Hawkins Bolden's Scarecrows, yellow and red
A marvellous temporary museum has opened in Primrose Hill in London. You enter through a tiny alleyway on a side street, and find yourself in a building that began its life as a dairy and was until recently a recording studio. The eccentric location is in keeping with its eccentric contents. It’s called The Museum of Everything, and is open to the public free of charge each week from Thursday to Sunday. Crammed into a warren of corridors, cubicles, uncomfortably shaped rooms and one cavernous double-height space is a generous exhibition of the marginalised art of the past 200 years, which has at various times been labelled art brut, outsider art (the most popular term), folk art, naive art, visionary art and, occasionally, Sunday painting.
The common denominator is that this is work by untrained artists, operating outside the commercial art world, in remote or impoverished communities and sometimes in mental institutions. But the competing terminology indicates the lack of consensus on what this art really is, or where it should go in the art historical and museological scheme of things.
The art in this show ranges from the St Ives painter Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), whose seascapes are in the Tate, to the obscure French artist ACM, whose intricate structures resemble models of Indian temples, but are made of electronics. There are intriguing back stories behind most of it. Downstairs you will find the religious works of Sister Gertrude Morgan, a street evangelist in New Orleans (1900-80). Her dense oil and crayon works are full of scrawled psalms, swirling flame-like brushstrokes and the heads of saints. She began painting after receiving a message from God in 1956, and stopped in 1974, apparently at His request. James Brett, the wealthy north Londoner who owns most of the collection on show, was able to acquire handfuls of her work after meeting her accountant. There is a room full of the scroll-like panoramas of Henry Darger (1892-1973), perhaps the best-known marginalised artist of them all, who, after escaping abuse at a children’s home, painted naked children in idyllic garden-like landscapes in the innocent style of children’s book illustration. Hawkins Bolden (1914-2005), meanwhile, was a blind sculptor who compulsively made “faces” from old kitchen pans, washtubs, road signs and other junk.
Some of the work has the precision of contemporary art. Like the handful of Nek Chand’s figures, three-quarters human height, made out of recycled materials such as beads and porcelain. Since the 1950s, Chand has been covering a 2km-square area outside Chandigarh, in northwest India, with these figures; the materials come from the construction of that city, which was designed by Le Corbusier as a model of urban modernism. Deliberate or instinctive, the precision of Chand’s counter-image—a painstaking creation on an equally exaggerated scale but the very opposite of Le Corbusier’s ordered geometric city—is worthy of any conceptual or politicised artist.
Yet this kind of art is no longer outside the art market—it forms its own genre, with specialist dealers and an annual fair. How much further inside the mainstream should, and will, it come? In many ways its outsider status is already an anachronism. Jean-Michel Basquiat once swapped his entire exhibition for a few paintings by the black South Carolina artist “Uncle” Sam Doyle (1906–85), also included in this show. Basquiat is called a graffiti artist, but his style owes more to the primitivism of folk artists like Doyle. The Museum of Everything is peppered with tribute texts from famous artists, including Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari—both of whom have big retrospectives in London now. The delicately obsessive objects wrapped in thick layers of thread by Judith Scott (1943-2005), an artist who was deaf and had Down’s syndrome, are now in the collections of big American modern art museums and were the subject of a solo show at the cult New York gallery White Columns. In recent years, obsessiveness has become a fashion among conceptual artists, a few of whom cover large canvases in biro drawing, like the English outsider artist Madge Gill (1882-1961).
Yet there is a counter-argument against relaxing the rules of admission to art history. However influential “outsider” art is, it does not play the same game as art-historical art. It is not interested in what went before it, or in addressing the nature of its medium, or in capturing the zeitgeist. It’s outside all that.
In the future, as museums continue to expand their definition of art, contemporary art may be reduced to a sub-category. But we are not there yet. The Museum of Everything’s installation follows few rules, with little use made of geography or chronology as an organising principle. You wander through it like a maze—symbolic of the confusion that surrounds this art genre.
