Outsider art | Definition, History & Artists (2024)

outsider art, any work of art produced by an untrained idiosyncratic artist who is typically unconnected to the conventional art world—not by choice but by circ*mstance. The “classic” figures of outsider art were socially or culturally marginal figures. They were usually undereducated; they almost invariably embraced unconventional views of the world, sometimes alien to the prevailing dominant culture; and many had been diagnosed as mentally ill. These people nevertheless produced—out of adversity and with no eye on fame or fortune—substantial high-quality artistic oeuvres.

Definition of terms

Outsider art goes by many names, and the definition of terms is and has always been controversial. One of the most famous collections of this art, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switz., was amassed by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who is commonly regarded as a foundational figure.

In the 1940s Dubuffet began collecting works of art made in unusual contexts. He considered these more authentic than the works of trained artists. In particular, he was intrigued by the art of psychiatric patients such as Heinrich Anton Müller, Aloïse Corbaz, and Carlo Zinelli; spiritualist mediums such as Augustin Lesage and Madge Gill; and other self-taught social isolates such as Gaston Chaissac and Scottie Wilson. For the art they produced, Dubuffet coined the term art brut (“raw” or “unrefined art”). In 1949 he wrote of his coinage:

We understand by this term works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part… These artists derive everything…from their own depths, and not from the conventions of classical or fashionable art. We are witness here to the completely pure artistic operation, raw, brute, and entirely reinvented in all of its phases solely by means of the artists’ own impulses.

The term outsider art was introduced into the lexicon in 1972 by British writer Roger Cardinal as an English-language equivalent of the French art brut. By the 1980s, however, the term had expanded to encompass a much greater range of vernacular and “marginal” arts. This broadening was particularly important in the United States, where a rich vein of art that reflected racial, religious, and localized histories rather than psychiatric or spiritualist ones had grown independently from art brut. Known successively—and at times concurrently—as “popular painting,” “modern primitive art,” “self-taught art,” and “contemporary folk art,” works from the American scene were first made visible and analyzed in the 1930s by Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) curator and WPA Federal Art Project art director Holger Cahill, collector Sidney Janis, and others.

Some of the first such American artists to be identified were Horace Pippin, John Kane, William Edmondson, and Morris Hirshfield. Although none of those artists conformed to the European idea of pathological artists, they were viewed in much the same way—as naïfs whose creative strength lay in some presumed innocence and authenticity, comparable to the European “Sacred Heart painters” such as Séraphine Louis and Louis Vivin. Later those Americans would be joined by others more closely conforming to Dubuffet’s “brut” definition, including Joseph Yoakum, Minnie Evans, Bill Traylor, James Castle, and, perhaps most famous of all, Henry Darger, a janitor from Chicago whose more-than-15,000-page illustrated novel In the Realms of the Unreal came to public notice only after his death. Outsider art further benefited from the addition at the end of the 20th century of figures such as the impressive fibre artist Judith Scott, who had Down syndrome and was deaf; Dwight Mackintosh, who was cognitively disabled and began drawing after his release from years of confinement in psychiatric hospitals; and Roy Wenzel, an autistic Dutch artist who developed a distinctive approach to colour and visual narrative.

History and characteristics

Outsider art had its origins in the psychiatric collections of 19th-century European psychiatric hospitals. The works in these collections were solicited from patients and organized for the purpose of medical teaching and analysis. About 1900 some psychiatrists and professional Modernist artists came to see such works not as medical evidence but as art. Two of the doctors produced early influential books on the subject: Swiss psychiatrist Walter Morgenthaler’s A Mental Patient as Artist (1921), which provided the first monograph of an outsider artist, Adolf Wölfli, a long-term patient whose oeuvre the Surrealist writer André Breton considered one of the three or four best of the 20th century; and the German psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922), which became something of a touchstone for the Surrealists, especially Max Ernst, as well as for Dubuffet and subsequently many others.

The artists Dubuffet chose to put in his category of art brut were socially marginalized—often denied not only their liberty but also their status as adults. Nevertheless, even the most distant of them—who were autistic or resided in other realities—did not create art out of nothing. For example, Wölfli and the Mexican artist Martín Ramírez, who had been held up as paragons of uninfluenced creativity, in fact had deep connections with culture outside the psychiatric hospital, both before and after their confinement, that were formative in their artwork and important aspects of its content. For other outsider artists, such as Howard Finster or Bill Traylor, it has long been agreed that content and context were uppermost in their work. Typically, the visual image was primarily a vehicle for the proselytizing and storytelling impulse of the artist.

One of the threads connecting the groups within the outsider art category is the tendency of the artists to be “straight talking” (even if that talk is straight from a radically different worldview). Outsider art used to be seen as a kind of evolutionary prototype for much of Modernist practice, but, considered by itself, it was valued for its essential difference from that practice. By the early 2000s the work of outsiders could often look like an awkward version of what Dubuffet scathingly called the “usual art”—that is, the accepted and acceptable production of the contemporary mainstream. The confusion was more likely to result from “outsiderish” trends among trained artists than from any wish of outsiders to conform. Because outsider art tends to concern itself primarily with its message, the works often seemed more readily accessible and visually coherent to viewers than did those of the mainstream artists whose spaces it had begun to invade.

While the Surrealists, according to their general practice of transgressing cultural boundaries, tended to show outsider art in the company of their own work, exhibitions of outsider art were otherwise restricted to specialist galleries and museums, such as the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switz.; the Aracine Musée d’Art Brut (Gagny) and the Musée de la Création Franche (Bègles) in France; and, in the United States, the American Folk Art Museum and the Galerie St. Etienne, both in New York City, and the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago. Occasional outsider art exhibitions in mainstream galleries, such as Dubuffet’s 1967 "Art Brut" at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris or the 1979 "Outsiders: An Art Without Precedence or Tradition" at the Hayward Gallery in London, only served to reinforce the sense of separation from the contemporary mainstream.

A much-discussed exhibition of 2007 at the American Folk Art Museum and subsequently at the Milwaukee (Wis.) Art Museum showcased the work of Martín Ramírez (1895–1963), who worked entirely within the confines of the California psychiatric hospital where he was a patient for the greater part of his adult life. Though long known among those interested in outsider art, his works were thus introduced to a much wider U.S. audience. The New York Times described the exhibit as “one of the best shows of the season” and went so far as to declare Ramírez “one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.”

The showing of Ramírez’s work confirmed a general move since the mid-1990s toward the wider acceptance of outsider art into mainstream galleries and museums and a recognition of its worthiness for serious art-world attention on its own terms. Other notable examples include exhibitions in 2005 at Kiasma, Helsinki’s museum of contemporary art, and at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. On the whole, however, outsider art continued to circulate among an international spread of specialist dealers, collectors, and galleries, and an annual New York Outsider Art Fair was established in 1992, attracting dealers from the United States, Europe, and Asia.

A landmark exhibition of outsider, or “vernacular,” environments, “Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds,” was held in 2007–08 at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis. Such environments are an important part of the range of outsider art. Often significant in size and invariably the result of the compulsive vision and tireless work of a single individual (though occasionally helped by others later on), they can be found the world over. The best-known early example is Ferdinand Cheval’s Ideal Palace (built 1879–1912) in Hauterives, France. Other important environments include Sabato (Simon) Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles, Calif., Fred Smith’s Wisconsin Concrete Park in Phillips, Wis., Veijo Rönkkönen’s Sculpture Park in Parikkala, Finland, and Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India.