencil on paper, 11.9 x 16.5 ins. / 30 x 42 cm
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ndustrial pipes and steel girders. Smoking chimneys and steamy cooling towers. Rooftop water containers and piled-up storage tanks. Mammoth factory halls, with tiny skylights, access roads and railroad tracks. One roundabout and two rail yards, where in one of which a freight train pulls more than 30 wagons. Transport shafts, sky-high gangways and fire escapes. Cars carpeting parking lots, and countless streetlights, villages and forests. A wide river, crossed with bridges. Meandering creeks. An airplane in the sky. These details, and more details, lay themselves out until the horizon, fighting with each other for one’s view and marked by a notable absence of humans. Industry From Above is an impressive, hyperrealistic drawing of the DSM chemical plant in Heerlen, southeast 14 2
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Netherlands, as seen through the eyes of its creator during his childhood. Whenever visiting his mother’s twin sister, who lives near the factory, or going on vacation to France, the ter Wal family would pass by the plant. The family took no notice of it, apart from Tim. His eyes took in every little detail, recording it in his mind. The plant was archived like a computer file, to be retrieved over two decades later and reproduced elaborately using nothing more than a graphite pencil, a sheet of paper and his mind. Tim ter Wal is a young Dutch upcoming artist, or, as he calls himself, “a precision draftsman”. His primary inspiration is from industrial architecture and urban landscapes, but animals and the natural world, as well as fantasy worlds with huge dragons, also appear in his
Old factory interior, 2015, pencil on paper, 16.5 x 23.5 ins. / 42 x 60 cm
drawings. He has long been fascinated by industrial vistas, like the DSM plant. A young ter Wal frequently passed a steelworks in the city of Ijmuiden, a port northwest of Amsterdam where his grandfather lived. Twenty-five years later, ter Wal worked only from memory to create a ten-foot-long colour-pencil drawing of the plant, from the perspective of the North Sea Canal’s dyke half a mile away (Panorama Steelworks, not shown). Other sights are stored in his internal picture library, taken from satellite views on Google Earth or mentally recorded through airplane windows when he flies to his favourite holiday destination in the Canary Islands. For the past seven years, ter Wal and his father have stayed at the same hotel there several times each year. “My memory is my camera”, is how ter Wal explains
his gift. Recently, he visited the Shell oil refinery at the Botlek, a huge harbour area near Rotterdam. One of ter Wal’s purchasers, and the owner of an extensive private art collection that includes Willem van Genk, offered ter Wal the tour as a present. Although ter Wal has been drawing industrial scenery like this for many years, it was the first time he had actually set foot on such a compound. He said, “A new perspective opened up for me. When looking at images alone my eyes automatically focus on the details but now, while actually walking through it, I can see the big picture and how everything is connected.” It enabled him to understand how the towers distil the incoming crude oil into various fractions of different boiling ranges, each of which are then RAW VISION 97
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Industry From Above, 2012-2014, pencil on paper, 33.1 x 72.5 ins. / 84 x 184 cm
processed further in the other refinery processing units. A parallel can be found between the oil refinement processes and those of ter Wal’s, as the impressions and stimuli that enter his mind during the day are distilled and drained by the act of creating. Drawing clears his mind – like a creative distillation. Ter Wal was born on November 6, 1984, in Alkmaar, a picturesque municipality about one hour’s drive from Amsterdam. The youngest of three siblings, from an early age he was recognised as an extraordinary child, for until the age of five he expressed himself only in his own designed language of words and sounds. 16
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Even now, as an adult and fully capable of speaking Dutch fluently, he enjoys inventing words and their meanings. His words sound almost like Dutch, and he writes them in long, numbered lists on white A4 paper, in his perfectly compact handwriting. “Parperauffe” means “a monumental cortège with three white horses. “Kevebrens” is a kind of “head protection, which can be customised with embroidery and is to be worn with a wedding gown”. “Minoreufe” is the point at which, after asking somebody extensive questions, there is enough stimulus to accurately imitate that person. All of ter Wal’s words illustrate his special, specific sense of humour.
Subsequently at kindergarten, instead of playing with classmates, he preferred to retreat into his own imaginary world and mainly played alone. For instance, he had such a clear idea of how the factories and buildings in his mind ought to be created with building blocks, there was no room for compromising with others. While other kids cavorted outside in the playground, ter Wal stayed indoors surrounded by his favourite drawing material, chalk. On the blackboard, he drew all the things he had seen on his way to school, already showing a remarkable eye for detail. It was around then that his remarkable talent for drawing was recognised, as well as a disorder on the
autistic spectrum. “Some say autism is a dysfunction, I would rather call it a gift”, ter Wal says, and it’s true. He has a sixth sense for perspective, ratio and scale; the ability to hyper focus and concentrate for hours and hours; and, of course, his highly developed memory for details. Furthermore, after over 30 years of drawing so intensively, he has established extraordinarily fine motor skills and works freehand with no need for rulers, stencils or compasses. In fact, it seems that the more limited his means, the more ways he finds to use his inner resources. “When I am drawing it’s like meditation, I become one with what I am doing”. RAW VISION 97
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S PAC E S Advocacy organisation SPACES documents art environments around the world and is linking up with the Kohler Foundation, Inc.