A marvellous temporary museum has opened in Primrose Hill in London. You enter through a tiny alleyway on a side street, and find yourself in a building that began its life as a dairy and was until recently a recording studio. The eccentric location is in keeping with its eccentric contents. It’s called The Museum of Everything, and is open to the public free of charge each week from Thursday to Sunday. Crammed into a warren of corridors, cubicles, uncomfortably shaped rooms and one cavernous double-height space is a generous exhibition of the marginalised art of the past 200 years, which has at various times been labelled art brut, outsider art (the most popular term), folk art, naive art, visionary art and, occasionally, Sunday painting.
The common denominator is that this is work by untrained artists, operating outside the commercial art world, in remote or impoverished communities and sometimes in mental institutions. But the competing terminology indicates the lack of consensus on what this art really is, or where it should go in the art historical and museological scheme of things.
The art in this show ranges from the St Ives painter Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), whose seascapes are in the Tate, to the obscure French artist ACM, whose intricate structures resemble models of Indian temples, but are made of electronics. There are intriguing back stories behind most of it. Downstairs you will find the religious works of Sister Gertrude Morgan, a street evangelist in New Orleans (1900-80). Her dense oil and crayon works are full of scrawled psalms, swirling flame-like brushstrokes and the heads of saints. She began painting after receiving a message from God in 1956, and stopped in 1974, apparently at His request. James Brett, the wealthy north Londoner who owns most of the collection on show, was able to acquire handfuls of her work after meeting her accountant. There is a room full of the scroll-like panoramas of Henry Darger (1892-1973), perhaps the best-known marginalised artist of them all, who, after escaping abuse at a children’s home, painted naked children in idyllic garden-like landscapes in the innocent style of children’s book illustration. Hawkins Bolden (1914-2005), meanwhile, was a blind sculptor who compulsively made “faces” from old kitchen pans, washtubs, road signs and other junk.
Some of the work has the precision of contemporary art. Like the handful of Nek Chand’s figures, three-quarters human height, made out of recycled materials such as beads and porcelain. Since the 1950s, Chand has been covering a 2km-square area outside Chandigarh, in northwest India, with these figures; the materials come from the construction of that city, which was designed by Le Corbusier as a model of urban modernism. Deliberate or instinctive, the precision of Chand’s counter-image—a painstaking creation on an equally exaggerated scale but the very opposite of Le Corbusier’s ordered geometric city—is worthy of any conceptual or politicised artist.
Yet this kind of art is no longer outside the art market—it forms its own genre, with specialist dealers and an annual fair. How much further inside the mainstream should, and will, it come? In many ways its outsider status is already an anachronism. Jean-Michel Basquiat once swapped his entire exhibition for a few paintings by the black South Carolina artist “Uncle” Sam Doyle (1906–85), also included in this show. Basquiat is called a graffiti artist, but his style owes more to the primitivism of folk artists like Doyle. The Museum of Everything is peppered with tribute texts from famous artists, including Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari—both of whom have big retrospectives in London now. The delicately obsessive objects wrapped in thick layers of thread by Judith Scott (1943-2005), an artist who was deaf and had Down’s syndrome, are now in the collections of big American modern art museums and were the subject of a solo show at the cult New York gallery White Columns. In recent years, obsessiveness has become a fashion among conceptual artists, a few of whom cover large canvases in biro drawing, like the English outsider artist Madge Gill (1882-1961).
Yet there is a counter-argument against relaxing the rules of admission to art history. However influential “outsider” art is, it does not play the same game as art-historical art. It is not interested in what went before it, or in addressing the nature of its medium, or in capturing the zeitgeist. It’s outside all that.
In the future, as museums continue to expand their definition of art, contemporary art may be reduced to a sub-category. But we are not there yet. The Museum of Everything’s installation follows few rules, with little use made of geography or chronology as an organising principle. You wander through it like a maze—symbolic of the confusion that surrounds this art genre.
