Outsider art

Outsider art describes any piece of art created by someone who works outside of the mainstream art establishment. Outsider art is intended to be creatively unrestrained by the traditional schools of art, resulting in works that rely more on raw creativity than artistic training. Many outsider artists come from disadvantaged backgrounds and work in obscurity for decades purely for their own enjoyment before their discovery. Some of the most famous outsider artists had mental health conditions like schizophrenia, intellectual disabilities such as Down syndrome, or with autism spectrum disorder. Due to its connections to the artist rather than the artwork itself, outsider art can incorporate broad types of works ranging from simple drawings to more ornate sculptures, carvings, and paintings. It also often has strong associations with other categories of art created by untrained artists, such as folk art, naïve art, and primitive art.

Outsider art is regarded as offering an important alternative perspective to the strictly defined boundaries of traditional art. It is often viewed as providing raw, uncensored examinations of reality that may be either more or less accessible to the average viewer than traditional art, but this art nonetheless provides unique insight into the world. Despite their humble origins and lack of artistic lineage, individual works of outsider art can nonetheless be very valuable. For instance, Boxer, a sculpture by William Edmondson, sold for $785,000 in 2016—a record for a work by an outsider artist. However, critics have argued that when such works are embraced by the fine art establishment, they lose the qualities that made them valued as outsider art in the first place.

Brief History

While there have always been untrained artists working outside established art circles, they were often typically disregarded as simple amateurs. However, in the early twentieth century, Swiss and German psychologists became increasingly interested in the creative efforts of patients at asylums and psychiatric hospitals. Their work was primarily focused on studying the psychiatric meanings of their art as well as the often soothing effects their labors had on them. In 1921, Walter Morgenthaler, a Swiss psychiatrist, presented a study of his patient Adolf Wölfli called Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist). This work examined the role Wölfli's self-taught art played in bringing him comfort during his forced institutionalization in an asylum. Although Morgenthaler's work offered a clinical examination of Wölfli's case, some researchers, particularly German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, also presented an aesthetic portrait of their patients' efforts that represented a genuine appreciation for their art. In 1922, Prinzhorn released Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), a study that examined the link between self-expression and mental illness. Among the featured artists were Karl Brendel and August Natterer, two individuals with schizophrenia whose canons of works are still regarded as important examples of outsider art alongside that of Wölfli.

These studies attracted the interest of avant-garde artist communities in Germany and Paris. Expressionists and surrealists used these works as inspiration for their own artwork, although little attribution was given to the original creators. However, in the 1940s, French artist Jean Dubuffet began to bring attention to the artists themselves. He collected pieces by several featured artists from the psychiatric studies as well as other self-taught artists in Paris who were not part of the city's traditional artistic collective. He argued that Western cultural traditions were responsible for the suffocation of genuine artistic instinct. Instead, he promoted the creativity of ordinary people. He called their works art brut (raw art) and celebrated their unique points of view that he believed provoked a different sensibility than that offered by more traditional artwork.

In 1972, British art critic Roger Cardinal wrote a defense of Dubuffet's collection entitled Outsider Art. Cardinal's study helped to define this category of art while bringing it increased renown in a new generation. His book title also provided this style with its English language name. Under Cardinal's definition, the term was meant to invoke any artwork that fell outside the normative boundaries of traditional art. However, the term has assumed broader implications since the initial release of Cardinal's book and now includes all materials by artists who lack training in the standard artistic disciplines. Similar categories of art in Europe may be called marginal art or art singulier.

Overview

Outsider art, by definition, has few shared characteristics. However, certain recurring aspects have been noted. For instance, due to both their unrestrained creativity and their lack of artistic training, many works of outsider art border on the abstract. For many artists of this class, art is an obsession that revolves around strict themes such as religion or biographical details. In this sense, for many outsider artists, their art is autobiographical, often reshaping elements from their pasts to create alternate stories of their lives. As a result, such works often have great personal meaning to the individual artists and may offer an externalized portrait of aspects of their psyche.

Another recurring feature among some artists of this ilk is the incidental adoption of a style of art called horror vacui (meaning "fear of empty spaces"), in which all space on a canvas is filled with markings of some sort. Another common feature is the use of found objects. For instance, Judith Scott, a deaf outsider artist with Down syndrome, wrapped objects in thick bundles of yarn to create abstract shapes. Similarly, artist with schizophrenia Martín Ramírez created fantastic landscapes and kaleidoscopic circles using such unconventional supplies as brown paper bags, matchsticks, crayons, mashed potatoes, and saliva.

Perhaps among the best-known outsider artists is Henry Darger, a resident of Chicago who spent most of his adult life working as a janitor at a Catholic hospital. Shortly before his death, his landlords discovered his life's work: a series of lengthy fantasy epics illustrated with collage-like artwork. The most prominent of these was "In the Realms of the Unreal," a fifteen-thousand-word story. This story focused upon seven young sisters called the Vivian Girls, who were waged in an epic war against a group of adult overlords who had enslaved the juvenile population. His accompanying artwork combined aspects of tracing, watercolors, photo assemblage and enlargement, and other distinctive elements.

Aside from their growing value, the works of the best-known outsider artists have increasingly gained critical appreciation. Such works have also been the recurring subjects of scholastic studies that have sought to explore the relationship between art, psychology, and creative expression. From an artistic standpoint, by defying the conventions of mainstream art, some art critics have suggested that outsider art helps to expand the boundaries of the art world and provoke new expressions of thought.

Bibliography

Cardinal, Roger. Outsider Art. Praeger, 1972.

Cardinal, Roger. "Outsider Art and the Autistic Creator." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 364, no. 1522, 2009, pp. 1459–66. The Royal Society Publishing, rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1522/1459. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Frank, Priscilla. "What Is the Meaning of Outsider Art? The Genre with a Story, Not a Style." HuffPost, 6 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/what-does-outsider-art-mean‗n‗6574138. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Mitchell, Samantha Dylan. "Outsider Artists at Work." Psychoanalytic Perspectives, vol. 13, no. 3, 2016, pp. 353–61.

“Outsider Art.” Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/o/outsider-art. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Peiry, Lucienne. Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art. Random House, 2001.

Wojcik, Daniel. "Between Madness and Art: Insanity, Therapy, and the Origins of Outsider Art." Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma. University of Mississippi Press, 2016, pp. 39–90.

Zimmerman, Cara. "The Inside Track on Outsider Art — The Artists to Know." Christie's, 2 Jan. 2025, www.christies.com/features/Outsider-Artists-Hot-List-7598-1.aspx. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.

Zolberg, Vera L., and Joni Maya Cherbo, editors. Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge University Press, 1997.