JO FARB HERNร NDEZ
SPACES Director Jo Farb Hernรกndez with Founder Seymour Rosen at the Watts Towers, 2000, Los Angeles, CA, photo: Sam Hernรกndez
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his story begins with an ad-hoc group of artists and community activists who banded together in 1959 to fight the city-mandated destruction of Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers, an environment of 17 sculptures sparkling some 100 feet high above south central Los Angeles. At first, this group of enthusiasts (the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts, CSRTW) believed this public artwork was unique in both aesthetic and genre. But, as the initial success of that first campaign gave way to more sustained involvement with the Watts community, bringing art classes to local children and exploring ways to link the inspiration of the Towers to improving lives in the surrounding neighborhoods, a photographer and early member of the CSRTW named Seymour Rosen started to find evidence of other
idiosyncratic or monumental structures, first around southern California and then further north. “This must be a California phenomenon”, he reasoned, assuming that the postwar impulse to move West would include its share of radical thinkers, makers and builders. At the time, Rosen was piecing together a living by documenting contemporary art installations at the Ferus Gallery, photographing the Los Angeles Museum of Art’s entire permanent collection, teaching classes and leading workshops at the Barnsdall Art Center, and documenting a variety of other art-related activities around Los Angeles. He began to focus his free time on what he called “folk art environments”, to differentiate them from public environments and installations by mainstream artists. While we no longer use that descriptor – as in
In the Birdcage Theater by Calvin and Ruby Black, 1975, Possum Trot, Barstow-Victorville, California, photo: Seymour Rosen
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Watts railroad station, 1959, Los Angeles, CA, gelatin silver print, photo: Seymour Rosen
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above: SPACES Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1982 below: landing page, www.spacesarchives.org
Fred Smith, Wisconsin Concrete Park, 1974, Phillips, WI, photo: Jo Farb Hernández
many ways these unique spaces are the very antithesis of the community-driven shared aesthetics that define folk art – we understand that by calling attention to their distinctiveness, while trying to slot them into existing art world categories, Rosen was beginning to formulate the identification of a completely different genre. SPACES – the acronym for Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments – thus grew and grew, both physically and conceptually. It was formally incorporated as a non-profit organisation in 1978, and, though its collections leaned toward Californian/Western art environments, Rosen had soon realised it wasn’t a California phenomenon at all. It was global. And while he was a rather unlikely person to found an archive – as his organisational gene was sorely lacking – he persevered. He followed leads to new sites and funding sources, and conceived of ways to interest a wider audience through
exhibitions and public programming. He had become obsessed with these sites. Seymour and I began working together in the early 1980s. We co-curated an exhibition on California art environments, “Divine Disorder”, in 1985, at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, where I was Director and Chief Curator. In the mid-1990s I took on development responsibilities for SPACES, and, by 1999, I was broadening the archive’s international outlook through my work in Spain and France. As Seymour began to sicken in the early 2000s, we talked of future steps and outlined the organisation’s priorities. I was to succeed him as Director after his death, which I did in September 2006. Since the end of 2012, when the SPACES website went live, interest in the field of art environments has grown exponentially. Hundreds of supporters – from rigorous researchers to casual photographers – have RAW VISION 97
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MAVERICKS IN JAPAN Inventive ways of handling their materials and distinctive personal obsessions characterise the work of four Japanese self-taught artists By KUSHINO NOBUMASA, introduction and translation by EDWARD M. GÓMEZ
Born in 1976 and based in Fukuyama, in southern Japan, Kushino Nobumasa is a researcher who formerly worked with people with disabilities and now specialises in the activities of contemporary Japanese self-taught artists. He has shown their creations at Kushino Terrace, his gallery and art space in Fukuyama, and has published his findings in several books, including Yankii jinruigaku: Toppashatachi no “āto” to hyōgen (Yankee Anthropology: The “Art” and Expressions of Breakthrough People, Tomonotsu Museum, 2014) and Autosaido de ikite iru (Living on the Outside, Taba Books, 2017). Here, he introduces four art-makers whose
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work he has examined. (Names appear in the Japanese manner, with surnames preceding given names.) Kushino uses the term yankii (Yankee) to label some self-taught artists in Japan; that American word has been adopted to mean “delinquent” or, by extension, “maverick” or “renegade”. It evokes their hard-to-classify works and describes their individualistic points of view, which stand out in a conformity-minded society like Japan’s. Raw Vision’s senior editor, Edward M. Gómez, is a specialist in Japanese modern-art history who is cocurating an exhibition of recent works from Japan for the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne Switzerland.
top: Ratel, Fist Man, 2005, coloured oil pencil on paper, 8.3 x 11.7 ins. / 21 x 29.7 cm opposite: Ratel, Planting a Field, Round and Round, for Food to Eat, 2015, oil crayon on paper, 15 x 21.3 ins. / 38.2 x 54.2 cm
The artist Ratel, above, at her home in Osaka, and, opposite, some of her works; photos courtesy of Kushino Terrace
ラーテル Anaguma Hachirō (“Ratel”) The second of two sisters born in Osaka, Anaguma Hachirō, who is known as “Ratel”, does not reveal her birthdate. During her childhood, since she did not do well taking part in group activities, she withdrew and stayed at home. Affected by developmental disabilities, depression and other conditions, starting in the second year of middle school, she began painting pictures with a particular touch. At that time, while systematically copying the pictures that were reproduced in an art textbook, she was mesmerised when her eyes landed on the works of the Edo-era painter Soga Shōhaku (1730–1781). Since then, over a period of 15 years, in her room at home she has continued to paint. Until now, she has produced more than 300 works, in which different characters appear. Among them are many grotesque pictures, which have been greatly influenced by Ratel’s love of horror B-movies from the 1980s. So far, she has
used Twitter and a blog to publicise her work. Over the past ten years, as the eerieness of her pictures has increased, for the sake of her family, from whom she has heard, “Why don't you paint something much cuter instead?”, it appears that she has not shown her works to anyone at all. One almost cannot bring works like hers to market. Her painted subjects seem to resemble animals, as well as mysterious living things. It has been said that, ever since she was little, she has been a woman who, with the exception of humans, has been interested in living things and only in looking at illustrated books about living things. Her screen name “Ratel” is taken from that of an animal more commonly known as the honey badger in English. It has been recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most fearless animal in the world. She named herself after the brave ratel in order to begin taking her first steps out into society.
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top: Itō Terumasa, Oozora Maru (The Big Sky), a crane-equipped vehicle, 2008, mixed media and paper, 11.8 x 2.8 x 5.2 ins. / 30 x 7 x 13 cm, photo courtesy of Kushino Terrace bottom: Itō Terumasa, Aikoku: Nihon Danji (Patriotism: Sons of Japan), sculpture depicting a right-wing political organisation’s propaganda vehicle, 2015, mixed media and paper, 13.8 x 2.8 x 4.3 ins. / 35 x 7 x 11 cm, photo courtesy of Kushino Terrace
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The artist Itō Terumasa at his home in Hiroshima with his paper-lorry sculptures, photo courtesy of Kushino Terrace
伊藤輝政 ITŌ Terumasa Bodies made from construction paper. Glittering silver parts made with aluminum foil. Tyres made with wood purchased from a home-centre store. Plastic drinking straws to “hydraulically” lift the vehicles’ load-hauling carriages. All easily available materials, close at hand, used to create elaborate paper lorries. Just like actual lorries, all of their working parts really do function. Itō Terumasa, who lives in Hiroshima, was born in 1977 with a severe heart condition. Unable to physically exert himself due to his illness, he has come to spend most of his time at home where, with fascination, he has created a big, beautiful world of dekotora (or “decoration trucks”, from dekoreeshon torakku, the Japanese phonetic transcription of the English words). As fate would have it, as a young child, Itō watched Truck Guys, a series of Japanese movies. Adorned with decorative lights and paint, dekotora became a nationwide craze. Itō began to create his paper trucks.
From dekotora, cranes, and courier-service vehicles to right-wing political groups’ propaganda trucks, Itō has rendered in three dimensions real-life, customised vehicles that he has seen in magazines or on the Internet, and even though, since childhood, he has had no one to show them to, over a period of some 30 years, he has produced nearly 700 pieces. To date, he has made so many works whose safekeeping has been a concern that today, at his home, he has filled two rooms with an extensive group of artworks and materials. Given his interests, naturally, ever since he was in kindergarten, specialised magazines about dekotora have been his favourite reading material, which he has continued to purchase. Without even looking at cars or motorcycles, his room filled with the sound of hard-rock music, and with tremendous strength and intensity, Itō continues to construct a dazzling world.
