Exhibition Review:
abcd: a collection of art brut
at the Chicago Cultural Center
April 26 - June 29, 2003
It seems the world is made up of two kinds of artists: the raw and the cooked. The raw do not care
about the art world, its museums, its standards, its scholars, or anything else about it; the cooked
care about nothing else. The raw make art often out of some spiritual motivation or desperate
obsession; the cooked do as well, but how they were trained, what they were taught, and the society
in which they live often inhibit their inspirations.
The purest artists of the first group are those who have been self-taught, isolated from society, consider themselves spiritualists, or have been institutionalized (and are thus, like the isolates, separated from society's constrictions). The French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) was the first established, formally trained artist to recognize the production of people in these categories, and was the first to term their work "art brut," literally "raw art," in the 1940s. Dubuffet said late in his life: "true art crops up wherever you don't expect it. Wherever no one has been thinking about it or uttering its name." Whether in insane asylums, forgotten attics, or quiet, lonely farms in the deep south, art has existed in places where art scholars have rarely cared (or dared) to look.
Fortunately, that has begun to change. I felt privileged to have caught, at the Chicago Cultural Center, the exhibition abcd: a collection of art brut, which closed on June 29. Drawn from the collection of ABCD (Art Brut Connaissance & Diffusion), a private Paris based foundation, the exhibition was organized by the American Folk Art Museum in New York and was curated by Brooke Anderson and Jenifer Borum. Recently New Yorkers had an opportunity to view stunning exhibitions of the works of Henry Darger (1892-1973) and Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930), which were lessons in the obsessive-compulsiveness of human nature; abcd: a collection of art brut was a lesson in the clarity of a uninhibited mind.
Darger and Wölfli were included in the exhibition, but also shown were a number of lesser-known artists whose work was equally compelling. A mediumistic artist born at Hénin-Liétard, France, in 1875, Fleury-Joseph Crépin stood out exponentially. Having gained a reputation as a healer, Crépin began to paint in his mid-60s. He claimed to hear music while he was painting, and that "spirit-guides" encouraged him to paint. He believed that upon the completion of his three hundredth painting World War II would end, and in fact his three hundredth painting is dated May 7th, 1945. His second goal, to ensure world peace upon completing another forty-five paintings, went unachieved at his death; unfortunate for us because one feels it may have worked. His untitled painting in the exhibition from 1940 depicts what looks like a female figure seated atop a throne, but for the most part the forms are highly abstract. The work is made up of tiny, perfect drops of paint, the enamel still shiny and jewel-like. Crépin's brand of pointillism makes for one of the most vibrant pieces in the show.
Other standouts included two institutionalized artists, Joseph Ernest Ménétrier, known as Emile Joseph Hodinos (1853-1905), and Carlo Zinelli, known as Carlo (1916-1974). Mostly self-taught but apprenticed as an engraver, Hodinos was institutionalized at the age of 23 for "manic excitement" and remained hospitalized until his death thirty-two years later. His hand-drawn images are also trompe-l'oeil masterworks because they so perfectly emulate engraved prints. Carlo's obsession with the number four is evident in his paintings; the viewer gets lost in counting the groups of four in his works (and will be surprised when sometimes a group of three seems to have sufficed). My husband and I found ourselves spellbound by the works of the Polish isolate Edmund Monsiel (1897-1962), who hid in his brother's attic for twenty years. Monsiel's pages, filled end to end with intricate pencil drawings of faces and tiny people, attest to the horror vaccui from which many of these artists suffered. My favorites in particular were the works of Anna Zemánková (1908-1986) a mediumistic artist who produced exuberantly colored mixed-media collages under the influence of classical music. She created very bright and lively forms, most in warm colors, in spite of the fact that she was a double-amputee and suffered, quite understandably, from depression.
There is a conundrum inherent in the appreciation of art brut: can an "outsider" ever become an "insider"? Would they want to? If the artist becomes an accepted, canonical member of art history, they would lose their status as "raw" artists. On the other hand, these artists should be taught in survey classes and their art actively collected by museums. They were doing exactly, and innately, what Dubuffet, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and countless other established artists were striving for in their own work: purity, simplicity, and a detachment from the confines of Western culture.
[To learn more about art brut, visit Raw Vision]
Caterina Y. Pierre
Brooklyn, New York
2 July 2003
Copyright 2003 © Caterina Y. Pierre; all rights reserved
No portion of this text may be used without the written permission of the author
Contact the author at
{Previous Review}
{Main List of Reviews}
{Next Review}
{An Art Diary - Main page}
{MarcelloSculpture Main page}
{Teaching Website}