Exhibition Review: INTUIT: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago, Illinois
In 1946, French painter Jean Dubuffet wrote an essay “Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre” in which he conceptualized an art that would be “spontaneously available for anyone to practice, an art that would require neither talent nor instruction, an art that would proceed from jubilation rather than initiation”.[1] Dubuffet’s ideas stemmed from his reading of Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill. The book explored the psychological and aesthetic aspects of art carried out by Prinzhorn’s patients-an area of psychology that hadn’t been researched until the 1920s. Dubuffet took an immediate liking to this art and started collecting it because, as he saw it, the work was completely devoid of social influence, technical instruction and intellectual consideration. The compositions were seemingly “primitive” and “childlike,” justified solely by the action of creating. This art goes by many names: Art Brut, given by Dubuffet; self-taught, naïve, deviant, intuitive, outsider, and visionary art, the last three which are the most common terms in the U.S. today; and the least eloquent label, art of the insane.
Outsider art has a complex psychology. The works are created by socially marginalized and mentally ill artists who share an existence of isolation and distress anchored by their spirituality and unbridled creativity. With the help of scholars like Dubuffet and his network of Parisian intellectuals, psychologists, and family members, outsider art has become more mainstream. Ever since Dubuffet amassed and donated his collection to the city of Lausanne, Switzerland (which opened a museum, Collection de l’Art Brut) in 1979, numerous venues for outsider art collections have taken shape in hospitals, artists’ homes, galleries and museums. As outsider art continues to gain more attention, ethical issues have surfaced.
There are many ethical debates over whether the gallery and museum setting is the proper venue for outsider artists. Hospitals and artists’ homes seem more appropriate because they are linked to the lives these creators lived while museums and galleries displace the artists, pulling them out of the shadows and into the spotlight. On one end, people who champion the artists feel their exposure is long overdue. Then there are those who feel the posthumous fame of outsider artists is exploitive.
I had the opportunity to visit these issues at INTUIT: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago, Illinois, in the winter of 2009. In a converted commercial space, the INTUIT building is nestled in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood, west of Chicago’s loop. Behind the unassuming façade is a loft space that has one small and one large gallery with 20-foot ceilings, wood floors, gray walls and exposed piping. The space is quiet, but the crowds are steady.
I first learned about INTUIT when I was conducting research on the life and work of Henry Darger (1982-1973), author of the longest illustrated novel ever written. Darger uses common materials like crayons, markers, construction paper and pencil and stencils to transfer images from advertisements, packaging and newspaper clippings to his compositions. His art ranges from tiny portrait sketches to large 12 foot double sided panoramic murals. Darger’s extensive body of work portrays scores of whimsical landscapes, with ominous cloud formations approaching in the background as the protagonists, 9 angelic young girls, ward off the evil military opposition. These compositions and techniques are childlike, taking heavy outlines of shapes and filling them in with bright colors that saturate the drawing surface. Darger’s masterpiece In the Realms of the Unreal was created in his small, Chicago one-room apartment on Webster Avenue- a place he lived in for 40 years. Today, some of the contents of the apartment (donated by his landlady, Kiyoko Lerner) have been placed in a reconstructed room in INTUIT’s gallery as part of their permanent display. The room is replete with newspaper clippings, advertisements, bundled magazines, religious artifacts, sketches, pigment powders, crayons, pencils and original furniture. The Henry Darger Room, a tapered version of the original apartment, is the main attraction at INTUIT for it goes beyond just displaying artifacts; it helps capture the psychological and physical essence of outsider art, taking viewers into the life of a reclusive genius.
The Darger room is a freestanding space with temporary 6 foot tall painted walls. The room is roped off so that a few visitors can see the room from the doorway at a time. The transition from the main gallery to the Darger space is rather seamless, marked only by a contrasting wall color. Since there is no ceiling over the Darger room, the space shares the same light and sound as the rest of the gallery. The room lacks the quiet, intimate essence of the original space because of this, but nonetheless, Darger’s environment is conveyed effectively enough with dimension, color and contents. Curators of the installation, Jessica Moss and Lisa Stone wrote, “bringing together a selection of Darger’s rare artifacts along with original artworks, original architecture elements, and furniture offers viewers a portal into Darger’s working process.”[2] The opportunity to learn in this alternative space is not to be passed up because visitors can get close to something tangible, making the artist accessible in ways a photograph in a catalog or frame on the wall prohibit. It’s very exciting to acquire a sense of the proportions, color hues and smells of such a revered artist’s space.
As thrilling as it was for me tap into the life of one of my favorite artists, I couldn’t help but think, is this what Darger would have wanted? The truth is this body of work was never intended to be shared. As Darger laid dying in hospice in 1972, his landlord Nathan Lerner visited him and asked what to do with the contents of his apartment. Darger asked him to throw it all away because he didn’t need it anymore. To Lerner’s surprise, he discovered the contents of Darger’s apartment wove together a very imaginative illustrated tome. The story also had antecedence to Darger’s obsession with his childhood traumas so each weather log, character lists, glossary, autobiography, and artwork in the apartment supported his life experiences. Because of this, Lerner felt compelled to preserve it-recognizing its vastness, intricacies and authenticity. It was beyond what anyone expected from Darger.
