Adolf Wolfli. Untitled (Saint Adolph Bitten in the Leg by the Snake), 1921; colored pencil and pencil on paper;
 26-3/4 x 20-1/8 in.; Waldau Clinic, Bern, Switzerland. Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photo: Marie Humair.

The importance of this documentation is hard to overestimate. In addition to providing insight into Dubuffet’s early process and philosophy in formulating art brut as a new aesthetic paradigm, it also chronicles the moment when the seeds for what would later become outsider art were first planted in the United States. Many of the artists included in Art Brut in America, like Aloise Corbaz, Augustin Lesage, and Adolf Wolfli, are now well known to American audiences through the robust and active network of outsider-art galleries, fairs, and publications. Through revisiting and partially re-creating art brut’s American debut, the exhibition also inevitably tells outsider art’s genesis story. While it is undeniable that the outsider-art genre was built from art brut’s blueprints, and inherited the slippery criteria for inclusion and false dichotomies that plagued its predecessor, it is crucial to remember the differences between the two fields, in particular the historical context that informed Dubuffet’s motives for collecting in the first place.

Robert Gie. Distribution d’Effluves avec Machine Centrale et Tableau Métrique (Distribution of Emanations with Central Machine and Metric Table), 
circa 1916;
 pencil and India ink on tracing paper; 19-1/2 x 26-3/8 in.
; Rosegg Psychiatric Clinic, Switzerland. Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photo: Arnaud Conne.

Dubuffet, whose work is most closely tied to the tachisme and art informel movements, was highly involved in the European avant-garde art world and an active contributor to conversations about the role and importance of art after the horrors of World War II. He was influenced by Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 book, The Artistry of the Mentally Ill, and Walter Morgenthaler’s 1921 book, A Psychiatric Patient as Artist, which described the artwork of Morgenthaler’s patient, Adolf Wolfli. By the time Dubuffet proposed the transfer of the art brut works to Ossorio in 1952, he had been collecting across Western Europe for about six years, primarily from psychiatric institutions whose doctors donated works in the hopes they would be preserved. Set against the very recent trauma of the Nazi party’s persecution of the mentally disabled—referred to as the murder of the “unfit”—it is not surprising that Dubuffet approached his collecting with great urgency and that many medical professionals were eager to cooperate with his efforts. [1] He exhaustively documented the details about every new acquisition, recording his direct observations of the creators, interactions with their doctors, and descriptions of the institutions. While his self-interests were certainly tied to art brut gaining prestige and cultural value—not to mention that he heavily borrowed many formal and stylistic elements for his own art practice—Dubuffet is responsible for the preservation of this work as well as the only records of many of these individuals’ lives. His project, in the aftermath of unprecedented atrocity, is a deeply redemptive one.

Aloise Corbaz. Baptême de Pie XII / Un Baiser à l’Aviateur – Le Pape Pie XII Monnayeur et son Sphinx sur le Siège (Baptism of Pius XII / A Kiss to the Aviator—Pope Pius XII Counterfeiter and His Sphinx on the Seat), c. 1955; colored pencil on a sheet of paper folded in the middle; 59 x 39-3/8 in.; De La Rosière Psychiatric Hospital, Gimel, Switzerland. Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photo: Olivier Laffely.

Grounded within this historical frame, the exhibition’s extensive use of biographical information doesn’t feel out of place. The names of the asylums where the artists were institutionalized are included on the majority of the exhibition’s object labels. Small booklets with the artists’ biographies are available in every gallery. When such strategies appear in the contemporary outsider-art marketplace, however, they risk being reductive and exploitive. The present landscape of attitudes concerning mental-health issues in the United States is considerably different from the one Dubuffet was responding to in postwar Europe, thankfully so. Mental illness is no longer unequivocally determinative of cultural marginalization. Positing that it promises the kind of artistic purity and uncontaminated creativity that Dubuffet proclaimed distinguished art brut from the established, academic, mainstream art world just continues a romantic mythology.

