Marginal Art: what it is and what characteristics it has

Perhaps you have heard of "outsider art", but do not know exactly what it is. It may sound like a definition of a minority art, or the artistic expression of groups excluded from society.

outsider art or Art Brut it's a bit of all that. Strictly, the artist who develops this type of art is outside of "official art" and does not follow the guidelines that it stipulates. They do not necessarily have to belong to an “excluded” group, although it is true that their artistic manifestations are not “conventional”. Thus, we find marginal art in groups such as psychiatric patients, the elderly or children, whose artistic expression has traditionally been considered something secondary.

In this article we are going to see what this type of art is and what its characteristics are.

What is outsider art and what are its characteristics?

The concept of "outsider art" emerged in the 1970s., by the art critic Roger Cardinal (1940-2019). The Spanish word is the translation of its outside art, whose bases he collected in his famous book outside art (1972).

However, long before Cardinal introduced the world to the aesthetics of this new art, a group of artists had coined a similar term, the Art Brut, whose characteristics Cardinal resumed in 1972. Thus, outsider art or outside art is basically a translation of Art Brut from the middle of the 20th century.

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He Art Brut or the art of the “marginalized”

To understand what outsider art consists of, we must go back to the 1940s, when the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) inserted the term Art Brut (raw art) to describe the artistic production of those groups that were on the margins of society and whose works could not be included in the official art standards.

When determining the existence of Art Brut, Dubuffet was greatly influenced by Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933), German psychiatrist and art historian, who, in 1922, had published what would become his most famous (and bombastic) work qualification): Plastic activity of the mentally ill. A contribution to the psychology and psychopathology of formal configuration. The work gave Dubuffet an idea when it came to “cataloging” that art made by marginal groups of society.

So, at first, the Art Brut, the antechamber of outsider art, was carried out especially by psychiatric patients, a group traditionally misunderstood and excluded from social circles. Nobody until then had shown interest in the artistic production of these people, so Prinzhorn's work (and, more later, the efforts of Dubuffet and his colleagues) were truly innovative, not to say that they forever changed the idea of art. Artistic creation would never again be measured by the same standards.

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The value of the “other” artistic expression

As expected, André Breton and his fellow Surrealists embraced the concept with enthusiasm.. It could not be otherwise. Breton had exercised his military services during the First World War in a sanatorium French psychiatric hospital, and there he had had the opportunity to observe the creativity of the patients mental. While the psychiatrists at the center considered the parliament of these patients mere “nonsense lucubrations”, Breton immediately knew the artistic value they entailed. Because the patients' monologues came directly from their minds and flowed freely, without any moral or rational restraint.

Breton's stay at the Saint-Dizier sanatorium gave rise to automatic writing and the free association of ideas, a writing procedure that refused to correct what arose from the mind and dumped it as is on the paper. This was one of the bases of surrealism founded by Breton, but that is another story.

What is really essential to understand this sudden valuation of outsider art or Art Brut among artistic communities is its meaning of “pure art”, uncontaminated. Breton and the other artists who supported this art did so with the sincere conviction that social norms and morals strangled artistic expression and distanced it from the genuine to turn it into something prostituted and corrupt. In other words; the official artist sells himself to society for recognition and money, but the "true" artist expresses himself without hesitation or convention of any kind.

The appreciation of this “different” art can be traced back to the end of the 19th century, when Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) went to the South Seas trying to find the indigenous purity, or even earlier, when the romantic Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) made a series of trips to the Orient to seek inspiration in his exoticism more "primitive". On the other hand, naif art (from the French word "naive"), encompassed paintings made by non-professional artists, whose "clumsy" and "childish" work was criticized by many.

In summary; he Art Brut tried to recover a spontaneous and vital art, like the one made by children when they are still unaware of the rules or the art of the mentally ill, who live outside of them. Those were the values ​​that Dubuffet and the group of artists who followed him wanted to rescue.

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The first exhibitions

The first major public demonstration of outsider art or Art Brut known to have been carried out in 1900, at the Bethlm Hospital in London. The exhibition showed works of the so-called "psychotic art", that is, creations of psychiatric patients who, on the other hand, in those years had more scientific than artistic interest. The show was successful and was repeated in 1913.

A little later, the German expressionists of Der Blaue Reiter, led by Vasili Kandisnky and Franz Marc, “officialize” outsider art by exhibiting, along with their own works, some made by mental patients; a clear statement of intent that seemed to say: art made by the “marginalized” has the same value as movements led by artists.

And already in the middle of the 20th century, and after coining the term of Art Brut, Jean Dubuffet, together with André Breton, Michel Tapié and other fellow artists create the Compagnie d'Art Brut, a collection of outsider art currently preserved and can be viewed at the Chateau de Beaulieu in Lausanne, Switzerland.

And how to understand outsider art?

In order to value this type of artistic manifestation in its proper measure, it is essential to take our minds away from the official artistic conventions and norms that, although we do not know it, continue to influence us when judging a artwork.

According to Dubuffet, one of the greatest instigators of this type of expression, art is always where it is not expected, and only there it flourishes as it should; that is, away from the corset of creative norms that society imposes. True art, according to this statement, would be found in the hands of the groups that no one thinks of when they think of art.

Only from this perspective can one understand what the concept of outsider art means. The creator becomes, in this way, an absolutely autonomous entity, with a completely self-sufficient inner world and, therefore, expresses what this world, which is only his, asks of him. We could say that outsider art takes the idea of ​​the solitary artist to the extreme that he only follows his own instincts and desires, an idea that, by the way, already began to be drawn in Romanticism. However, outsider art takes this concept to the limit, definitively separating the creator and his environment. Because, although the romantics lived immersed in a constant frustration derived from the dichotomy between the artist and the world, outsider art does without it, since the creators are not even aware that these rules.