Unfortunately, today, pieces of Darger’s treasure trove are scattered around the world, hanging in private homes, museums, galleries or hidden away in archives. While I think the Lerners, as executors of the estate, had good intentions when they decided to subsequently donate works to museums, recognizing their rich educational value, I can’t help but feel that sending some of the works into the commercial realm instead of keeping the oeuvre intact was an unfortunate mistake. It is so unique to find an artist’s oeuvre intact so it’s hard to understand why anyone would break it apart. When Nathan Lerner died in 1997, his wife was left with this heavy physical and financial burden to run the estate so she decided to carry out their original intentions to promote Darger’s work by distributing the estate to all different kinds of institutions, collectors and schools around the world. Selling some of the art helped subsidize the Lerner’s efforts.
When an artist’s estate is intact there is a real opportunity to learn about the artist’s process. Sadly, this estate will never be put back together, though INTUIT does a good job of making reference to other areas of Darger’s oeuvre that are not in its collection. More importantly, since there is no quintessential piece of art that can encapsulate the artist, I fear each piece that breaks off from the collection’s core runs the risk of misrepresenting him.
Of course there can be a claim that many artists become famous after they die or most artists are seeking fame, but that might not be true with outsider art. Darger, like many other outsider artists, never engaged with society, therefore didn’t have a concept of how the art world functions. They might have been unaware of their value as artists or simply not have been interested. I believe if Darger was making art for the people, he wouldn’t have lived his long life as a hermit. Never in Darger’s life did he try to promoted his art.
For all of the brilliance Darger revealed since his death, there are equal judgments of him circulating. People cannot talk about the artist without mentioning something disparaging about his escape from a boys asylum, the loss of his sister, his portrayals of nude children, his attempts to adopt children, or his fervent religious beliefs. Many times the most speculative rumors about his personal life became the biggest selling points. Since he’s not alive to defend himself is it right for this artist to be in museums and galleries where his life is totally exposed?
INTUIT is doing a fine job of balancing these issues by educating visitors about Darger, focusing on the working process of a reclusive artist and keeping its distance from the rumors-they’re not ignored, but not confronted either. The Darger installation is more about artists’ working process as with Darger as the example. There is one lengthy introductory panel about the installation which discusses how the curators arrived at the idea to make an in situ space. There is no analysis of Darger’s art, nor are there any other Darger works hanging in the gallery. So essentially, this room is to be viewed as a single piece.
Darger is relevant to Chicago and outsider art and therefore INTUIT is the right place for the entire collection. In fact, I believe works of all outsider artists who have been confined to hospitals, remote locations, private residences throughout their lives should be kept intact, because, at the very least, it helps give visitors a full glimpse into the artists’ lives. It also helps minimize sensationalism and focuses on the artistic merits which is what outsider art collectors and museum professionals should have always done.
If we look back to the history of outsider art, we recognize that Dubuffet was interested in how artists arrived at their ideas since being removed from social influence. For Dubuffet, Art Brut artists were on a parallel course with professional, trained artists-they just started from a more original place. Outsider art’s evolution does not build on previous art movements; it starts new with every artist. This is different from a trained painter who cannot be taught how to be naïve and original for his or her ideas have been tainted by knowledge of art history and the influence of contemporaries.
For this reason, I hope INTUIT will put Darger’s works in historical context by acknowledging Dubuffet for bringing outsider art into the museum/gallery realm and for recognizing Hans Prizhorn as the first person to study artists in asylums. I think it would help explain INTUIT’s mission as an institute that:
"Promotes public awareness, understanding, and appreciation of intuitive and outsider art through a program of education and exhibition. Intuit strives to discover, document, maintain, preserve, exhibit, and collect examples of intuitive and outsider art; and to operate a permanent facility in which to pursue such activities."[3]
True, Dubuffet was not the first to discover artworks by people suffering from mental illness, but he was the first collector and scholar to impose a critical assessment, exploring its nuances and peculiarities and, thus, giving these original compositions by non-traditional artists a place and name in art history.
Elen Woods
M.A. Program, Museum Professions, Seton Hall University
[1] Thevoz, Michel. The Art Brut Collection Lausanne. Zurich: Swiss Museums-Swiss Institute for Art Research, 2001.
[2] Moss, Jessica and Stone, Lisa. The Henry Darger Room Collection at Intuit. Chicago: Inuit, 2007.
[3] Wilson, Cleo. “Mission Statement” Intuit: Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art. 26 Feb 2009 http://www.art.org/aboutUs/aboutUs.htm