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OUTSIDER ART’S EARLIEST PHOTO? The discovery of an old photograph leads to a mystery MATT ARIENT
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s this the earliest existing photograph of outsider art? Where does the history of outsider art truly begin? In the United States, perhaps it began with the 1982 seminal exhibition “Black Folk Art in America, 1930–1980”. Curated by John Beardsley and Jane Livingston, the exhibition drew national attention and spawned many new collectors, scholars and enthusiasts. We may look further back, to Jean Dubuffet’s introduction of the term art brut in 1945 and his formation of the Compagnie de l’Art Brut in autumn 1948. Before that, one arrives at Hans Prinzhorn’s early collecting at the psychiatric hospital of the University of Heidelberg and his book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, published in 1922. These are pivotal points in the formal history of outsider art, but self-taught art-making far predates any of these milestones, and some of the artists would surely have been held in the same high esteem as Ramírez, Darger, Wölfli, Finster or others. This leads to the question: what records of historical self-taught art-makers or their work exist today? A recent discovery at an auction in England may, in fact, be the oldest existing photograph of outsider art, and perhaps its artist. Recently, I came across a blog devoted to wristwatch collecting that carried the headline, “Victorian Graffiti – an interesting ambrotype, depicting two men, one in official uniform”. It was linked to the website of a small auction house in the UK selling the “collection of a
Gentleman”. What the auction house identified as “Victorian graffiti” appeared to be by a self-taught or outsider artist. The murals in the photograph share a striking resemblance to works currently being shown in galleries and museums around the world. Enlarging the image using a high-quality flatbed scanner, the words written on the wall become readable. One can make out the following phrases: “No. 1 Rail way bobby aged 59”, “Squire John Russel aged 76” and “Joe H”. The titles “squire” and “railway bobby” (policeman) are English terms, and given the auction house location it is likely that the image was also taken in the UK. There are depictions of clocks, faces and sun-like objects that are difficult to discern. The thatched-roof building has a square and polka-dot design near its top and around the window. The viewer is left to wonder if the entire building was decorated in a similar fashion – are we only seeing part of the artist’s creation? The individual on the left is wearing a uniform. Is he the “railway bobby” depicted on the wall? And the individual on the right, who seems to be wearing disheveled clothing: one could be tempted to come to the idea that he lived in the cottage, and perhaps was the artist himself. Photography as we know it was invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839, but for his daguerreotypes the subject needed to remain completely still for 3 to 15 minutes, to ensure that the image wasn’t blurred. Its use outdoors was impractical and difficult. In the early 1850s, a
Matt Arient is the current Vice President and Exhibitions chair of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, in Chicago. Special thanks to Mark Chalabala and Jim Arient for their help with this article.
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cheaper and easier process was introduced. The ambrotype had an exposure time of 5 to 60 seconds, and widespread use followed, including outdoor photography. Rapid advancements meant that by the mid 1860s the “sixth plate ambrotype” came along, of which the image here is an example. For the sixth plate ambrotype, a single glass plate is cut into six individual plates to be inserted into the camera. To view the negative image, the back of the glass plate must be painted (usually black) in a process called japanning. The photograph shown here is 6.5 by 5.5 cm – small, by today’s standards – and held in a leather case. On the back, the paint was applied to the plate before the negative had fully dried, a sign either of haste or a less experienced photographer. Over the years, this has caused
some damage as flakes of the negative stuck to the inside of the case. Fortunately, all key portions of the image remain intact. Let us propose that this ambrotype represents the earliest-known photographic image of outsider art, taken sometime between 1855 and 1865. While it is possible that earlier daguerreotypes exist (pre 1855), the difficulty of the process makes it unlikely. Further avenues of investigation could focus on the uniform that the figure on the left is wearing, to narrow the time and location. Later photographs of this environment may also exist in other formats, pinpointing a location.
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CHARLES DELLSCHAU 1830–1923 An extract from Outsider Art in Texas: Lone Stars describes an early US outsider artist who privately documented his ambitious designs for flying machines
JAY WEHNERT
Book 12, 81 pages, nos. 4850 to 5235, March 24 –July 24,1921, ink, watercolour, pencil, and collage on paper, 21.25 x 17.4 x 1 ins. / 54 x 44.2 x 2.5cm, courtesy American Folk Art Museum, Collection abcd / Bruno Decharme
The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. . . . Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone; that is when ideas are born.—Nikola Tesla, New York Times, April 8, 1934 The life and art of Charles A. A. Dellschau is shrouded in mystery and wonder. Dellschau’s life illustrates how diverse forces of isolation can converge within an individual, sometimes contributing to a uniquely personal creativity and art. Charles Dellschau’s fascinating life of isolation and imagination would come to mark him as one of America’s earliest and greatest self-taught visionary artists. Charles August Albert Dellschau was born on June 5, 1830, in Berlin, in what was then Prussia. He was born into a historical period of political revolution and economic 40
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upheaval in his homeland, marked by violence and hardship. Many of his generation sought opportunities and stability by coming to the United States. Charles uprooted himself from home and family and apparently emigrated alone to Texas in 1849, arriving through the Port of Galveston. Charles Dellschau’s life in his adopted American homeland was marked by adventure, fragile domesticity and recurrent personal tragedy. While during his early years in the United States he may have sought his good fortune in the California Gold Rush, his return to Texas held just the opposite. There, he was to be preceded in death by his two wives and their natural children. He ultimately settled in Houston with the family of his surviving step-daughter where his life’s final decades culminated in his visionary masterwork. Charles Dellschau’s life illustrates the wide range of forces, both grand and personal, that can come to bear,
Book 8, nos. 4347, April 7 and 9, 1919, ink, watercolour, pencil and collage on paper, 35 x 17 x 2 ins. / 88.9 x 43.2 x 5.1 cm, Collection J. Kevin O’Rourke, courtesy of Stephen Romano Gallery, New York
resulting in displacement and isolation. The global economic and political world that he was born into in Europe provided the broad circumstances of his lone flight from his family and culture of origin. He arrived in the United States alone. Subsequently, so much personal family loss in the span of two decades would serve as a further backdrop for Dellschau’s ultimate retreat and reclusion from domestic life and his immersion into a solitary and private life of fantasy and creativity. Living with Elizabeth in Houston, Dellschau was later described by family members as increasingly aloof from everyday family life, spending more and more time alone in his private room in the family house. It would not be until some 40 years after his death at the age of 93 that the world would discover the wonder and intrigue of his furtive and cloistered labors. In 1967, following a fire at the house, the attic and its contents were cleared out on the order of the Fire
