The history
of outsider art as we know it today begins with an interest in artworks
made by psychiatric patients. In Europe in the 1920's psychiatrists began
to assemble their patients' artwork, convinced that these works could
help in their evaluation, diagnosis and treatment. Many of these doctors
were familiar with more conventional contemporary art and were able to
appreciate qualities in these works that made them more significant than
mere diagnostic tools. Soon these works came to the attention of contemporary
artists, critics, collectors and dealers.
The term outsider art means different things to different people today,
but there are generally some key points on which a majority would agree.
Historically the first known definition as written by the French artist
Jean Dubuffet in 1949, and his description still holds true in many respects
today. At that time, he used the term art brut (which translates
from the French to mean literally "raw art") to describe what
was so distinctive about his own collection of artworks. What we mean
by this term is work produced by people immune to artistic culture in
which there is little or no trace of mimicry; so that such creators owe
everything - their subject matter, their choice of materials, their modes
of transcription, their rhythms and styles of drawing and so on - to their
own resources rather than to the stereotypes of artistic fashion.
What Dubuffet described so many years ago is still considered to be a
basic definition of outsider art; works produced by artists who are independent
of conventional artistic traditions, artists who often can trace subjects,
materials, styles, and motivations to sources that are exceptional in
the history of art, and people who often work independently, responding
to an urgent and personal need to make artworks. And, unlike folk artists
who usually follow a tradition passed down throughout the culture in which
they live, outsider artists don't self-consciously follow any tradition.
In 1951, when Jean Dubuffet traveled to the United States for the first
time, he came with two important missions. One was to oversee the installation
of his entire Collection de l'Art Brut on Long Island; the second was
to meet a group of prominent Chicagoans who Dubuffet described as "the
fiercely independent Chicago collectors, led by Maurice Culberg, whose
dedicated enthusiasm for his work was born of their historical commitment
to surrealism, tribal art and figurative painting." It was, however,
in "primitive-psychotic-popular culture-expressionistic oriented"
Chicago that Dubuffet's remarkable collection and his theories had their
greatest influence. If outsider art had been, until recently, neglected
by many American art communities, it has been historically celebrated
in Chicago.
by 1972, Art Brut was sufficiently familiar across the United States that
the art critic Roger Cardinal coined the term 'Outsider Art' to help explain
it to American audiences. Looking beyond artworks made by patients in
psychiatric care, the term was used to describe works by people who were
creating outside the traditional art world, anyone who was "innocent
of pictorial influences and perfectly untutored" as he explained.
Copyright 1998, Judy A. Saslow Gallery. All Rights Reserved.
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