The View From Outside

By ROBERT HUGHES

MODERNISM IS OLD; THE WHOLE MUseum industry is its nursing home. The old mull over their beginnings, and there's no doubt that Modernism's high breeding line -- Manet, Courbet and Cezanne, who begat Matisse and Picasso, and so forth -- doesn't describe the whole family tree. All kinds of odd stuff went into it; now we are curious about these sources, and various museums have tried to document them.

In 1984 there was the Museum of Modern Art's much disputed show, " 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art." In 1986, with "The Spiritual in Art," Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Maurice Tuchman offered an account of how "fringe" religious and spiritualist beliefs common in Europe in the early part of the century -- Theosophy and its cousins -- linked up to older mystical traditions and afforded the common ground for certain pioneer abstract artists, from Mondrian in Holland to Malevich in Russia. Now that "historic" show -- the adjective in the catalog is Tuchman's own, but this is Los Angeles, after all -- gets its sequel in "Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art," on view at LACMA through Jan. 3. The ( exhibition will then travel during 1993 to Madrid, Basel and Tokyo.

"Parallel Visions" tries to do for some areas of 20th century figurative art what the earlier show did for some kinds of abstraction: disclose an ignored lineage that lies outside of formal art history. That lineage is in the work of artists for whom a satisfactory name has never been found. Visionaries? Obsessives? Nuts? Mediums? Amateurs? Sunday painters? Primitives? A little of each, mostly; and in all cases, people who persisted in making their images out of an inner compulsion strong enough to carry them through a lifetime of artmaking -- a long life, sometimes -- without any professional support or community. Thus, for want of a better word, they are called outsider artists.

One astonishing example among many documented in "Parallel Visions" is the Mexican-American artist Martin Ramirez (1885-1960), whose landscape drawings featuring Super Chief trains and many-arched, organic tunnels and cliffs have the epic character that can only rise from intense experience metabolized within a fully formed style. Yet Ramirez had no art training at all; he was a Mexican bracero who migrated north to California, found a job on the railroad around 1910, became aphasic and wound up in a mental hospital. There, over the last 30 years of his life, he drew -- and the staff destroyed his drawings almost as fast as he made them. Yet about 300 survived, and through the enthusiasm of the Chicago funk artist Jim Nutt, they became a source of inspiration in the professional art world.

This relationship between insider and outsider, amateur and pro, is one of the main themes of this extremely interesting show. It's a one-way flow -- the outsiders were less interested in the pros than artists like Paul Klee or Jean Dubuffet were in them -- and it belongs almost exclusively to the 20th century. An earlier Europe had been fitfully interested in the art of the mad, the estranged, the infantile and the obsessed. But generally its interest was confined to professionals who "went wrong" and lost their sense of cultural continuity, plunging into a world of private hallucination or inscrutable vision.

From the 16th century on, a growing literature attests to the idea that the genius of painters was a hairbreadth away from lunacy -- "Great wits are sure to madness near allied/ And thin partitions do their bounds divide." With the advent of Romanticism, this trickle of interest became a flood. The Romantic - movement valued whatever was personal, unmediated and direct, in images that welled up from strata beneath the structures of formal culture. Twentieth century Modernism, in so many respects the child of 19th century Romanticism, inherited this; but the difference was that it began not only to seek evidence of visionary energy in outsider work but also to regard it as an alternative, purer mode of creativity, worthy of emulation. This insight could hardly have existed before the age of psychoanalysis.

What was the primal form of art, the cultural equivalent of Goethe's Urpflanze, or primal plant? Did you have to go back thousands of years to find it? Not at all, argued Klee in 1911; it was right under your modern nose -- in kindergartens and madhouses. The art of children and madmen "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. That is how far back we have to reach in order to avoid facile archaizing." The messianic Modernist would find his modes of prophecy, as did primitive Christians, in the mouths of babes and anchorites. Unmediated expression, without psychic limits.

From the heights of neo-neo this and post-post that, we may smile at such "naivete" -- isn't everything mediated in advance? -- but the fact is that the longing for intensity through emulation of outsidership is one of the most vital strands in modern art, from Klee to Dubuffet, from Kandinsky to the Surrealists, from Gabriele Munter to the prodigiously fecund and still imperfectly understood Filipino-American artist Alfonso Ossorio (1916-90), whose paintings such as Rose Mother, 1951, are among the high points of this show.

It may seem odd that the artist whom the general public associates above all others with madness, Vincent van Gogh, is not in this exhibition, but he should not be. Van Gogh's illness did not inspire his art; in fact it prevented him from working. In any case the topic is not "mad artists" but artists who (like Dali) found method in the madness of others.

Most of the professionals represented here will be familiar names to museumgoers. On the other hand, the outsiders are mostly unknown or recognizable by name only. A few, like the visionary landscapist Joseph Yoakum (1886- or 1888-1972), have risen to minor fame through the admiration of other artists -- in his case, again, via Nutt and his friends in the Hairy Who group in Chicago in the '60s. Others are better known in Europe than in the U.S. These include Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930), the near illiterate peasant schizophrenic whose stupendously complex drawings of imaginary terrains, buildings and cities, infinite in their ramifications of detail and yet exquisite in their order, entitle him to be seen as perhaps the greatest psychotic artist whose work has come down to us. And some are known only to specialists. Among these are Heinrich Hermann Mebes (1842-?), whose tiny visionary-symbolist watercolors fall somewhere between Philipp Otto Runge and Persian miniatures; and Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern (1892-1982), with his fearsome moralizing fantasies; and the mental patient Karl Brendel (1871-1925), whose tiny, intense woodcarvings are so close in spirit to German Expressionist sculpture.

The weirdest talent in the show, because it is the most epic, obsessive and totally self-referential in its mixture of sadistic violence and kitsch daintiness, belongs to the Chicago recluse Henry Darger (1892-1973). Darger's rented apartment, after his death, turned out to be crammed with the output of a lifetime's obsession with innocence and violence, including a 15,000-page illustrated saga titled The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, a sort of madman's Iliad of endless carnage between adults and moppets. No "mainstream" artist has so far based anything in Darger, which is just as well; in today's America, he would be arraigned for child abuse faster than you could say Lewis Carroll.