Art of artists outside art
A brief history of painting from art brut to outsider art
MúzeumCafé 11.
Jean Dubuffet was the first to use the expression “Art Brut”, which he coined in 1945. Since 1972 the expression outside art, ‘invented’ by Roger Cardinal, has been mostly used. Before becoming a painter and art theoretician, Jean Dubuffet earned his living in his family business working as a wine dealer in Paris. It was absolutely clear to him that the term ‘brut’ found on champagne bottle labels indicated the finest pure beverage, exempt from all kinds of additives. When he turned his attention to the artistic activity of people living on the social periphery – that of the mentally disordered, those under psychiatric treatment, ‘eccentrics’ unable to fit in society, or the homeless, tramps, criminals and prisoners, Debuffet referred to their creative products as Art Brut, signifying often hard, crude and brutal art whose representatives are not ‘infected’ by any learnt stylistic theory or creative techniques, but who create with their original, pure intentions, feelings and impulses in an honest and undiluted manner. This increasingly popular style of art, however, is more and more referred to all over the world as outsider art – a designation devised by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972. At the same time, in America it is known as part of folk art. Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) first came across a variety of artistic manifestations of patients in Swiss mental hospitals. In 1972 he established a foundation to enable his collection to be housed in one of the hospitals, and since 1976 the works have been kept in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, where more then ten thousand works by some three hundred artists are housed. Beside the Lausanne collection, one of the oldest is the Lombroso Collection, which has compiled works created in this style since the 1860s. More than 60,000 works of outsider art are held in the Adamson Gallery in Asthon near Cambridge and the Demirel Collection in Wuppertal is also a significant one. Then there is the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, compiled by psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), who began working at the clinic in 1919. Another noted such medical collection can be found in the therapeutic psychiatric institute of Klosterneuburg-Gugging near Vienna. It has operated as the House of Arts since the 1980s and has only treated psychiatric patients who need or at least agree to receive art therapy. The current level of interest in the genre is reflected by the fact that the world’s first auction of exclusively outsider art work was held by Christie’s in New York in 2003. Seventy-eight per cent of the items under the hammer were sold for a total value of 1.1 million dollars. A painting by Ramirez was purchased for a hundred thousand and a work by Darger for 89,625 dollars.
In Hungary Dr. Árpád Selig (1880–1929) an intern at Budapest’s Lipótmező psychiatric hospital began systematically collecting art works created by mental patients in the 1910s. After his departure, psychiatrists Rudolf Fabinyi (1879–1936) and Gyula Nyírő (1895–1966) continued the collection. The first public exhibition of those works was held in 1928. In 1930 a permanent exhibition opened in Angyalföld (a district of Budapest). It was named the Selig Museum in honour of the collection’s founder and was included in the official list of Hungarian museums. Between 1918 and 1946 neurologist and psychiatrist Reuter Camillo (1874–1954) of Pécs in southern Hungary collected works by psychiatric patients and that compilation was later supplemented and processed in 1956 by Dr. Irén Jakab with the help of artist Ferenc Martyn (1899–1986). In 1940 the works of art in the Selig Museum were returned from Angyalföld to Lipótmező. Today only some one third of the original Selig collection can be found in the compilation. The works turned up in 1950, though that happened rather accidentally since they had been deposited near the entrance of a loft and forgotten. The scientific processing of the collection began only in 1988 and a permanent exhibition of the works opened in the same year. In 1990 the whole collection became officially protected and a bilingual, Hungarian and English, catalogue of the Psychiatric Gallery and Museum edited by art historian Edit Plesznivy was published in 1992. Meanwhile, in 1991 the Moravcsik Foundation – named after the former legendary director of the Semmelweis University’s Psychiatric Clinic – was established. It is based at the clinic itself, which has greatly supported the art therapeutic creative activity of patients. Works originating here have been regularly exhibited from 2006. In 2004 the National Psychiatric and Neurological Institute opened its Tárt Kapu Gallery where works by patients created during their art therapeutic sessions at the institute were continuously exhibited. Due to the reorganisation of the health service in Hungary, the National Psychiatric and Neurological Institute was closed and the future of the collection became unsure.
In the end, however, following long consultations the Hungarian Academy of Sciences took over the collection, primarily on the insistence of the institute’s last director, Dr. Zoltán Nagy. The works now under the management of the Art History Research Team of the Academy have found a new, hopefully permanent home in the Academy’s building on Teréz Boulevard in Budapest. The collection on the 4th floor at the rear of the Battyhány Mansion is managed by art historians Monika Perenyei and Judit Faludy, who were appointed by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.