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Seeing Stars: Fascinating Menil exhibit mixes visionary drawings by famousartists and psychiatric patients
If you’ve ever suffered a head injury or been punched in the eye, it’s likely that you’ve had the experience of “seeing stars.” Named phosphenes in scientific literature, these fleeting images occur to all of us if we simply close and then rub our eyes too vigorously.
There are others, though, for whom phosphenes are just the start. It’s no secret that contemporary culture often looks down on people who experience full-fledged visions, with or without the use of mind-expanding drugs.
It was fine for painter and poet William Blake. It was also fine for Allen Ginsberg, perhaps, who claimed that while sitting in his Harlem apartment in the late 1940s he’d had a vision of Blake. It’s all fine — as long as you don’t expect anyone else to actually believe in the truth of your experience.
Curator Michelle White has done an extraordinary job of putting together this show of rarely-seen gems from the permanent collection, providing viewers with a context that also expands our understanding of the goals and methodologies — if not some of the problems and challenges — of the surrealist movement.
A new exhibit at The Menil Collection, Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawing from the Collection, is fascinating evidence of the importance, integrity and inherent beauty of the visionary experience.
Curator Michelle White has done an extraordinary job of putting together this show of rarely-seen gems from the permanent collection, providing viewers with a context that also expands our understanding of the goals and methodologies — if not some of the problems and challenges — of the surrealist movement.
The drawings are on display until January in a small gallery next door to the Menil’s vast surrealist collection, allowing you to make your own comparisons and deductions.
In the early 1970s, art critic Roger Cardinal used the term “Outsider Art” to describe work created far from the madding mainstream circles of art, including work by artists without any formal training. The term could be seen as somewhat parallel to French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet’s label art brut, which translates approximately as “raw” or “rough” art.
Dubuffet was particularly intrigued by the artistic work of psychiatric patients. So intrigued, in fact, that he assembled an enormous collection known as the Collection de l’Art Brut, which to this day is held in Lausanne, Switzerland.
An elastic term
Since White’s choices include drawings and photographs by established artists such as Dubuffet, Pollock and Brassaï, alongside work by psychiatric patients and what might be called “eccentric” persons, her label is more generous and inclusive.
She describes visionary art in her gallery brochure as “… an elastic term that encompasses outside, folk, naïve, and self-taught art,” adding that the intent of grouping them here is that they are “…bound together by a number of shared stylistic tendencies and intuitive processes.”
It is a paradox that the pieces by the most famous artists in this show are not necessarily the most compelling. Both of Pollock’s Untitled (Psychoanalytical Drawing) pieces from 1939-40 seem a kind of surface digging at the vast realm of the unconscious mind.
Dubuffet’s 1949 Personnage avec deux chevres et le soleil (Figure with two goats and a sun) is dense with watercolor and ink, almost overworked in its attempt at simplicity. His oil, sand and granular filler Paysage aux ivrognes (Landscape with drunkards) from the same year is more chaotic and less controlled, even if it is aware of its borders.
As I was strolling through the gallery, I soon became aware of a major difference in the work of the psychiatric patient-eccentrics and the famous, well-known artists. The former group tends to begin a process without necessarily anticipating its conclusion. Many of those artists continued to draw until they ran out of paper, adding as necessary until the vision was completed, making mandalas infinite in nature.
The finished works seem to be snapshots of a larger idea. I wondered also if the established surrealists had created merely an artificial imagination. Were they secretly jealous of the “outsiders” who had perhaps a closer — perhaps more authentic — connection to the workings of the subconscious mind?
Chief among the eccentric artists in this show is Henry Darger, the brilliant American visionary whose work was not known until after his death. His epic At Jennie Richee Capture What the Foe Left, a 1960s watercolor, graphite, carbon paper transfer work with additions of printed paper, is the first image that greets the viewer upon entering the gallery. I went back twice this week just to stare at it, and I’ll return many times more.
Winged children
It is a large work, approximately 10 feet wide by 25 inches high, in sections of paper joined together. The word “West” is written in the middle at the top. The central panel portrays what I believe are the Seven Vivian Sisters, child-heroes of Darger’s epic unfinished novel In the Realms of the Unreal.
On either side are a numerous winged children, some of them with ram horns and reptilian tails, others with girlish faces and tiny uncircumsized penises, mythic creatures he named the Blengins.
Darger did not work particularly with perspective or shadowing, though the images in the drawing are scaled in a way that leads the eyes from left to right. Apparently, he had an intricate system of transferring images from popular photos, magazines and newspapers using carbon paper, which gives his work the feeling of an unfinished coloring book.
The palette is largely pastel (he used readily obtainable, inexpensive watercolor paints) with some instances of vivid red and deep purple. There is an apparent narrative, but will we ever know it? Darger might have been untrained in the formal definition, but his methodology suggests an intricate technical approach, nonetheless. How many contemporary artists engage in free-hand, representation drawing?
The exhibit contains work of other artists with similar complicated and self-developed systems of production, from Charles A.A. Dellschau’s daunting scrapbook of flying machines (found in a Houston junkshop in the 1960s) to Henry Ray Clark’s painstaking colored-pencil drawings with titles such as I am the creator from the planet Birdbeam and I tolte my wife eno we are from the planet Neptune.
White’s selection makes one aware that John and Dominique de Menil bought art by unknown patients in German psychiatric wards and pieces from the Prison Art Gallery in Huntsville along with their Rothkos and Picassos. Truly visionary, to say the least.
