Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art

Los Angeles and Princeton: Los Angeles County Museum; Princeton University Press, 1992. 334 pages, illustrations (some colour); 31 cm. Catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and held October 18, 1992 to January 3, 1993 and other museums through December 1993. Firm binding, clean text. Foreedge and endpapers lightly soiled. Another copy available. OVERSIZE! No priority/international, except by special arrangement. "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 today's 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." - Publisher. CONTENTS: Eyes outside and eyes inside, by Jonathan Wiliams; Moral influences and expressive intent: a model of the relationship between insider and outsider, by Carol S. Eliel; Biographies of outsider artists, by Barbara Freeman; Expressionism's ancients, by Reinhold Heller; Surrealism and the paradigm of the creative subject, by Roger Cardinal; From the asylum to the museum: marginal art in Paris and New York, 1938-68, by Sarah Wilson; Looking to the outside: art in Chicago, 1945-75, by Russell Bowman; Playing tennis with the king: visionary art in central Europe in the 1960s, by Mark Gisbourne; Contemporary artists and outsider art, by Carol S. Eliel and Barbara Freeman; Constructing creativity and madness: Freud and the shaping of the psychopathology of art, by Sander L. Gilman; I see a world within the world: I dream but am awake, by John M. MacGregor; Nostalgia for the absolute: obsession and art brut, by Allen S. Weiss; Art history, museology, and the staging of modernity, by Donald Preziosi.. 1st. Paperback. Very Good. 4to.