Recently discovered wooden box of drawings, maps and visions dated from the late 1930's to the mid 1970's. Documentation of alien abduction, early space travel and Revelations. Cool outsider/visionary art find. Found in a dumpster in Rio DeJaneiro, Brazil. Pretty weird.

"Paris Polka" Jean DuBuffet. French (1901-1985). Father of art brut and thus, "outsider art", sets record at Christies "Looking Forward to the Past" sale.

Because of my interest in "outsider" art, I was especially anxious to see how the major DuBuffet painting "Paris Polka" would do at the Christie's big sale this week in New York. It did just fine, realizing $24,805,000 (hammer price + buyers premium). This was a new world record for the artist.

Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
Paris Polka
signed and dated ‘J. Dubuffet 61’ (lower right)
oil on canvas
74 3/4 x 86 1/2 in. (190 x 220 cm.)
Painted in 1961.  

Galerie Daniel Cordier, Paris
Galerie Beyeler, Basel
The Morton and Linda Janklow Collection, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner 

(courtesy Christie's)

Bizarre, satanic, outsider art drawings by Clifton Harvey 1979 discovered during an inspection of an abandoned Detroit home.

(From the Detroit Metro Times, Thursday April 23rd, 2015)

Trip out on these Satanic drawings found in an abandoned Detroit house

Posted By Lee DeVito on Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 7:28 AM

Reader Joseph Goeddeke found these drawings in an abandoned Detroit house that he was inspecting for asbestos while working for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. The house was scheduled to be demolished later that day, and Goeddeke (who says he's "not an art guy" but thinks "they are great drawings") decided to save the art and send it to us. We're glad he did.

We don't know anything about the artist other than that one of the pages is signed “Clifton Harvey” and dated “12/79." We dig his depiction of Satan as a giant with a snake arm and a three-headed snake pitchfork, and the drawings remind us of the works of Henry Darger and Hieronymus Bosch.

Enjoy. (And if you know who Clifton Harvey is, please drop us a line at arts@metrotimes.com.)

[Update 8:09 a.m. Friday, April 24, 2015: We asked Goeddeke where the drawings were found. "As I recall, east side. The area between Cadillac Blvd and St Jean, and Jefferson to Mack Ave," he says. "I found them last summer and they have been in my desk since, so I’m trying to recall. As you probably know, there are thousands of homes demolished each year, so I don’t think I can pinpoint an address, but it was definitely in that area."]

The automatic drawings of Unica Zurn. German (1916-1970).

Automatic drawing originated with the Surrealists as a way of losing all rational control and thought from their art. The movement of the pen, pencil or paint was thought to be a reflection of the psyche. It was a means of expressing the sub-conscious. Think of it as being spiritual in nature.

"Automatic drawing was pioneered by André Masson. Artists who practiced automatic drawing include Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp and André Breton. The technique was transferred to painting (as seen in Miró's paintings which often started out as automatic drawings), and has been adapted to other media; there have even been automatic drawings in computer graphics. Pablo Picasso was also thought to have expressed a type of automatic drawing in his later work, and particularly in his etchings and lithographic suites of the 1960s". (Wiki)

"Unica Zurn was born in Berlin-Grunewald as Nora Berta Unica Ruth, her childhood was tainted by her family that suffered from a history of mental health issues. Her father, Ralph Zurn, and her mother, Helene Pauline Heerdt, divorced in 1930. The only single male figure who remained part of her life was her brother who she claimed used to inflict acts of sexual violence upon her as a young girl. In 1942 she married a wealthy man named Erich Laupenmuhlen. In 1943 she had her first child, Katrin, and in 1945 she had her second child, Christian^, In 1953, she and Erich divorced, forcing her to lose custody of her children. She could not afford a lawyer and provide the means to take care of them. In 1953 she met surrealist painter Hans Bellmer in Berlin at an exhibition at the Galerie Springer. She moved with him to Paris, becoming his partner and model. The relationship lead to some physical complications for Zürn. She suffered from a surgical procedure gone wrong for a genital tear from childbirth and relations with Bellmer. Additionally, she had to endure multiple back-alley abortions during the affair".

"Together with Hans Bellmer, Unica Zürn frequented surrealist circles and befriended people such as André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Henri Michaux, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Zürn made her way into the Surrealist movement amongst other successful women as Leonora Carrington, Dorthea Tanning, Kay Sage, IthellColquhoun, Toyen, Leonor Fini and Valentine Hugo.  Bellmer incorporated Unica into his piece titled, “Unica Tied Up,” which was exhibited in his 1959 exhibit “Doll”. That same year, Zürn was involved in an exhibition at the Galerie Cordey in Paris that included many other surrealist artists".