Augustin Lesage. Composition Symbolique, Amour pour l’Humanité (Symbolic Composition, Love for Humanity), 1932;
 
oil on canvas; 38-1/4 x 27-1/2 in.; Pas-de-Calais, France.
 Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland. Photo: Claude Bornand.

The 200 works in the show range wildly in medium and complexity, and there is no formal thread that definitively or comfortably ties them together. One of the undeniable appeals of the show, however, is imagining the reception of these boldly unselfconscious works by the New York art-world elites who were deep in the trenches of Abstract Expressionism.

Art Brut in America provides a focused spotlight in which to examine a pivotal moment in art brut’s history and a germinative moment for outsider art’s reception and formation in the United States. The exhibition confirms the breadth and importance of Dubuffet’s efforts while acknowledging that he was constantly reevaluating and revising the field’s definition from its beginning.

Art Brut in America: The Incursion of Jean Dubuffet is on view at the American Folk Art Museum through January 10, 2015.

[1] http://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/online-features/special-focus/nazi-persecution-of-the-disabled

Marino Auriti. Encyclopedic Palace/Palazzo Enciclopedico/Palacio Enciclopedico/Palais Encyclopédique or Monumento Nazionale. Progetto Enciclopedico Palazzo (U.S. patent no. 179,277), 1950s; wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, and model kit parts; 11 x 7 x 7 ft. Collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of Colette Auriti Firmani.

Self-Taught Genius seeks to frame the collection of the American Folk Art Museum as an archive of the culture of self-education in the United States. The exhibition’s organizers draw their interpretation of the word “genius” from roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, embracing a definition that underscores the potential in all human beings for exceptional creativity, intuition, and insight. The use of the term “self-taught” embeds the works in a continuum of self-actualization outside of formal educational structures, calling up the resistance to hierarchical institutions and indoctrination that is foundational to the spirit of the American narrative. This premise is satisfyingly inclusionary and long overdue.

For artists whose work has been ghettoized within fraught categories like Outsider Art, Vernacular Art, Psychotic Art, and Intuitive Art by patronizingly simplistic or exploitative analyses and mythologies, the American Folk Art Museum’s framework is incredibly validating without being over-compensatory. Those who have followed the historicization of Folk Art and its many overlapping fields and terminologies will find it deeply refreshing to see these artists rightfully recast as key players in the shaping of American visual culture. To experience the use of the word “genius” in an art context without its application solely to white men is also a gratifying bonus, to say the least.

The works in the exhibition span a time period of over 200 years and range wildly in medium to include paintings, quilts, furniture, handmade books, sculpture, ceramics, and decor. Presumably in an attempt to help viewers navigate this broad spectrum, the museum presents seven themes that group works together: Achievers, Encoders, Messengers, Improvement, Reformers, Ingenuity, and Guides. These themes can at times be unpersuasive, even seemingly arbitrary, but ultimately they do not significantly distract from the overarching thesis of the show.

Judith Scott. Untitled, before 1991; yarn and fabric with unknown armature; 6 1⁄2 x 62 x 11 in. Collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of Creative Growth Art Center. Photo: Gavin Ashworth.

Of all the seven themes, Encoders stands as the most engaging and accessible, without veering into simplicity. One of Judith Scott’s untitled sculptures is on view here, showcasing her signature elaborate wrapping of yarn and fabric over an undisclosed armature. The work’s form feels both figurative and weapon-like—a latent potency being cocooned within layers of dampening textile. The care and intricacy of this binding loads its inner secrets with implication—a shrouded significance that feels best left unknown. Henry Darger’s The History of My Life and 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 (Volume 1) are also included in this section. One a 5,000-page autobiography, the other a 15,000-page novel, both are full of intensely detailed descriptions, characters, and historical facts that blur the boundaries of fiction and biography, poetry and prose. Darger’s oeuvre is marked by a distinctive language and patterning; a series of indexes is necessary to track the complex structure of his chronicles. His life’s work is a network of encrypted content, vast in scope and density, that doesn’t need decoding to be moving.

