CategoriesStyles and Movements
Outsider Art
Art made outside the art schools and professional art world, by self-taught, visionary and institutionalised makers.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Outsider Art are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In 1945 the French painter Jean Dubuffet began collecting what he named art brut: raw art by psychiatric patients, spiritualist mediums and solitary eccentrics. He had been struck by Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922), in which the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn published works from his Heidelberg clinic, and his own collection later opened to the public in Lausanne. The critic Roger Cardinal introduced the English term in his book Outsider Art (1972).
The work is often obsessive, with private symbol systems and improvised materials. Adolf Wölfli filled thousands of pages with music, maps and invented autobiography in a Swiss asylum; Henry Darger wrote and illustrated an enormous epic in a rented room in Chicago; James Castle, deaf from birth, drew with soot mixed with saliva; Judith Scott wrapped found objects in yarn. Many now prefer the label “self-taught”, and museums increasingly show such work alongside the mainstream.
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