ART CITIES:Vienna-Flying High

The discourse on Art Brut has gained extra dimensions in recent years. The term Art Brut now goes beyond an exclusive focus on works from psychiatric institutions and today also encompasses “mediumistic” and works by artists with disabilities. Historical barriers between Art Brut and “high” art seem to be rapidly breaking down, aesthetic criteria are gaining in relevance over diagnostic interest and what has been hidden or marginalised until now is being washed to the surface.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien Archive

Gathering together 316 works by 93 women artists from 21 countries, which in many aspects of content and aesthetics challenge our idea of what art is, “Flying High: Women Artists of Art Brut” is the first exhibition that is devoted ‘globally’ to female positions in Art Brut produced from 1860 until the present. The exhibition adopts the term Art Brut – raw art or outsider art – defined by Jean Dubuffet in 1945 as starting point for the primordial, non-academic art produced outside the cultural mainstream. The diversity and heterogeneity of the works being presented in the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien demonstrate clearly that the scope of the Art Brut concept today has over time encompassed far more than works of the mentally ill; it also includes the production of ‘mediumistic’ (spiritualist) women artists, ‘lone wolves’ and women artists with disabilities. The history of women’s art is always closely interwoven with the history of emancipation, and in the case of Art Brut the constellation is all the more precarious. For decades, exclusively male discoverers and propagandists of the genre (psychiatrists and artists) have addressed the work of creative women patients in a way that can only be described as a process of elimination. In the groundbreaking book “Die Bildnerei der Geisteskranken” by the Heidelberg art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (1922), the chapter planned for the outstanding Else Blankenhorn was sacrificed to “the demands of budgetary cuts”. It was not until 2004 that the Prinzhorn Collection was reviewed from the perspective of gender-specific differences. Also with regard to the “Haus der Künstler” (Artists’ House) in Gugging, everything revolved around a purely male department. It was only recently that occasional women artists were discovered from the era of Leo Navratil. However, Jean Dubuffet, the founder of the term “Art Brut”, did actually promote one woman artist: Aloïse Corbaz, who created a personal cosmogony filled with princely and political figures like Napoleon Bonaparteand blue-eyed historical heroines, like Marie-Antoinette and Queen Elizabeth. Aloïse Corbaz, known as Aloïse (28/61886-5/4/1964), was born in Lausanne to a large family of modest means; at thirteen, she lost her mother. At the end of her schooling and one year of boarding school, she found herself at loose ends for some time. Her dream was to become an opera singer and, already then, she began composing religious propaganda. To cut short a relationship of which she disapproved, her elder sister ordered Aloïse to leave for Germany; there Aloïse worked as a governess in various situations, including a stint in Potsdam, in William II’s court. Thereupon, she fell in love with the emperor, imagining a torrid love affair with him. The war’s outbreak obliged her to leave the country hurriedly. Back in Switzerland, she showed signs of such exalted religious and pacifist feelings that she was committed to the Cery-sur-Lausanne asylum in 1918, followed by the La Rosière Asylum in Gimel-sur-Morges, where she would remain until her death. Shortly after entering the hospital, she began writing and drawing. Until 1936, she did so in secret, using lead pencil and ink. At times, too, she resorted to flower petal juice, as well as crushed leaves and toothpaste. She used wrapping paper, sometimes sewn with thread, in order to achieve large formats; and, too, envelopes, pieces of cardboard and the backs of calendars. Often as well she used sketch books, which came to represent a specific sector of her oeuvre. She developed a fantasized world in these, often favoring the support’s vertical direction. Misleidys Castillo Pedroso was born with severe hearing loss, and without the proper social and medical supports, has led an isolated life in her native Cuba. Unable to speak or communicate through traditional means, Misleidys has developed her own visual language of painted figures, mythological creatures, demons, and human bodies that are partially exposed, revealing brightly colored organs, muscle, and tissue. The paintings are subsequently cut out and installed on the wall of her family’s home with precisely trimmed and spaced pieces of tape. The figures and body parts vary enormously in size but are of consistent aesthetic sensibility and quality. At the centre of Julia Krause-Harder’s creative output are sculptures, and in particular sculptures of dinosaurs which she creatively produces from various materials. She has made it her task to depict every single one of the 860 dinosaurs discovered to date, and believes that the bones of dinosaurs not yet discovered call to her from beneath the earth. As an autistic person, she pursues her artistic mission to the fullest, concentrating all of her energy on it; she researches the living conditions of dinosaurs in natural history museums from Germany to New York. In the Atelier Goldstein’s collaborative project of redeveloping a landmarked Cistercian church, the Marien Kirche Aulhausen in Rüdesheim in the Rheingau, she is represented with textile works. Her works can also be found, for example, at the Dommuseum, Frankfurt am Main. In 2017/18 some of Julia Krause-Harder’s dinosaurs will be shown at Mona, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, within the context of an exhibition from the Museum of Everything of the London collector James Brett.

Info: Curators: Ingried Brugger and Hannah Rieger, Assistant Curator: Veronika Rudorfer, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, Freyung 8, Vienna, Duration: 15/2-23/6/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-19:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, www.kunstforumwien.at