Gifts of the Soul

An exhibit on outsider art at Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Gallery looks at the inner worlds of self-taught artists.

By: Ilene Dube
   Where did the time go? You were looking at an untitled 1918 Adolf Wolfi colored-pencil illustration and a good 18 minutes slipped by. The grid-like design incorporates musical staffs and notes; something that looks like a pineapple; simple graphic shapes embellished with detail and swirls of color; and repetitions of faces, or demons.
   Look closely and there are hidden animals — these could be a rabbit, a dog, snakes… gophers? The legs of the gopher-like creature are elongated into the design. A cross with balls at the end, something like jacks, is a dominant motif on top of the heads of the masked demons.
   The more you look, the more you see. To create it the artist, quite obviously, plumbed the inner depths of his psyche; the work is a vessel for his spirit.
   While looking at this picture, you wonder if others will interpret it the same way. Probably not. Like a Rorschach test, it pulls something out from within the viewer. So there you are in the large open gallery in Bristol-Myers Squibb’s lush Lawrence headquarters, with views of the magnificent grounds, having an ecstatic experience as the soul of a deceased artist, a mental patient, is making a deep connection with your own.
   Adolf Wolfi (1864-1930) is regarded as the original outsider artist. As a patient of Dr. Walter Morganthaler in a Swiss asylum, he re-created the past, present and future of his life in more than 25,000 complex pencil drawings, obsessively detailed with repeating symbolic imagery that was the language of his inner world.
   Wolfi is one of 30 international artists in the exhibit Outsider Art: The Inner Worlds of Self-Taught Artists, on view through June 15. It is curated by Kate Somers with much help from Kristen Accola, a former curator at the Hunterdon Museum of Art.
   Bristol-Myers Squibb is especially enthused about this show because it aligns with the company’s mission to develop drugs for the treatment of mental illness. Last November the company introduced a breakthrough drug, Abilify, to treat schizophrenia without the side effects of past drugs.
   Ms. Somers chose to work with Ms. Accola on this project because "I knew she had a passion for outsider art and she had done quite a bit of scholarly research on the period."
   "Outsider Art is a form of visual expression produced outside the boundaries of what is defined as mainstream in any given society," writes Ms. Accola in the exhibition catalog. "Outsider artists are commonly referred to as self-taught, visionary or intuitive. They are either mentally ill, imprisoned, poor, uneducated or cast out for cultural or racial differences, and for whatever reasons, they are living on the margins of society.
   "It is the condition of that outsider status that usually fuels the compulsion to make art," Ms. Accola continues. "The art in turn is often the outsider’s sole means of emotional survival. For the mentally ill, it is a way of dealing directly with inner pain, turmoil, conflict and confusion."
   What differentiates outsider artists from mere doodlers, says Ms. Somers, is their "compulsion to make art and make it under very difficult circumstances. They have to make art to stay emotionally alive. It helps them make sense of the world."
   Edmund Monsiel, for example, hid in a relative’s attic after the Nazis seized his shop in Poland in 1942. He became a recluse and spent the rest of his life — 20 years — in that attic, creating minutely detailed pencil drawings that fill every millimeter of the paper. There are faces within faces within faces, like Russian nesting dolls although far more complicated.
   Psychiatrists Hans Prinzhorn and Walter Morganthaler (Adolf Wolfi’s doctor) were the first to collect, exhibit and write about the work of their patients. Dr. Prinzhorn’s extensive collection became a major influence for European artists in the early- to mid-20th century.
   "The two psychiatrists saw this as a window into the patients’ psyche, but they also saw its extraordinary beauty," says Ms. Somers. "It goes back to the Jungian collective unconscious. The iconic imagery represents something to all of us."
   Freud, of course, believed a patient’s doodles and sketches could be used to explore deeper levels of subconscious. And in the 1960s, psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing encouraged art as a therapeutic exercise for patients and as material for psychoanalysis.
   The result is possibly a purer art than what can be taught in art school; uncontaminated by the techniques of others, the outsider artists have gone directly to their own unique style without passing Go. "In the few cases in which trained artists have become mentally ill, their newly altered condition precludes their art from resembling its former state," writes Ms. Accola.
   So many of these pieces are untitled, because the artists never intended them for sale or exhibition.
   The idea of the art of children, rural folk artists and tribal people as a purer form of expression first began to attract the attention of art collectors in the mid- to late-19th century, according to Ms. Accola. "Such art was perceived to be the unpremeditated, spontaneous outpourings of fundamental humanity, devoid of the inhibiting effects of accepted culture," she writes.
   Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau were the first well-respected European primitive and naive artists, followed by the fauvists and the German expressionists. Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Paul Klee were very much a part of the movement. The surrealists became interested in the references to the subconscious.
   In the 1940s, Jean Dubuffet coined the term "art brut" for the work of the mentally ill and socially marginalized. He began collecting the work, writing about it, and by the 1950s was working in this vein.
   Art brut was raw art, uncooked by cultural or artistic influence, "produced by people who have not been culturally indoctrinated or socially conditioned," writes Michel Thevoz, curator, Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. "They are dwellers on the fringe of society, working from the depths of their own personalities and for themselves and no one else. They are outstandingly original in concept, subject and technique."
   In 1972, British art historian Roger Cardinal came up with the term outsider art to replace art brut. Today, there are museums of outsider art from Baltimore to Moscow and the Netherlands.
   The difference between naive art and outsider art, according to Mr. Thevoz, is that naive, or primitive, painters remain in the mainstream and accept its subjects and technique and values. They hope for public recognition. Outsider artists make up their own techniques, often with new materials, and create them solely for their own use. Subject matter can be enigmatic because the opinion of others does not matter, and they may even keep their work secret.
   Some art dealers and critics say the term outsider art is no longer appropriate. Ms. Accola chooses the term to apply to artists inspired by sources not influenced by art history. The exhibit includes work by the mentally ill, developmentally disabled, poor, uneducated, racially or socially outcast, religious visionaries and "a few who simply live on society’s margins in an undetermined way," Ms. Accola says.
   "But for many of the artists working today, outsider may be a disappearing categorization and perhaps for the better. Regardless, the artwork stands on its own and continues to express the human spirit in surprising and unpredictable ways."
Outsider Art: The Inner Worlds of Self-Taught Artists is on view at The Gallery at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Route 206, Lawrence, through June 15. Hours: Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 1-5 p.m. For information, call (609) 252-6275.