"In 1960 she experienced her first hallucinatory crisis. From this point on she suffered from long periods of depression and spent most of her time in and out of psychiatric hospitals. After two suicide attempts, she returned home in a wheelchair and destroyed most of her drawings and writings. The years 1960-1962 were spent in Jacques Lacan’s Psychiatric clinic of St. Anne. It wasn't until recently that researchers claimed she most likely suffered from schizophrenia. One of her doctors was Gaston Ferdière, a friend of the surrealists, who was also psychiatrist to Antonin Artaud. Regardless of her battle with mental illness she continued to draw, write, and formulate anagrams. Her illness inspired much of her writing, above all Der Mann im Jasmin, written between 1963 and 1965.
She committed suicide in Paris, France in 1970, at the age of 54, by leaping from the window of the apartment she shared with Bellmer". (Wiki)

The website History of Mental Health begins their study thusly:

October 19, 2014

By Henk van Setten

Tormented Artist 

"October 19, 1970 – This day German-French artist, writer and poet Unica Zürn (54) killed herself by jumping from her 6th-story apartment at 4 Rue de la Plaine in Paris. Her death looked like taken from the story in her own book Dunkler Frühling (“Dark Spring”) that had been published the year before.

In 1949 (when she was 33) Zürn had separated from her first husband and lost the custody of her children. She began to move in German artistic circles and in 1953 she met surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). She went to live with him in Paris.

Although sometimes they had difficulties and tried to separate, in fact they remained a couple until shortly before Unica’s death.

Bellmer’s work had strong sexual elements with explicit sadist and fetishist elements. He used Unica as a model; some think she must have been masochist to lend herself to it. There certainly were masochist fantasies in Unica’s own writings.

Notorious is a series of photos Bellmer took in 1958 of her nude body bound with thin, flesh distorting string. These photo’s leave a shocking impression of degrading the nude female body (Unica’s head is not shown) in a deeply humiliating way. I find them disturbing enough to not show them here. If you insist on seeing some, Google Image Search will help you out.

On the other hand, Bellmer also kept stimulating Unica to write and to make drawings. Expositions of Unica’s surrealist doodle-drawings soon became a success.

Some think that the sadomasochistic element in the personal and artistic relationship of Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn may have contributed to her mental disintegration. I don’t think we can be entirely sure about that.

Anyway, Zürn became depressed in 1959 after Bellmer persuaded her to have an abortion. It was the first of several times they separated for a while. Soon after, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Her ensuing journey reads like a slow slide down into hell.

 ● October 1959-February 1960: stay in the Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik, a psychiatric clinic in Berlin-Wittenau;
● September 1960-Augustus 1962: stay in the Sainte Anne psychiatric clinic in Paris;
● July 1964-November 1964: stay in the Lafond asylum in La Rochelle; she also became a patient of the famous Paris psychiatrist Gaston Ferdière (1907-1990);
● June 1966-September 1966: first stay in the Maison Blanche psychiatric hospital in Neuilly-sur-Marne;
● December 1969-January 1970: second stay in the Maison Blanche;
● April 1970-July 1970: third stay in the Maison Blanche;
● July 1970-October 1970: stay in a beautiful old country house that had been converted into a psychiatric clinic: the La Chesnaie clinic in Chailles.

In this last place Zürn’s condition seemed to improve. But when in October she got permission to go home for a few days, it gave her the opportunity to kill herself.

Amazingly, during all these years she kept writing and making drawings. She really remained very productive until the last.

In the interval between 1964-1966 (when she was largely out of clinics) she began writing The Man of Jasmine: Impressions from a Mental Illness.

This would become a lucid and touching description of her psychotic hallucinations, depressions and anxiety attacks – the “Man of Jasmine” was derived from a fantasy figure from her childhood dreams. The book would be published in 1977, seven years after her death. (text and photos courtesy History of Mental Illness)

Thanks also to 50watts.com
Galleryhip.com and drawingcenter.org

"A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person’s being" Jean DuBuffet (1901-1985)

Outsider art is a reflection of whats going on in the artist's heart, soul, brain, memory and imagination. The painter of this contrived city demonstrates that idea.

The painting is mid-century, 28 x 43, signed E. Allen and is available for purchase here

Dr. Walter Morgenthaler (1882-1965) and Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930)

Early today I gave a lecture on the early, European roots of outsider art. It was part of the Center for the Visual Arts lunchtime lecture series. It is important to understand the 19th century roots of the movement before it evolved into art brut and later outsider art

These roots centered around the work of Drs. Hans Prinzhorn and Walter Morgenthaler. These psychiatrists were contemporaries and both explored the use of the visual arts combined with psychotherapy to help the insane patients they treated in sanitariums. They were the fathers of what we now refer to as art therapy.

Morgenthaler wrote the textbook for Psychiatric Nursing that is still in use today. He also developed the Rorschach Technique but his contribution to art history was the 1921 publication Madness and Art: The Life Works of Adolf Wolfli. Besides being an MD, he was also an art historian. Morgenthaler encouraged and documented Wolfli's artistic body of work.

Raw Vision put it like this "Dr Walter Morgenthaler published the first study of a single psychiatric patient's work, Adolf Wölfli, a patient at his Swiss asylum. Wölfli worked for thirty years in a small cell at the Waldau Asylum, producing hundreds of huge drawings which he bound in vast tomes accompanied by a dense script recounting his exploits and calculations, a depiction of a whole alternative reality from his tragic life".