Department. Left on the sidewalk that day was what Charles Dellschau had been producing in his reclusive room during the culminating two decades of his life. However, his labors were only beginning to be brought into the full light of day. Fred Washington, a Houston junk and antiques dealer with a picker’s sharp eye, acquired the discarded pile of fire debris. What had caught Washington’s eye was a cache of twelve large notebooks, each hand-bound with shoelaces and thick with text and colourfully detailed mechanical drawings of dirigible-like machines. Mary Jane Victor, an art history student at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, made her own discovery at Fred Washington’s shop. She described his taking down from the shelves a stack of roughly handbound books, several of which were falling apart. Her first impressions as she looked at them were compelling. She reported, “I thought they were very fascinating. They were RAW VISION 97
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Book 8, nos. 4347 and 4348, April 7 and 9, 1919, ink, watercolour, pencil and collage on paper, 35 x 17 x 2 ins. / 88.9 x 43.2 x 5.1 cm, Collection J. Kevin O’Rourke, courtesy American Folk Art Museum, Stephen Romano Gallery, New York
just so strong that even a student could see that, especially with the dirigibles and all kinds of flying machines. They were just amazing.” Through her contacts some of Dellschau’s books were sold to the Menil Collection. It is important to appreciate that at this time no one really yet knew what Charles Dellschau had created. In 1969, the concept and context of outsider art had yet to be fully established and popularised as it is today. In fact, it was not until 1972 that Roger Cardinal coined that term, beginning its popularisation. Seminal American artists such as Bill Traylor, Henry Darger, or Howard Finster had yet to be discovered, documented, or valued. There was not yet a cultural framework for anticipating, recognising, or understanding what Dellschau’s voluminous works might be. Thus, no one encountered the work as possibly being “the next great discovery” in outsider art. Looking back, Mary Jane Victor remarked, “At that time no one 42
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knew what outsider art was.” Instead, the books were received with a more basic and intense inquisitiveness and wonder. The mysteries that they held were their essence. A deeper understanding of Dellschau’s creation would result from the perseverance of amateur enthusiasts, initially Peter Navarro and then other academic art researchers, who would seek to uncover the secrets that Dellschau’s books embodied. What Navarro uncovered was that the volumes produced by Charles Dellschau in his secluded room, left for trash on a Houston sidewalk, salvaged by a junk dealer, and then discovered by the upper echelon of the art world, appeared to chronicle in great narrative and visual detail Dellschau’s participation in a secret society of designers, engineers, and builders whose work was the invention and construction of lighter-than-air flying machines. The story takes place in Sonora, California, the
place of the young Dellschau’s unaccounted-for early years. Page after page of elaborately illustrated air-ships in watercolour and collage, accompanied by text in English, Prussian, and cryptic code, describe the inner workings of Dellschau’s Sonora Aero Club. Dellschau referred to the fantastical airships as “Aeros,” and each was named for its maker or another important quality. The books present a detailed narrative of the club’s inner workings, including the identities of other club members, descriptions of the construction and flights of the ships, and sightings by the public. There is much attention given to the top-secret gas called “Supe,” which gives the airships their power of flight. Dellschau refers to himself as the draftsman for the organisation. Following his retirement to the confines of his room, Dellschau began his solitary writing efforts around 1898 with a series of three memoirs, two written in English and
the last in German. These volumes take the form of a more traditional journal with hand-written text and accompanying illustrations. In these first texts Dellschau describes in extensive detail the inner workings of the Sonora Aero Club, its members, and their activities during the time that they operated in California. Rendered in sepia ink, with some lightly coloured accents, there are artful portraits of club members and their daily boardinghouse activities. There are also detailed descriptions of their secretive work, designing and constructing the flying machines that Dellschau called “Aeros.” In these memoirs Dellschau illustrates many of the vessels and accompanies them with detailed explanatory text. The formulas for the club’s secret gasses and propellants are contained here. Peter Navarro was intrigued by the seeming prescience of the group’s mechanical designs that appeared to predate some of their actual invention. RAW VISION 97
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BANANA MAN Bartolomeo Mereu – from ice cream to sculpture PAVEL KONEČNÝ
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n the edge of Sardinia in the Mediterranean, in the Gulf of Orosei, is a once-forgotten fishing village. It lies on one of the most stunning rocky coasts of this mysterious island, which has been filled with a turbulent history. Today, it is known as Cala Gonone and is frequented by tourists from around the world. It is where a great winemaker and, until recently, well-hidden sculptor called Bartolomeo Mereu (born 1935, in Dorgali) lives. Mereu is an expert not only in wine but, curiously enough, also in ice cream. He sold the stuff for decades in his café, and from his mobile carriage nearby Dorgali. Dorgali is a peculiar mountain town on the slopes of Monte Bardia, which is famous for its traditional Sardinian craftsmanship in textiles, leather, ceramics, jewellery, knives and musical instruments. Here, Mereu lives in his house with a small garden. He is known by his nickname, taken from his favourite flavour of ice cream:
Banana. However, to set up his business he had to earn money and he did this through hard work as a miner in Belgium and then Germany. He did this work, deep beneath the earth, for ten years. When he retired, around 2005, he revisited his childhood hobby: finding and gathering objects with shapes that were interesting to him, and transforming them into art. The forms that emerge under his hands can be human heads or whole figures, or animals. Wood is scarce in Sardinia, especially in the mountainous region of Barbagia that surrounds Mereu’s birthplace. Trees with carvable wood are rarely found – instead, there is an abundance of dense evergreen shrubs. Prickly pear cacti, myrtle and juniper cover much of the land. By necessity, these plants are Mereu’s materials for his unconventional work. There is a rich tradition of folklore in this until-recently isolated island world, with its deeply rooted and distinctive culture that was inherited from
opposite: a carved and assembled figure greets visitors, n.d., wood and paint, height 45 ins. / 115 cm
Woman with earrings (detail), n/.d., wood and paint, height 23.5 ins. / 60 cm
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A group of sculpted figures and a dog line the railing outside Mereu’s house, n.d., wood and paint, height 15.8 5 to 27.4 ins. / 40 to 70 cm
the mysterious builders of nuraghes (the megalithic towers that have come to symbolise Sardinia) as well as the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Etruscans and Romans. This tradition is reflected in the island’s unique folklore. However, the interconnection of Mereu’s carving with ancient magic and mysticism does not comply with the written or unwritten technical rules that are strictly adhered to and respected by many local folk craftsmen, for example in how the grimacing carved masks are produced, for the annual carnival in nearby Mamoiada or to be sold as sought-after souvenirs. Mereu’s work is much freer, more specific and, above all, it reflects his rich imagination, individual inner world and extroverted nature rather than the usual aspects of the rooted Sardinian tradition. His artwork can be seen as the characteristic and selfsustaining expression of a spontaneous unskilled creator who, considering his unrepeatable creativity, idiosyncracy, strong emotional charge and unexpected ways of carving, can be considered a genuine and authentic “raw” artist. Few of them live in Sardinia nowadays, and they are truly outstanding personalities. Since 2015, when the 48