Darger and Scott exemplify the Outsider Art/Self-Taught Art/Folk Art fields and the regrettable imperative toward biography that these categories have traditionally entailed. The details of their lives, including diagnoses of mental illness, have largely crowded out thoughtful analyses of their work. Biography of course plays a part in contextualizing all artists’ practices, but in the case of artists who never leave behind an artist statement or play an active role in the historicization of their life’s work, a different stance is required. Embracing the mystery of encoded meaning in both Darger’s and Scott’s practices feels like an apt response to the work of individuals who have too often been spoken for by others.

Purvis Young. People Celebrating, 1990s; mixed media on wood; 49 x 34 1⁄2 x 5 in. Collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of Gordon W. Bailey in honor of Anne Imelda Radice. Photo: Adam Reich.

The exhibition also features significant breadth in ambition and planning, showing exactly how much “self-taught” can encompass. Some works on display, like Purvis Young’s People Celebrating, are relatively unpresuming. Young’s mixed-media painting on wood is a document of unfettered rejoicing that is infectiously delightful to take in. Then there is work like Marino Auriti’s Encylopedic Palace, an 11-foot tall model of a skyscraper—the largest object in the show. The staggering detail and comprehensiveness of the model are indicative of Auriti’s original hope that the building would eventually be erected. Had it been, it would have been 136 stories and over 2,300 feet tall, with a footprint of nearly sixteen city blocks. This piece was also featured in last year’s Venice Biennale—yet another praiseworthy instance of the Insider/Outsider boundaries dissolving and revealing their irrelevance.

Advertisement for the 2014 Outsider Art Fair, from the April 2014 issue of Art Forum. Photo by Lia Wilson.

Thus, through the empowering strategy of simply letting works speak for themselves, Self-Taught Genius deftly navigates many of the pitfalls that still plague discourse around Folk, Intuitive, and Outsider artists. Evidence of these pitfalls is especially apparent in the marketplace, as epitomized by events like the Outsider Art Fair, which has recently featured many of the artists included in Self-Taught Genius. An advertisement for the fair in the April 2014 edition of Art Forum featured a full-page spread with only the word “Practice” with a slash through it. The implication of this ad is that artists outside the formal art-education systems don’t need to “practice.” Such a claim is a residue of a long-outdated and disserving mythology: Outsider artists have an intuitive gift, a raw vision, a brilliance that springs forth fully formed. Such an assumption brazenly disavows the rigor, discipline, focus, and commitment that defines the work of artists like Judith Scott, Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, and many others. The continued reiteration of this mythology runs in direct conflict with the progressive notion that the American Folk Art Museum is attempting to cultivate: that every one of us has the potential to become a self-taught genius. You know what gets you there? Practice.

Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum is on view at the American Folk Art Museum through August 17, 2014 .

Marino Auriti. Encyclopedic Palace/Palazzo Enciclopedico/Palacio Enciclopedico/Palais Encyclopédique or Monumento Nazionale. Progetto Enciclopedico Palazzo (U.S. patent no. 179,277), 1950s; wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, and model kit parts; 11 x 7 x 7 ft. Collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of Colette Auriti Firmani.

For artists whose work has been ghettoized within fraught categories like Outsider Art, Vernacular Art, Psychotic Art, and Intuitive Art by patronizingly simplistic or exploitative analyses and mythologies, the American Folk Art Museum’s framework is incredibly validating without being over-compensatory. Those who have followed the historicization of Folk Art and its many overlapping fields and terminologies will find it deeply refreshing to see these artists rightfully recast as key players in the shaping of American visual culture. To experience the use of the word “genius” in an art context without its application solely to white men is also a gratifying bonus, to say the least.

The works in the exhibition span a time period of over 200 years and range wildly in medium to include paintings, quilts, furniture, handmade books, sculpture, ceramics, and decor. Presumably in an attempt to help viewers navigate this broad spectrum, the museum presents seven themes that group works together: Achievers, Encoders, Messengers, Improvement, Reformers, Ingenuity, and Guides. These themes can at times be unpersuasive, even seemingly arbitrary, but ultimately they do not significantly distract from the overarching thesis of the show.

