Philadelphia Museum of Art
Through June 9
I’ve got one quibble with this fascinating display of “untutored brilliance,” said Edward J. Sozanski in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The term “outsider art” doesn’t do justice to the creators—some disabled, some psychiatric patients, some simply unfortunate enough to have been poor minorities in segregation-era America. It’s a tag that was invented by insiders, both to separate these artists from the elite and to halfheartedly apologize for deficiencies in technique. Yet among the 200 or so drawings, paintings, and sculptures on display, there are pieces “so close to ‘insider’ art that one almost can’t tell the difference.” The artists seem distinct not because of their presumed marginality, but because they relied almost solely on intuition to create these “rough and urgent treasures.”
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Crucially, they also “made their art without the idea or intention of sale,” said Paul Fishbane in TabletMag.com. Several of them claimed divine inspiration; others simply tried to make sense of the world using the materials at hand, sometimes including spit, soot, and chicken bones. This impressive exhibition “shows that the work of the best practitioners deserves to be seen on its own terms.” And yet you can’t help but notice how the works echo developments in mainstream art, said Henry McMahon in Art New England. Bosie and Wewe, an undated work by Sam Doyle that depicts a cow suckling her calf, has an immediacy “that could be the envy of most neo-expressionists.” It’s doubtful that Doyle, a porter and laundry worker on South Carolina’s remote St. Helena Island, had ever heard of 1980s art star Jean-Michel Basquiat, but their works are strikingly similar.
Reading the “brilliantly written” life histories of these so-called outsiders, you might detect another pattern, said Ed Voves in the California Literary Review. Much of their work was shaped by adversity. Bill Traylor, a former slave who spent much of his life as an Alabama sharecropper, completed Runaway Goat Cart (1939–42) when he was in his late 80s. This watercolor of a galloping goat yoked to a cart “has narrative power, as well as a cryptic, enigmatic quality.” But the details of Traylor’s life bring a possible meaning to light. A decade earlier, his son was killed by white policemen in what was “almost certainly an act of legally sanctioned lynch law.” Perhaps Runaway Goat Cart is a comment on the lack of control that its African-American creator had over his own fate. We’ll never know. But one thing is clear: The artists in this “truly dazzling” collection painted from the heart.