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first public exhibition of Mereu’s work (together with the painter Luigi Mula) took place in Cala Gonone, in the premises of the former CINEMA 5D, it has been necessary to include him and his work with other renowned artists, Fiorenzo Pilia (born 1933, and creator of Il Giardina Fantastico) and Fellicu Fadda (born 1932, who sculpts using basalt) of Ghilarza. Mereu’s chief inspiration is the human figure, with the initial creative impulse being the size and shape of the wood he uses. The wood comes to him marked by the elements, and sourced from the virtually inaccessible rocky hills. He usually returns from the hills with dramatically twisted branches that have been savaged by the rain, wind and sun. With his imagination, and a sense of both the grotesque and of poetry, he transforms them. Eventually, his artworks – together with the lush vegetation around his open-air workshop in the corner of the garden – filled the area around his house. Numerous artefacts “flow” in one direction towards a rather low wall, which protects the carver’s plot (from which, according to him, more than one work has been stolen); or, in contrast, they can be seen heading up the stairs towards the entrance to the house. He created several dozen sculptures, the first of which was a
portrayal of his wife’s uncle in 2005. The distinctive three-dimensional portraits were not only of other relatives, neighbours and acquaintances but also of mythological, religious or historical personalities, such as Osama Bin Laden or Mario Balotelli, the Sicilianborn football striker of Ghanaian origin. Mereu’s unique talent for observation, and his ability to convey it idiosyncratically in his carvings, can be seen in his sculptures of animals: dogs, birds, pigs, horses, cows and so on, which are perfect examples of his distinctive style, skill, sense of detail and use of colour. Mereu’s artistic expression, imagination and surprising solutions to partial, detailed work have a straightforwardness and vital simplicity. It is not calculating in terms of effect, nor does it contain any empty, formalistic wilfulness. On the contrary, his work gives a fresh, natural and playful impression that has a childlike sincerity. For example, there are various improvised depictions of human heads to which Mereu has fastened plastic ears from discarded dolls or screwed on improvised ears, unless he has created the form of the hearing organ by a simple, rough saw-cut through the side of the head. He likes to decorate his
sculptures with beads made from different nuts, and with the balls and ovals (egagropili) of the ancient Neptune grass that gather, like tumbleweeds, on the seashore. He almost always applies polychromatic paint to his sculptures, giving them distinctive and loud colouration in a way that highlights the often humorous, ironic or grotesque subtexts. Yet Mereu’s carving work remains tethered to its deep Sardinian roots, which shine creatively through the content and formal layers of his work. His frequent use of unrestrained and highly contrasting colour tones may be partly attributed to the sophisticated decorative sentiment of the ice-cream maker, as well as to the likely hunger for light and bright colours that developed while he toiled underground in dark coal drifts for those years. Another feature that stands out is that he is not satisfied with the mere completion of individual sculptures. He likes to integrate them into larger functional units, as in the case of figures in two rows of the wooden banisters, separating the staircase leading into the cellar of the house, from the garden, and thus creating a kind of natural sight dominant of this enclosed private space. He does not hesitate to combine individual RAW VISION 97
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ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION On the opening of his exhibition at Intuit, Chicago, the Midwestern outsider artist, Stephen Warde Anderson, was interviewed by the artist, curator, writer and folk-art collector, Michael Noland
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above: Stephen Warde Anderson (b. 1953) in his home, 2017, photo: Michael Noland
above: Karen Carpenter, 1992, tempera and acrylic on shade cloth on hardboard, 22.5 x 20 ins. / 57.2 x 50.8 cm
previous page: Jane Austen, 1987, crinoline on hardboard, 28 x 22 ins. / 71.1 x 55.9 cm
All reproductions of work courtesy of Kieth Sadler
Mike Noland: How did you get started as an artist? Stephen Warde Anderson: I never thought of being an artist until I was past 30 – had no art training or education except for a 7th grade art class. I used to get books from the library and, for a time, I was checking out books on the great artists. I was already doing pencil and charcoal drawings; this got me interested in painting. With little idea of what I was getting myself into, I decided to try my hand at it. Did you have any early art influences? Such as your mother’s painting. I guess I do have some art genes, at least on my mother’s side. She worked in watercolours when she was young; in later years she did coloured pencil drawings and did so right up until the time she died last year at 96. Her mother was a watercolourist as well, and her father, E. Warde Blasidell – I’m partly named for him – was a professional artist, an illustrator and cartoonist. His heyday was in the 19-aughts. He was noted for his whimsical drawings of anthropomorphic animals dressed in clothes – rabbits in top hats, bears in frock coats, that sort of thing. His style of
whimsy is present in some of my own paintings, but as he died before I was born, I think the familial art influences are mostly… subliminal. Even today, I don’t think my art is influenced particularly by anyone, even by artists I admire. It all comes from within. How did you discover or invent your early technique of using tempera, saliva, a needle for a stylus and bottle caps for a palette? I was not very successful at drawing, so in the early 1980s I concluded I needed to embark upon the great painting experiment. I broke the bank and bought myself some Prang tempera – just black, white, red, yellow and blue. I was confident that I could mix the rest of the colours I might need. Tempera was too watery for me, but the paint became manageable when it dried to a pasty consistency. Once, I unceremoniously spat upon the dry paint, and, lo!, it became a paste again. The next day I reliquified the hardened paints with water, but, doggone, they became too runny again. Aha, I said to myself, it’s the saliva that makes the paint pasty! I soon devised a technique of mixing up the paints in pop bottle caps. The next day they
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would be hard and I could reliquify them by spitting on them. It was great! Since a brush was inadequate, I eventually found that I could make an ideal stylus from the plastic of whipped cream containers. As I developed a pointillist technique, I began to use sewing needles to dot and sometimes striate the surface with paint, often over a coat or two of paint already laid on by the stylus. I never found canvas suitable. In the late 1980s, I used strips of curtain-stiffening glued to board and then, for a long time, painted on window shade cloth fused to hardboard. By 1995 I was using gouache, then acryla-gouache, and by 2002, acrylics. This necessitated using brushes – a loathsome but necessary concession to conventionality. My painting surface became illustration board glued to hardboard and, more recently, to canvas boards. A lot of your work is portraits of actors and actresses you admire. How did that become the theme? I think my original intention was to create pictures of my favourite actresses. Looking at movies and TV has been a lifelong obsession. I must have at least 6,500 films and
