Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art

About this book

In 1912 Paul Klee declared that the art of the mentally ill as well as the art of children "really should be taken far more seriously than are the collections of all our art museums if we truly intend to reform todays art." What Klee found most fascinating and instructive about the art of "outsiders"--those self-taught individuals sometimes mentally disturbed who create while isolated from mainstream culture--was the sincerity depth and power of their un-adulterated unmediated expressions. Parallel Visions an exhibition and catalogue organized and produced by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art reveals the considerable influence that outsider art has had on the development of twentieth-century art. The work of such "marginalized" artists and compulsive visionaries as Antonin Artaud Ferdinand Cheval Henry Darger Howard Finster Madge Gill Martin Ram!rez P. M. Wentworth Adolf Wlfli and Joseph Yoakum is juxtaposed with the work of devotees of outsider art among modern artists. Essays by the curators of the exhibition Maurice Tuchman and Carol S. Eliel and by other commentators offer a history of this phenomenon as well as an exploration of issues crucial to the formation of our aesthetic and critical judgments and our notions of creativity. In addition to the curators the contributors include Russell Bowman Roger Cardinal Barbara Freeman Sander L. Gilman Mark Gisbourne Reinhold Heller John M. MacGregor Donald Preziosi Allen Weiss Jonathan Williams and Sarah Wilson.