An awesome retrospective and virtual exhibition documenting the relationship between Morgenthaler and Wolfli can be found here. I encourage you to check it out.

Wölfli was born in Bern. He was abused both physically and sexually as a child, and was orphaned at the age of 10. He thereafter grew up in a series of state-run foster homes. He worked as a farm labourer and briefly joined the army, but was later convicted of attempted child molestation, for Bern, Switzerland, a psychiatric hospital where he spent the rest of his adult life. He was very disturbed and sometimes violent on admission, leading to him being kept in isolation for his early time at hospital. He suffered from psychosis, which led to intense hallucinations.
which he served prison time. Sometime after being freed, he was arrested for a similar offense and was admitted in 1895 to the Waldau Clinic in Bern.

 At some point after his admission Wölfli began to draw. His first surviving works (a series of 50 pencil drawings) are dated from between 1904 and 1906.Walter Morgenthaler, a doctor at the Waldau Clinic, took a particular interest in Wölfli's art and his condition, later publishing Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler (A Psychiatric Patient as Artist) in 1921 which first brought Wölfli to the attention of the art world.

Morgenthaler's book detailed the works of a patient who seemed to have no previous interest in art and developed his talents and skills independently after being committed for a debilitating condition. In this respect, Wölfli was an iconoclast and influenced the development and acceptance of outsider art, Art Brut and its champion Jean Dubuffet.

 Wölfli produced a huge number of works during his life, often working with the barest of materials and trading smaller works with visitors to the clinic to obtain pencils, paper or other essentials. Morgenthaler closely observed Wölfli's methods, writing in his influential book:

 "Every Monday morning Wölfli is given a new pencil and two large sheets of unprinted newsprint. The pencil is used up in two days; then he has to make do with the stubs he has saved or with whatever he can beg off someone else. He often writes with pieces only five to seven millimetres long and even with the broken-off points of lead, which he handles deftly, holding them between his fingernails. He carefully collects packing paper and any other paper he can get from the guards and patients in his area; otherwise he would run out of paper before the next Sunday night. At Christmas the house gives him a box of coloured pencils, which lasts him two or three weeks at the most."The images Wölfli produced were complex, intricate and intense. They worked to the very edges of the page with detailed borders. In a manifestation of Wölfli's "horror vacui", every empty space was filled with two small holes. Wölfli called the shapes around these holes his "birds."

His images also incorporated an idiosyncratic musical notation. This notation seemed to start as a purely decorative affair but later developed into real composition which Wölfli would play on a paper trumpet.
In 1908, he set about creating a semi-autobiographical epic which eventually stretched to 45 volumes, containing a total of over 25,000 pages and 1,600 illustrations. This work was a mix of elements of his own life blended with fantastical stories of his adventures from which he transformed himself from a child to 'Knight Adolf' to 'Emperor Adolf' and finally to 'St Adolf II'. Text and illustrations formed the narrative, sometimes combining multiple elements on kaleidoscopic pages of music, words and colour.
Wölfli eventually died at Waldau in 1930 and his works were taken to the Museum of the Waldau Clinic in Bern. After his death the Adolf Wölfli Foundation was formed to preserve his art for future generations. Today its collection is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern. (courtesy Wiki)

Gary Baseman lecture and low brow art show in The Village of Wittenberg, Wisconsin.

Local businessman and supporter of the arts, Randy Verhasselt organized an awesome night of art and conversation in the quaint Village of Wittenberg. Randy has the absolute coolest floral design studio in Wisconsin, Evolutions in Design please check it out.

We were thoroughly entertained by Gary's lecture and visit. I was particularly enamored with some of his sketch books which he shared with us. He also brought one of his original Toby's. The exhibit was really great too and included all the big name low brow and outsider artists.

Don't know who Gary Baseman is? He is the absolute Andy Warhol of what is called Low Brow art. He is a rigorous self promoter and extremely successful marketer of his art, his brand and his life. Here is a brief update from the "about" section of his website.

"Los Angeles-based Gary Baseman explores the “beauty of the bittersweetness of life” through painting, performance, film and fashion. Current projects include a collaboration with COACH ready-to-wear for the Spring 2015 Collection; a documentary “Mythical Creatures” about his family heritage; and a traveling retrospective that started in the United States in 2013 and continues at the K11 Art Museum in Shanghai through March 2015.
Baseman’s multifaceted career includes illustration for clients including The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Wall Street Journal and the bestselling board game Cranium; as well as animation for which he created the Emmy and BAFTA award-winning ABC/Disney series “Teacher’s Pet.” Baseman with his dynamic and abundant imagination continues to cross media platforms addressing both light and serious subject matter – fitting for today’s complex global society, where art reaches all from the digital and commercial realms to museums and beyond"
Here are some examples of Gary's work. Remember, he does huge 3 dimensional installations, housewares and clothes. The dude is a busy guy. Photos courtesy Baseman.

  

Sorry for the cruddy cell phone photo but here is the giant one he brought with him to Wittenberg. It was like 10 feet long.

If you are interested in seeing more of the exhibition and some of our friends just click below.