Judith Scott. Untitled, before 1991; yarn and fabric with unknown armature; 6 1⁄2 x 62 x 11 in. Collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of Creative Growth Art Center. Photo: Gavin Ashworth.

Of all the seven themes, Encoders stands as the most engaging and accessible, without veering into simplicity. One of Judith Scott’s untitled sculptures is on view here, showcasing her signature elaborate wrapping of yarn and fabric over an undisclosed armature. The work’s form feels both figurative and weapon-like—a latent potency being cocooned within layers of dampening textile. The care and intricacy of this binding loads its inner secrets with implication—a shrouded significance that feels best left unknown. Henry Darger’s The History of My Life and 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 (Volume 1) are also included in this section. One a 5,000-page autobiography, the other a 15,000-page novel, both are full of intensely detailed descriptions, characters, and historical facts that blur the boundaries of fiction and biography, poetry and prose. Darger’s oeuvre is marked by a distinctive language and patterning; a series of indexes is necessary to track the complex structure of his chronicles. His life’s work is a network of encrypted content, vast in scope and density, that doesn’t need decoding to be moving.

Darger and Scott exemplify the Outsider Art/Self-Taught Art/Folk Art fields and the regrettable imperative toward biography that these categories have traditionally entailed. The details of their lives, including diagnoses of mental illness, have largely crowded out thoughtful analyses of their work. Biography of course plays a part in contextualizing all artists’ practices, but in the case of artists who never leave behind an artist statement or play an active role in the historicization of their life’s work, a different stance is required. Embracing the mystery of encoded meaning in both Darger’s and Scott’s practices feels like an apt response to the work of individuals who have too often been spoken for by others.

Purvis Young. People Celebrating, 1990s; mixed media on wood; 49 x 34 1⁄2 x 5 in. Collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York. Gift of Gordon W. Bailey in honor of Anne Imelda Radice. Photo: Adam Reich.

The exhibition also features significant breadth in ambition and planning, showing exactly how much “self-taught” can encompass. Some works on display, like Purvis Young’s People Celebrating, are relatively unpresuming. Young’s mixed-media painting on wood is a document of unfettered rejoicing that is infectiously delightful to take in. Then there is work like Marino Auriti’s Encylopedic Palace, an 11-foot tall model of a skyscraper—the largest object in the show. The staggering detail and comprehensiveness of the model are indicative of Auriti’s original hope that the building would eventually be erected. Had it been, it would have been 136 stories and over 2,300 feet tall, with a footprint of nearly sixteen city blocks. This piece was also featured in last year’s Venice Biennale—yet another praiseworthy instance of the Insider/Outsider boundaries dissolving and revealing their irrelevance.

Advertisement for the 2014 Outsider Art Fair, from the April 2014 issue of Art Forum. Photo by Lia Wilson.

Thus, through the empowering strategy of simply letting works speak for themselves, Self-Taught Genius deftly navigates many of the pitfalls that still plague discourse around Folk, Intuitive, and Outsider artists. Evidence of these pitfalls is especially apparent in the marketplace, as epitomized by events like the Outsider Art Fair, which has recently featured many of the artists included in Self-Taught Genius. An advertisement for the fair in the April 2014 edition of Art Forum featured a full-page spread with only the word “Practice” with a slash through it. The implication of this ad is that artists outside the formal art-education systems don’t need to “practice.” Such a claim is a residue of a long-outdated and disserving mythology: Outsider artists have an intuitive gift, a raw vision, a brilliance that springs forth fully formed. Such an assumption brazenly disavows the rigor, discipline, focus, and commitment that defines the work of artists like Judith Scott, Martin Ramirez, Henry Darger, and many others. The continued reiteration of this mythology runs in direct conflict with the progressive notion that the American Folk Art Museum is attempting to cultivate: that every one of us has the potential to become a self-taught genius. You know what gets you there? Practice.

Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum runs through August 17 at the American Folk Art Museum.