have seen thousands more. There are many films I’ve seen dozens of times. You know, your favourite films and TV shows become a part of your life and you can live vicariously within them. So I get a lot of material from the cinema, inspiration for portraits and historical scenes. Why did you do some paintings in sepia tone? It was another idea I hit upon early on. The sepia, or burnt sienna portraits, capture some of the antique flavour of sepia photographs. In sepia the light tints are close to flesh colour and it looks semi-natural. Although I have a love for bright colours, I am periodically drawn to monochrome. It has a simplicity, and much of composing a picture involves simplification: figuring out how not to paint what’s unimportant. In recent work you have done biblical scenes, many including aliens. Do you believe in aliens – and if so, why? And how do they relate to the Bible? A few years go, Heaven knows why, I started creating The Anderson Revisionist Bible. It’s an attempt to make an accurate, truly modern rendering of the Bible, using existing translations. The text is augmented by notes that
The Jinni, 1995, tempera and gouache on hardboard, 24 x 32 ins. / 61 x 81.3 cm
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Anderson’s work table
address the questions the average skeptical reader might ask. The first of five projected volumes, The Books of Moses, was published last year. I am also working on the New Testament: so far I’ve published The Gospel of John. I have come to the conclusion that the Old Testament is, in part, a chronicle of ancient man’s relationship not with the divine but with alien – probably extraterrestrial – beings. Genetic experiments were conducted by aliens in the Garden of Eden to create modern man. The man who ate cottage cheese offered to him by Abraham, the Jehovah that Moses only saw the back of, the creatures Jacob watched going up and down a ladder were, I think, alien beings. I have incorporated this idea into some of my recent paintings; for example, I have Sodom and Gomorrah being destroyed by incendiaries dropped from airships, and the serpent of Eden is a humanoid reptilian. Do I believe in aliens? How can anyone not? The evidence is absolutely overwhelming. Ditto: fairies, Bigfoot, and ghosts. We reject belief in them only because we are loathe to challenge the comforting notions we were taught in the nursery – or in college. I have reason to believe that seven or eight years ago aliens made several nocturnal visits to me, that I may be among the many from whom they have taken samples – presumably to create a hybrid race. I have responded to the experience, which is not at all disturbing to me, by creating a series of paintings about humorous, non-threatening extraterrestrials, the Clueless Gray Aliens. Stranded on earth
and inept at adapting to human culture, they try to look at TV, play baseball, fish, ski, and other human activities. Yeah, I sold most of those paintings. How did you get your work shown in the beginning. And how did Phyllis Kind become your first art dealer? I got my start in my hometown, Rockford, Illinois. After I got a body of work together, mostly portraits, in 1988 I exhibited quite successfully at a cafe gallery and an art fair. Got to give a shout out to Cherri Rittenhouse from Rockford, who curated that first show. Later that year, I approached Phyllis Kind Gallery on Cherri’s advice. Sure enough, a couple of days later I got a call and, bingo! The gallery wanted to represent me. I had my first one-man show there in 1990. Such things rarely happen, and the more I look back on it the more grateful I am. Do you think of yourself as an outsider artist? Or just a contemporary painter? I don’t believe I am contemporary in any sense. I feel an affinity for the nineteenth-century American folk artist. My own work is classical and it’s naive, like a frontier log cabin built to resemble the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. How has your work evolved over the years? In what direction do you see your work going? I have always tried to improve and develop, and expand the range. You build on what you’ve done before, learning from
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PROFESSION – BILLIONAIRE The Soviet escapism of Gennadiy Lukomnikov ARIADNE ARENDT
Photographic self portrait, c. 1973
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he circus, money, space exploration, everyday Soviet life, word games and America: these are some of the themes woven into the fabric of Gennadiy Lukomnikov’s creative output. Leaving behind hundreds of works, this overlooked artist and writer worked in total creative and intellectual isolation, remaining practically unknown to this day. Born in 1939 into a middle-class Jewish minority family in Baku, the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia in childhood. Living with his mother and 58
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receiving a modest pension for his mental illness, he spent his life in and out of mental institutions. But continually processing daily life through the prism of a rich, witty and diverse imagination, he found an output for his world view on paper. Lukomnikov held a string of jobs (caretaker, tree planter, assistant cartographer, draftsman, photographer, geological digger), but was unable to keep any for too long and was often fired. His father worked as an assistant to the Minister of Agriculture in the Government House of
One Billiard Roubles, c. 1970, text on woman’s shirt: city of the yellow devil; background text: quote fragments of Gorky, Gogol, Lomonosov, Mayakovsky; word-search background spells out: moon, sun, aeroplane, poetry, myth etc.
All works are pen, coloured pencil or watercolour on paper and measure 7.9 x 11.3 ins. / 20.1 x 28.7 cm, courtesy of German Lukomnikov.
Hypnosis/Illusion, c. 1970
One Billiard Roubles, c. 1970
One dollar, c. 1970, text: From darkest nights the sun arose/ Illuminating with its eye/ My vain life’s sole/ And sharp objective
Baku, where he placed the young Gennadiy as a caretaker in 1961. Here he met and fell in love with an Armenian girl working as a lift operator. They married, and in 1962 had a son, German (named after the Soviet cosmonaut German Titov), but she soon divorced Gennadiy after realising the full extent of his illness. Gennadiy’s father also died a couple of years later, so the majority of his mature adult life was spent under the guardianship of his mother. It is
through German Lukomnikov, now a celebrated poet in Russia, that his father’s archive remains intact. But even his son only began to appreciate this legacy – stacks of ragged paper with modestly-executed sketches in biro and pencil, homemade books, wooden cutouts, photographs, exercise books of poetic verse – as the artistic manifestation of a complex and intricate world view, a decade after his father’s death. Gennadiy RAW VISION 97
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Circus acrobatics trick, c. 1975
Untitled, 1970
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“The key is that the human imagination has crossed the line of necessity” All work reproduced courtesy of Moscow museum of Naïve art,
A fragment from The Path of Thunder, c. 1975
Untitled, c. 1975
Untitled, c. 1975
Lukomnikov died aged just 38, in 1977, in a tragic incident involving a fall from their flat’s balcony. Towards the end of his life, Lukomnikov found a job he managed to keep for several years. At the Baku Opera and Ballet theatre, he first worked as a stagehand and then a set painter-decorator. He was engrossed by the theatre, which evidently resounded with his own inclination towards performativity and grandeur, inspiring him to draw performances from memory and invent his own. Despite, or maybe because of, his modest existence, Lukomnikov’s work is full of a certain opulence. The subject of money is a constant recurrence, most prominently seen
in his series of intricately-drawn banknotes in denominations from three to a million, a billion and even a quadrillion roubles. There is one dollar, but also “one million smiles” and “one hundred thousand Whys” (a paraphrasing of Rudyard Kipling). Some notes are devoid of any monetary denomination at all. Emblazoned with the stern profile of a large-haired woman in place of Lenin’s portrait, they are decorated with elaborate patterns and interwoven text: Soviet slogans, poetry, quotations, aphorisms and word games. Though his pension constituted a sizeable proportion of the family’s monthly budget, Lukomnikov treated it RAW VISION 97
