Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, essay by Pamela Kort. Michael Werner Gallery, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-8850-1381-1. Paperback $55 Friedrich Schroder-Sonnenstern images of unexcelled symbolic intensity marked him as one of the most creative German artists of the mid-20th Century, but also an artist whose weirdly eroticized work was unlikely to be found on gallery walls in his own time. He was also hugely eccentric, putting in time as both a charlatan occultist and a mental patient, according to Pamela Kort’s essay in the recently published catalog for the exhibit From Barefoot Prophet to Avant-Garde Artist at Michael Werner Gallery in New York. His serious
Continue readingCategory: Outsider Art
Book Review: Henry Darger
Henry Darger, by Klaus Biesenbach, with contributions by Brooke Davis Anderson and Michael Bonesteel. Prestel USA, 304 pages, 250 color illustrations, 2009. ISBN 978-3-7913-4210-8. Hard cover $85
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Book Review: Mary Nohl Inside and Outside
Mary Nohl Inside & Outside: Biography of the Artist, by Barbara Manger and Janine Smith. University of Wisconsin Press, 134 pages, 165 color images, 145 b/w or sepia images, 2009. ISBN 978-0-6152-5118-9. Soft Cover $29.95. See my Mary Nohl photos, circa 1990
Continue readingFine fashions
It’s been some time since I’ve stumbled across anything as nice as these fashion drawings in an antique store, mostly because I don’t spend much time in them any more.
Continue readingBook Review: Martin Ramirez: The Last Works
Martin Ramirez: The Last Works, by Brooke Davis Anderson, Richard Rodriguez and Wayne Thiebaud. Pomegranate, 160 pages, 136 illustrations, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7649-4695-0 The ratio of text to photos in this second major volume dedicated to Martin Ramirez is low, and that comes as a relief to someone who feels compelled to read books front to back, even when not reviewing them. The catalog published last year in conjunction with Ramirez’s epochal one-man at the American Folk Art Museum had many virtues. Contributions by Anderson and by Victor and Kristin Espinosa supplied essential (and in the Espinosas’ case ground-breaking) background and
Continue readingBook Review: Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor
Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor, by Mechal Sobel. LSU Press, 256 pages, 46 illustrations, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8071-3401-6 Pity the poor dead outsider artist. Odds are good you’ve been reduced to a collection of anecdotes gathered by an early collector or dealer then recycled, with declining fidelity, through biographical capsules, reviews and newspaper articles. Your life is a series of clichés attached to a stunning body of work. If you’re exceptionally lucky, like Martin Ramirez, you may eventually pique the interest of serious scholars and become the subject of actual biography. But when your life story is
Continue readingBook Review: Follies of Europe – Architectural Extravaganzas
Follies of Europe: Architectural Extravaganzas, by Nic Barlow, Caroline Holmes and Tim Knox. Garden Art Press, 256 pages, 286 color illustrations, 2008. ISBN 1-87067-356-5 In the United States, writing on the environments of self-taught artists tends to place them within the outsider art context or, sometimes, within a specifically American tradition of individual expression. Follies of Europe demonstrates a very different way of looking at these sites. Not only is their individualistic exuberance not distinctly American, but they belong to a tradition of highly personal outdoor extravaganzas going back at least to the 17th Century. Indeed, the book opens with
Continue readingBook Review: Collecting Madness – Outsider Art from the Dammann Collection
Collecting Madness: Outsider Art from the Dammann Collection, by Thomas Röske, Bettina Brand-Claussen, Gerhard Dammann and others. Catalog by the Prinzhorn Collection, 224 pages, 101 illustrations, 2006. ISBN: 3-88423-265-7 It may seem like a cheap shot to call this volume schizophrenic, but between its own punning title and its divided sense of purpose, the description is irresistible. “Collecting Madness” refers both to the mania of acquisition and to a particular exhibit of a German collection focused on work by artists with histories of mental problems and confinement in asylums. The catalog itself is divided by an abrupt transition halfway through,
Continue readingBook Review: The Air Loom and Other Dangerous Influencing Machines
Book Review: The Air Loom and Other Dangerous Influencing Machines, by Thomas Röske, Bettina Brand-Claussen and others. Catalog by the Prinzhorn Collection, 256 pages, 92 illustrations, 2006. ISBN: 3-88423-237-1. This book, also a catalog for an exhibit at the Prinzhorn Collection, is even more focused on psychiatric issues than the Collecting Madness volume. In an earlier time that could have been problematic, but the success of Dubuffet and his followers in liberating the art from its psychiatric context actually makes it easier to appreciate the insights. Although there is still plenty to debate relating to terminology and the significance of
Continue readingBook Review: Sublime Spaces And Visionary Worlds
Sublime Spaces And Visionary Worlds: Built Environments Of Vernacular Artists, By Leslie Umberger, Erika Doss, Lisa Stone, Jane Bianco and Ruth Kohler. Princeton Architectural Press, 424 pages, 650 color plates and 100 black and white illustrations, 2007. ISBN 1-56898-728-5
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