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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 8KB | 162 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 64

The View From Outside


An exhibition honors the visionaries, obsessives and crackpots
whose influence energized Modernism

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Modernism is old; the whole museum industry is its nursing
home. The old mull over their beginnings, and there's no doubt
that Modernism's high breeding line -- Manet, Courbet and
Cezanne, who begat Matisse and Picasso, and so forth -- doesn't
describe the whole family tree. All kinds of odd stuff went into
it; now we are curious about these sources, and various museums
have tried to document them.

    In 1984 there was the Museum of Modern Art's much disputed
show," `Primitivism' in 20th Century Art." In 1986, with "The
Spiritual in Art," Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator
Maurice Tuchman offered an account of how "fringe" religious
and spiritualist beliefs common in Europe in the early part of
the century -- Theosophy and its cousins -- linked up to older
mystical traditions and afforded the common ground for certain
pioneer abstract artists, from Mondrian in Holland to Malevich
in Russia. Now that "historic" show -- the adjective in the
catalog is Tuchman's own, but this is Los Angeles, after all --
gets its sequel in "Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and
Outsider Art," on view at LACMA through Jan. 3. The exhibition
will then travel during 1993 to Madrid, Basel and Tokyo.

    "Parallel Visions" tries to do for some areas of 20th
century figurative art what the earlier show did for some kinds
of abstraction: disclose an ignored lineage that lies outside of
formal art history. That lineage is in the work of artists for
whom a satisfactory name has never been found. Visionaries?
Obsessives? Nuts? Mediums? Amateurs? Sunday painters?
Primitives? A little of each, mostly; and in all cases, people
who persisted in making their images out of an inner compulsion
strong enough to carry them through a lifetime of artmaking -- a
long life, sometimes -- without any professional support or
community. Thus, for want of a better word, they are called
outsider artists.

    One astonishing example among many documented in "Parallel
Visions" is the Mexican-American artist Martin Ramirez
(1885-1960), whose landscape drawings featuring Super Chief
trains and many-arched, organic tunnels and cliffs have the
epic character that can only rise from intense experience
metabolized within a fully formed style. Yet Ramirez had no art
training at all; he was a Mexican bracero who migrated north to
California, found a job on the railroad around 1910, became
aphasic and wound up in a mental hospital. There, over the last
30 years of his life, he drew -- and the staff destroyed his
drawings almost as fast as he made them. Yet about 300 survived,
and through the enthusiasm of the Chicago funk artist Jim Nutt,
they became a source of inspiration in the professional art
world.

    This relationship between insider and outsider, amateur and
pro, is one of the main themes of this extremely interesting
show. It's a one-way flow -- the outsiders were less interested
in the pros than artists like Paul Klee or Jean Dubuffet were
in them -- and it belongs almost exclusively to the 20th
century. An earlier Europe had been fitfully interested in the
art of the mad, the estranged, the infantile and the obsessed.
But generally its interest was confined to professionals who
"went wrong" and lost their sense of cultural continuity,
plunging into a world of private hallucination or inscrutable
vision.

    From the 16th century on, a growing literature attests to
the idea that the genius of painters was a hairbreadth away from
lunacy -- "Great wits are sure to madness near allied/ And thin
partitions do their bounds divide." With the advent of
Romanticism, this trickle of interest became a flood. The
Romantic movement valued whatever was personal, unmediated and
direct, in images that welled up from strata beneath the
structures of formal culture. Twentieth century Modernism, in so
many respects the child of 19th century Romanticism, inherited
this; but the difference was that it began not only to seek
evidence of visionary energy in outsider work but also to regard
it as an alternative, purer mode of creativity, worthy of
emulation. This insight could hardly have existed before the age
of psychoanalysis.

    What was the primal form of art, the cultural equivalent of
Goethe's Urpflanze, or primal plant? Did you have to go back
thousands of years to find it? Not at all, argued Klee in 1911;
it was right under your modern nose -- in kindergartens and
madhouses. The art of children and madmen "really should be
taken far more seriously than are the collections of all our
art museums if we truly intend to reform today's art. That is
how far back we have to reach in order to avoid facile
archaizing." The messianic Modernist would find his modes of
prophecy, as did primitive Christians, in the mouths of babes
and anchorites. Unmediated expression, without psychic limits.

    From the heights of neo-neo this and post-post that, we may
smile at such "naivete" -- isn't everything mediated in advance?
-- but the fact is that the longing for intensity through
emulation of outsidership is one of the most vital strands in
modern art, from Klee to Dubuffet, from Kandinsky to the
Surrealists, from Gabriele Munter to the prodigiously fecund and
still imperfectly understood Filipino-American artist Alfonso
Ossorio (1916-90), whose paintings such as Rose Mother, 1951,
are among the high points of this show.

    It may seem odd that the artist whom the general public
associates above all others with madness, Vincent van Gogh, is
not in this exhibition, but he should not be. Van Gogh's
illness did not inspire his art; in fact it prevented him from
working. In any case the topic is not "mad artists" but artists
who (like Dali) found method in the madness of others.

    Most of the professionals represented here will be familiar
names to museumgoers. On the other hand, the outsiders are
mostly unknown or recognizable by name only. A few, like the
visionary landscapist Joseph Yoakum (1886- or 1888-1972), have
risen to minor fame through the admiration of other artists --
in his case, again, via Nutt and his friends in the Hairy Who
group in Chicago in the '60s. Others are better known in Europe
than in the U.S. These include Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930), the
near illiterate peasant schizophrenic whose stupendously complex
drawings of imaginary terrains, buildings and cities, infinite
in their ramifications of detail and yet exquisite in their
order, entitle him to be seen as perhaps the greatest psychotic
artist whose work has come down to us. And some are known only
to specialists. Among these are Heinrich Hermann Mebes (1842-?),
whose tiny visionary-symbolist watercolors fall somewhere
between Philipp Otto Runge and Persian miniatures; and Friedrich
Schroder-Sonnenstern (1892-1982), with his fearsome moralizing
fantasies; and the mental patient Karl Brendel (1871-1925),
whose tiny, intense woodcarvings are so close in spirit to
German Expressionist sculpture.

    The weirdest talent in the show, because it is the most
epic, obsessive and totally self-referential in its mixture of
sadistic violence and kitsch daintiness, belongs to the Chicago
recluse Henry Darger (1892-1973). Darger's rented apartment,
after his death, turned out to be crammed with the output of a
lifetime's obsession with innocence and violence, including a
15,000-page illustrated saga titled The Story of the Vivian
Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, a sort of
madman's Iliad of endless carnage between adults and moppets. No
"mainstream" artist has so far based anything in Darger, which
is just as well; in today's America, he would be arraigned for
child abuse faster than you could say Lewis Carroll.