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Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930) at the Waldau asylum
Asylum ward
ETERNITY HAS NO DOOR OF ESCAPE: ENCOUNTERS WITH OUTSIDER ART 2017, France, 80 min., dir. Arthur Borgnis, DVD (English/French/Portuguese) from: eternityhasnodoor.com “Let’s be realistic: demand the impossible”. This utopian slogan from the 1968 French student movement could apply to Arthur Borgnis’ latest documentary. The long history of the gradual recognition of outsider art, from Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922) to the most recent works produced in art therapy workshops such as La S grand atelier (Belgium), is an intricate one, mobilising such complex figures as Jean Dubuffet, André Breton, or Harald Szeemann: it seemed simply impossible to offer a comprehensive summary of these evolutions over nearly a century within the confines of a featurelength documentary. There have been a number of documentary films dealing with aspects of outsider art, starting with the inclusion of a section on Facteur Cheval’s Palais Idéal in French surrealist filmmaker JeanBertrand Brunius’ Violons d’Ingres (1939). However, they have mostly consisted of monographic takes on a single artist, collector or curator, as opposed to a broad historical overview of the evolution of the field as a whole. 64
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The history of outsider art is also a tale of extraordinary happenings, a series of small “miracles in a shoe insole”, to borrow from the title of a famous drawing of the Prinzhorn Collection’s Carl Lange. Eternity Has no Door of Escape presents in a clear, concise and engaging fashion the history of outsider art, introducing us to its most significant artists and works, but also to the visionary collectors, psychiatrists, curators and thinkers who decisively left their mark on this increasingly well-regarded field. This documentary is the result of over two years of painstaking, meticulous archival research: gaining a firm grasp of the monumental, ever-growing bibliography devoted to outsider art and its epigones, Borgnis managed to cherrypick significant, often moving, sometimes hilarious anecdotes, thought-provoking quotations, and a treasure trove of archival photographs, films, and videos, the majority previously unreleased. Far from offering a drab, overly didactic exposé, Borgnis’ documentary makes full use of the potentialities of cinema as a medium. A passionate connoisseur and collector of outsider art, Borgnis is also a veteran filmmaker, who worked on numerous short and featurelength movies in both the fiction and the non-fiction genre in various capacities, starting with Leos Carax’ Lovers on the Bridge (1991), on which he worked as an
apprentice stage manager at the tender age of 19. The main challenges for this documentary, according to Borgnis, was to find a way to film paintings and drawings – that is, to translate the visual grammar of a static, stable medium into the ever-moving idiom of the film camera. In the history of cinema, one of the most famous visual propositions attempting to solve that formal and artistic quandary is HenriGeorges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956), in which Pablo Picasso is filmed in the very act of painting, through a glass panel that he progressively fills in with his signature swift, muscular and precise brushstrokes. Without opting for such radical filmmaking methods as Clouzot’s, Borgnis developed a specific visual style that allowed him to film works of outsider art dynamically, and to make them become alive on screen. He often starts a shot on an extreme close-up of a significant or particularly visually striking detail of a painting, drawing, or sculpture, then slowly zooms out to allow the viewer to see how it fits into the broader composition. Alternatively, he often “follows” its main dynamic axes by using slow tracking shots in extreme close-up, thus attempting to recreate the viewing experience of a close, direct encounter with the intensely expressive works of outsider art “classics” such as Adolf Wölfli, Augustin Lesage, or
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Dr Hans Prinzhorn
Jean Dubuffet
Detail from a painting by Adolf Wölfli
Spiritualist séance
Aloïse Corbaz. These visually striking shots, interspersed with archival images and a series of interviews with international experts in outsider art, provide additional vibrancy and liveliness thanks to a dynamic, rhythmically varied montage and a compelling original soundtrack by French composer Jean-Christophe Onno. Such visual and technical savvy contributes to the emotional impact of the film: in spite of the density and richness of the material it covers, the documentary leaves ample space for discovery, wonder, and contemplation. Spectators are encouraged to spend some time with the artworks, following the sensuous gaze of the camera as it slowly glides over the surface of canvases or sheets of paper. This impression of unmediated contact is further reinforced by the introduction of a number of direct quotes from the writings of the artists themselves: the words of Augustin Lesage describing his first encounter with a mysterious, otherworldly “voice” in the pitch-black depths of a coal mine, enjoining him to paint his first canvas; or the lyrical outpourings of Aloïse Corbaz, describing her obsessive, colourful visions of romantic idylls as a labour of never-ending, ecstatic love. We are thus allowed to hear these artists in their own words, most of them read by the excellent, classically trained French comedian David Ayala. The interview of Michel Nedjar constitutes a very special treat in that regard, allowing us to experience first-hand the artist’s virtuosic delivery of well-crafted lines. The documentary also invites us to encounter a series of “insiders”, from
historical figures such as Jean Dubuffet or Madeleine Lommel to young scholars in the field like Déborah Couette, not to mention international experts such as the late art brut expert Laurent Danchin, Thomas Röske (Prinzhorn Collection), Christian Berst, Michel Thévoz, or Sarah Lombardi (Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne). Borgnis also selected particularly significant and often amusing excerpts from rare film and video archives, from Jean Dubuffet’s somewhat bombastic praise of art brut as an expression of an irrepressible natural “sap”, to Alain Bourbonnais’ unmistakably Gallic outbursts of joie de vivre, raising his glass in the company of one of his own wearable life-sized cardboard sculptures to toast the viewers in a short clip taken from his experimental film Turbulents’ Band (2017). Offering a comprehensive, nuanced summary of the history of outsider art in a film documentary is no small feat – not only because of the range and complexity of the issues at stake but also because the extension and even the very notion of outsider art are still the object of heated debates, both within the relatively small field of outsider art and within the art world as a whole. Passions run high, conceptual and national lines are drawn, and polemical statements abound, owing to the seemingly insurmountable aesthetic, ethical and institutional questions posed by the works themselves and the way they are displayed and collected. Most of the readers of Raw Vision will already be familiar with such debates, which I hardly need to recapitulate here: “term warfare” between the zealots of art
