Hirmer | Deutscher Kuntsverlag | 5 Continents
Review by David Starkey
It was a hot summer in Switzerland this year, as it was almost everywhere on our beleaguered planet Earth, so it felt good to be inside an air-conditioned art museum, while outside all the Swiss cheese was during into fondue.
The three exhibitions I saw in late July and early August that made the most lasting impressions on me were a career retrospective of the Venezuelan artist Marisol Escobar, known in the art world as Marisol, at the Kunsthaus Zürich; a retrospective of New York artist Helen Frankenthaler at the Kunstmuseum in Basel; and “Swiss Art Brut,” a stunning gathering of outsider art at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.
Marisol – Kunsthaus Zürich
I had seen a few of Marisol’s wooden sculptures over the years: they are hard to forget. Picture a rectangular block of wood for a body (add wooden legs for variety), and a square or spherical piece of wood for the head, on which is painted an eerily lifelike face. Seen as part of a museum’s collection with hundreds of other works by other artists, they are still remarkable. However, seeing her decades of her work, in such quantity and variety, is truly astounding.
Take, as just one example, the wood block sculpture The Royal Family, from 1967. The bodies of Queen Elizabeth, her husband, and two of her sons are painted on life-sized blocks of wood. The heads of Prince Philip and their son Edward are cubes of wood, while Elizabeth and Prince Andrew’s heads are slightly rounder. Prince Charles and Princess Anne are painted on a piece of plywood, as though they didn’t matter enough for the full treatment. However, like their mother, they have wooden noses protruding from their faces. At the bottom of the scene is a cartoonish Corgi, painted on another block of wood and staring up stupidly at the viewer. One imagines such a depiction of an English royal family by an artist in centuries past might well have been met with the command: “Off with her head!”
The exhibition catalog tells us that by the end of the 1960s, Marisol “had been written about more than any living artists in women’s magazines and [art] journals.” But she often recoiled from publicity, and in 1969, she took to scuba diving in Tahiti, which resulted in some amazing human-fish creatures that emphasize the interconnectedness of the human and non-human worlds.
Then there are the wild, surrealistic portraits drawn with felt-tip markers on paper, the imaginative sets designed for ballets, unsettling lithographs of people like “the elastic skin man,” and, in the 1980s, a return to the wood sculptures, this time showing famous figures like Desmond Tutu, Picasso, Georgia O’Keefe, and Abraham Lincoln. It’s overwhelming, but in a good way.
The catalog is in German, with an English appendix, and the reproductions are sharp. It’s a well-designed book overall, but there’s nothing quite like being in a gallery with a Marisol sculpture—or dozens of them. In the words of one twenty-something patron, whom I heard murmuring to another, “Very, very cool.”
Helen Frankenthaler – Kunstmuseum Basel
When it comes to second-generation abstract expressionists, my go-to painter has always been Joan Mitchell, but the show at the Kunstmuseum Basel was a good argument for Helen Frankenthaler as a close runner-up. The museum has a permanent Frankenthaler at the top of the stairs leading to the exhibition—an alluring promise of what was to come.
Frankenthaler is all about color. She frequently employed a “soak-stain technique,” where she thinned her oil paints with turpentine, then poured them onto the untreated fabric of her canvas. Jackson Pollock was an obvious inspiration, but Frankenthaler’s paintings are much calmer and more meditative that his ever could be. The various shades of green in 1992’s Overture evoke both music or the sea, or possibly something else entirely. Similarly, the yellows of 1975’s September could refer to the changing color of the leaves, or an autumn sunset, or they could be just a very imaginative use the artist’s materials.
One of Frankenthaler’s specialties was transforming a painting by a famous artist into something very much her own, an act she called “paraphrasing.” Titian’s Portrait of a Lady in White, for instance, shows a young aristocratic woman dressed in all her finery, including an elaborate white dress. Frankenthaler’s painting, with the same title, consists of white and gray smudges, with hints of blue, some gold to match the subject’s hair, and in the lower half of the canvas, a dash of bright green—the only correlative of which is the woman’s green eyes. It’s an entire reseeing of Titian’s painting, one that lacks his technical skill but somehow, like a punk rock version of a Bach canon, captures the essence of the original.
There’s an English version of the catalog with a biography/timeline and three well-written, though not especially thorough articles. Of course it’s the work itself, as in any catalog, that makes it worth owning, and Frankenthaler presents a particularly difficult case. Some of the canvases are six feet high and twelve feet long, and the experience of looking at them in person can hardly be replicated by a book. There are several fold-outs in the book, but even three pages, as we have for 1973’s Moveable Blue, isn’t enough.
Nevertheless, the catalog is an elegant reminder of Frankenthaler’s intuitive sense of design and harmony. Though I miss the original, I could look at the oranges and blues and pinks of 1974’s April Mood–reproduced on the book’s cover–all day.
Swiss Art Brut: The Collection from its Origins to the Present Day – Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
I was wowed by the current show at Lausanne’s Collection de l’Art Brut, so much so that as we left, I told my wife, “There’s really no difference between highly educated artists and those who go at it without any training at all.”
As I flip back through the pages of Swiss Art Brut: The Collection from its Origins to the Present Day, I think I may have been exaggerating, but that doesn’t mean the work doesn’t leave quite an impression.
The French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet began collecting art brut, or “raw art,” just after the Second World War. Traveling through Switzerland, he began meeting with doctors in psychiatric hospitals who shared the work of their patients. Dubuffet saw what I saw: a wild inventiveness unconstrained by taste and technique. In an article in the English-language catalog, he is quoted as asking, “Why do you write that gold in its raw state is more counterfeit than fake gold? I myself prefer it as a nugget than as a watch case.”
That’s an inexact analogy, of course: there is craft involved in the work found in Swiss Art Brut. Adolf Wölfi, who lived much of his life in the Waldau Psychiatric Clinic in Bern, clearly spent countless hours creating the intricate designs for his homemade books that tell the story of “Saint Adolf.” The enormous scrolls of Aloïse Corbaz—figure drawings in colored pencil and watercolor—and the colossal imagined buildings of Diego De Mauri—made using felt-tip pen and pencil—must have taken months to complete. Even Marc Moret, whose sculpture entitled Extinction is described in the catalog notes as a “mass of crushed and sieved glass, hide glue, pigment, metal, and various materials on a wooden board lined with paper,” has a kind of anarchic logic.
Admittedly, some of the show’s success, and the impact it had on me, is due to the museum space. Housed far off the beaten path in a former chateau with a warren of galleries with black walls and dramatic spotlights, the collection startles because of its originality and the juxtaposition of artists with very different methods and aesthetics. It’s like wandering around in the brain of the most creative, and possibly the most unstable, person in the world.
The catalog, edited by the museum’s director Sarah Lombardi, is full of insight into art brut from a number of authors, and includes photos and brief biographies of the many artists in the exhibition. It’s an amazing miscellany, though it wasn’t until 1971 that Dubuffet’s collection of five thousand works finally found a home in Lausanne. The city, and its visitors, are lucky to have such a treasure.