brut as defined by Dubuffet and the partisans of a more expansive definition of outsider art; defenders of the singularity and separate nature of the field opposed to its increasing integration into the structures and institutions of the global art market, or to a rapprochement with contemporary art. Given this constellation of apparently irreconcilable positions, such a documentary cannot be a neutral gesture: there is, of course, no such thing as a thoroughly objective take on history, and any investigation of the past, especially in the case of such a problematic, tensionridden field, will necessarily be perceived as favouring one of the embattled factions at the expense of the other. However, Eternity Has No Door of Escape mostly manages to eschew overly polemical or partisan tones. Instead of focusing on taxonomical issues, the documentary encourages us to take a closer look at the history of outsider art by calling our attention to the interactions between the personal trajectories of Hans Prinzhorn, Jean Dubuffet, Harald Szeemann, or Madeleine Lommel, and their respective historical and cultural contexts. This is a movie mostly concerned with opening doors, and asking questions that don’t call for easy answers. It encourages us to rethink the history of outsider art, and to reflect upon what is at stake in its reception, questioning the boundaries between art and non-art, normal and pathological, individual creativity and sociocultural conventions. Raphael Koenig RAW VISION 97
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EXHIBITIONS
above: Henry Darger, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion (Vol. I of the Story of “The Relams of the Unreal”, bound), 1910–12, American Folk Art Museum left: Paul Laffoley (1935–2015), The Living Klein Bottle House of Time, 1978, oil, acrylic, and vinyl lettering on canvas, collection of Norman and Eve Dolph
VESTIGES & VERSE: NOTES FROM THE NEWFANGLED EPIC American Folk Art Museum New York January 21 – May 27, 2018 “Vestiges & Verse: Notes from the Newfangled Epic” offers a sharply focused examination of a range of technically inventive methods that 21 different selftaught artists have employed to conjoin images and texts for their varied communicative purposes. The exhibition was organised by Valérie Rousseau, the American Folk Art Museum’s curator of self-taught art and art brut. A number of collaborating researchers contributed to its accompanying publications. Works by definitive representatives of the related art brut and outsider art categories, such as the Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (1864–1930), the American Henry Darger (1892–1973) and the German-born American Charles A. A. Dellschau (1830–1923), help set the historical scene. On the backs of the illustrated pages of his 45-volume magnum opus, in which he mythologised his own childhood and his alter ego’s creation of the universe, Wölfli wrote detailed passages of a vast narrative. He also wrote on the back sides of his stand-alone drawings and within his
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top left: Josep Baqué, 1500 Animals, Wild Beasts, Monsters, and Primitive Men, Year XV (selection from a 454-page manuscript), 1930–60, ink on paper, various sizes, private collection, Paris
images themselves, making both words and pictures function to propel his big, unfolding tale. Darger’s brief jottings on his drawings serve more as conventional captions, but also as prominent graphic elements within his compositions. Dellschau produced text-bearing collage works and notebooks in whose texts and images he explored his fascination with flying machines. With “Vestiges & Verse”, Rousseau proposes that, even by examining extracts from the larger bodies of work of such artists, a viewer may begin to comprehend the overall character and structure of each one’s broader, deeply personal oeuvre. She has pointed out that perhaps all of the bodies of work on display here “share a certain kind of logic.” Is there something inherently common among them? Viewers are invited to look for evidence that there is. Some of the less familiar art-makers whose works are on view include the Belgian Ariane Bergrichter (1937–1996), a one-time fashion model who made psychologically and emotionally intense collages capturing everyday-life scenes,
even as she recorded in writing the degrading declarations against her of hallucinatory voices. Josep Baqué (1895–1967) created a 450-page manuscript filled with images of some 1,500 imaginary creatures, which this former Spanish policeman taxonomically classified. Tunisian-born Jean-Daniel Allanche (1940–2015) moved to France and became a theoretical physicist. Among other subjects, he was intrigued by gambling and produced colourfully illustrated casino cards and notebooks documenting his study of the roulette wheel. “Life is a game only if the stakes are high”, he wrote, adding, “It is our work (action) that makes the stakes important.” As this exhibition demonstrates, it was the imaginative work of its various subjects that gave each of their lives a sense of meaning and purpose. Revelling in the aesthetic richness of their creations, viewers may also savour the ways in which they fully integrated writing with images to conjure up distinctive works of art. Edward M. Gómez
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BOOKS
BODY 5 Continents Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne ISBN 978 887439 788 4 The perennial subject of the human body is the theme of the current exhibition at Lausanne, and much reflected in the work of many art brut creators. From Hauser and Aloïse to Darger and Schröder-Sonnenstern, the human body has been an integral element in the artist’s vision. Apart from the famous classics there are many lesserknown works in the book, such as the startling drawings of Brigitte Roos and Ted Gordon’s ‘Hand-Faces’.
LA PINTURITAS by Hervé Couton Edition Alpas ISBN 979 10 699 1518 3 text in French, Spanish, English Maria Fernandez, aka La Pinturitas, was the cover story for Raw Vision as recently as a year ago, and the author has now published a comprehensive and attractive book dedicated to her relentlessly compulsive production. Her work, on the semi-derelict building which serves as her canvas, lies between expansive mural and indecipherable graffiti, with overlapping forms of swirling lines of text and staring open faces with predominantly strong and warm colours covering all the walls of the structure. Hervé Couton has been a devoted follower of La Pinturitas for almost a decade and visits each year to continue his documentation. This is an important process as the huge work is constantly evolving and being added to, even painted over. In addition to Couton’s own texts contributions from Jo Farb Hernandez and the late Laurent Danchin plus a foreword by Sarah Lombardi broaden the context of this impressive creation. The visual documentation is outstanding with fold out pages of panoramic views and hundreds of images, both details and general installation shots that give a thorough picture of one woman’s overwhelming creative achievement. John Maizels
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ODY SABAN peintures 1981–2017 lelivredart ISBN 978 235532 289 1 Ody Saban is one of France’s leading selftaught artists and her work exudes a unique strain of powerful eroticism coupled with a complex and intricate flowing line. Saban is well-known for her highly detailed ink drawings but this book concentrates on her vibrant painted works and serves as a retrospective chronology of her life and output, with paintings shown dating from the 1980s until the present day. The rich sensuous images are accompanied by text by Francoise Monnin and an interview with Thomas Mordant that follows Saban’s life through different stages – from her childhood in Istanbul, her stays in Israel and New York to her eventual new home in Paris where she has now lived and worked for almost 40 years and managed to establish herself in an important position in her field.
DUBUFFET’S LIST Masterpieces from the Prinzhorn Collection Outsider Art Museum, Amsterdam ISBN 978 908060 440 7 Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill was one of Dubuffet’s great influences, and in 1950 he was able to visit Prinzhorn’s collection. Dubuffet’s list of works he studied there was unearthed a few years a go in the archives at the Collection de l’Art Brut, and this book is a catalogue for an exhibition of those works curated by the Prinzhorn Collection which was shown at several venues in Europe. Although Dubuffet studied some of the great “schizophrenic masters” of Prinzhorn’s collection, like Karl Genzel, Else Blankenthorn, August Klett, Josef Grebing and Johann Knopf, he also listed many anonymous pieces and little-seen examples, such as the delicate drawings of Ulrich Engler or Hermann Behle’s portraits drawn on scraps of toilet paper.